Well, it happened again: they linked to my article about the internet and attention, again in an article about Obama. Lame.

With Picasa’s announcement of the updated Web Albums site, I’ve settled on it for my own photography needs. Their “name tags” feature is incredibly well-done, I can arbitrarily tag my photos additionally, and they’ve added other compelling features that have sold me on it.

Previously, I had been using Flickr. By the time I joined, it seemed to be the premier community for photographers, and it offered the most features I wanted: licensing photos, tagging, flexible management of albums/sets, RSS feeds for nearly everything, and super-cool mash-ups with other sites.

Separately, a lot of people have been using Facebook for photos (at least those of people-based events and such), namely because their person tagging is very good: boxes around faces and notifications of tagged photos. (Flickr has tagging, and you can separately add boxed notes to photos, but it has no way to connect that directly with people.) While not a photography website per se, it is certainly a great way to share photos easily.

Picasa Web Albums has been a nice project, and I had used it occasionally, but not very often. The interface hasn’t been the best, it felt very closed off from any sort of community, and it seemed to be wedded to the application Picasa (which has a pretty shoddy track record on Linux). I can (and do) manage my photos quite well via F-Spot, but there was a lot I couldn’t do without Picasa (the application).

But in one fell swoop, they’ve knocked down the competition. The name tags feature is so nice, it’s actually fun to use; in about an hour I tagged about 700 photos with my existing Gmail contacts. I’ve also tagged my photos with some other keywords, in case you really want to see what photos of roller coasters I’ve taken. Lastly, I can release my photos with Creative Commons licenses, so neat things can happen.

The sum of these features is what drives Picasa’s new Explore page. You can see popular tags, locations, and featured photos. There’s even a (mediocre) game where you guess the locations of photos.

All in all, Google has a good product and it breeds good competition in the photo website space. You can see my photos on my Picasa profile.

(PS: If it seems like I’m talking slow, that’s because I’m sapping my bandwidth uploading four albums at a time. )

You are busy. You have many demands on your time and attention. Never, under any conditions, hesitate to ignore anyone or anything that’s not making good use of your attention. Ever.

The ever-insightful Merlin Mann. The first thing I did was to stop following him on Twitter; he asked for it.

I suppose this also means I should focus my RSS reading on things that will help me learn, will enlighten me, or a selective set of quality distractions (because—let’s face it—I will read Dinosaur Comics).

I also think that Facebook fits in here somewhere—their lack of RSS meaning I just shouldn’t bother visiting their site perhaps?—but in general, I do think that a lot of the social sites are the chief computer distraction for me (and I’m guessing Merlin too, as he brought it up).

Anything else I should consider? I’m a sucker for good reading online, on a variety of topics, but I also recognize the need to limit oneself.

YouTube - Inní mér syngur vitleysingur

Not the best video ever (by a long shot), but I love this song. So joyful.

Add Andrew Conkling [to our list of contributors] - he has done so much work for so long in Bugzilla, should have been listed here long ago.

[banshee] Revision 4414.

It’s not why I help out, but it is nice to be recognized. Thanks Gabriel!

It’s really very satisfying to contribute to the Banshee project, even if it’s not code. Part of my motivation is to help out the developers so they can focus on development itself, but it’s also been a good way for me to get my foot in the door while I work on my education. I certainly plan on (one day) being able to contribute my own code to Banshee and some other projects.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the ride.

On the Web, Obama’s Twitter site now has more than 60,000 followers, who receive updates from Obama’s town hall meetings and links to his Web site.

The article also mentions that “Republican John McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, has not highlighted text messages,” Instead McCain is going old-school with viral YouTube videos, [sic] “McCain’s recent ‘Celeb’ ad, which compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, has received about 2 million hits on YouTube.”

via Twitter Blog: Mobilizing His Followers

My favorite part: the AP calling YouTube “old-school”.

Untersberg Pictures via Schmap

Schmap for the iPhone

See the original on Flickr

I’ve bought a host, set up Google Apps, picked a theme*, duly reread John Gruber’s comments about his design :), and I’m pretty much set.

I’ve had an interesting a boring history with blogs: I started with Blogger in 2005, switched to WordPress.com in 2007 (and promptly never updated), and then started with Tumblr in early 2008. WordPress on my own host will provide me the best options for blogging as well as a host (get it?) of other tools at my disposal.

Tumblr is pretty nice, for what it is: a no-nonsense hosted blog. It even got me blogging on a regular basis. It doesn’t do everything well though, including customized design, plugins for extra features, and integrated comments (let alone exporting your content for another blog). I like what it is, but have decided I don’t want it to be my primary blog; I want something that can better reflect my web identity.

Let me know what you think!

PS: While I’ve ensured that the RSS feed migrated from Tumblr, you may want to update to WordPress’ default feed.

*- I’ll be changing the theme’s colors promptly, but otherwise I generally like the design.

But I’m no good at journaling. My past attempts have fizzled. I thought this would fare better than a journal because it would be online. However, the opposite has been true. I’ve simply let it go, not in the least because my life has been a bit too personal lately, so I have little energy left for writing on here.

My solution? A longish post about my life at present.

As you can see from my last post, I now have a son. Even though I’m not raising him, it’s amazing to me how much that simple fact changes things for me. In large and small ways, things shift focus and emphasis in my life. Mostly, it makes me realize that there are plenty of things in my life in which I put too much value. It’s been my lifelong goal to be a husband and father, but at the moment, I see that I’m not ordering my life as such, nor have I in the past few years. I’ve been far too selfish with my time and relationships. The consequences have been severe: I brought a boy into the world in the midst of a relationship that was not ready for him, said relationship has since crumpled under the pressure, and I’m left unable to handle dealing with moving on or getting over that.

I find it necessary, especially after posting pictures before, to post some pictures of Samuel Stuart Steven, the beautiful boy that he is. Here are two that are particularly dear to me. He looks so very much like Pearl and me!

I’ve been reading a great book about depression called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. It’s about the concept of learned helplessness and explanatory style. It’s all about how you respond to adversity in life. There are three levels on which to evaluate things: whether the event is personal, whether it is permanent, and whether it is pervasive. He says that pessimism tends towards those three, and optimism tends away from them. It’s amazing what a little awareness will do, and I’ve been catching myself explaining things very pessimistically, from something as small as burning some food that I’m cooking (”Blast! I am such a loser! I always do that!”) to something as large as my relationship with Pearl (”I’m worthless and my love life is doomed”). Of course, total optimism wouldn’t do in the latter case, because what happened is not Pearl’s fault per se (I don’t even like to think of it in terms of anyone’s fault or blame), it’s not immediately temporary (I’m not ready to love again), and it’s not completely specific (e.g. what happened with our relationship is directly related to my spiritual struggles of late). Thinking optimistically would be short-sighted and immature. So while I can’t be completely optimistic about everything, I’m finding that I’m far too pessimistic about most things. This is the deep work I need to do, and I’m very glad I’m in counseling to do it.

All in all, though this past year has been the toughest of my life, I’m beginning to see some good changes in myself and things are looking up, bit by bit. I’m not sure if all of these things will make sense in a general way, but there are a few things that I’ve noticed that mark significant changes in the way I operate:

1. I don’t want to spend hours on my computer fiddling around with crap and tweaking the hell out of my system. I do still like and use Linux, but I want it to work for me and not the other way around.
2. My musical tastes are changing. I have found Bruckner to encapsulate almost all that I’m feeling, in such a way that his music has constantly and repeatedly been pointing me to God. His ninth Symphony in particular seems to hold together all the pain and grief I’ve felt and lift it up before God in release. The Adagio therefrom has brought me to tears.
   In general, I find myself lately favoring the Romantics and the slow movements of music, whereas I have always before tended towards the formalized Classical models. (I think it’s that Bruckner holds both together so well that I’ve taken to him so much.)
3. I’ve been much more accepting of people and their faults, particularly in my family. My family is the best example of love that I have on Earth, and the best opportunity for me to love. Accepting and loving them has been a hard thing for me over the years, but it’s worth it.
4. I’ve been spending a lot more time with my family, and I see the benefits most directly in my relationship with my little sister Kaitlyn. It’s become important to us to spend time together, and I treasure that.

So, all told, this is ostensibly my last post. There’s just too much life to be lived to worry about this blog thing. Perhaps I will pick this up again in the future, but I don’t necessarily see that happening. Time will tell.

Bis dann and Adieu,
Andrew

So last week my mom, dad, sister, and I had a chance to visit with my son. It makes the decision to give him in adoption a bit harder but more rewarding in the end, because I can see (and hold) him whom I’m committing to the care of others (a very wonderful couple). You can see more pictures and video by clicking on the image below.

He’s certainly adorable.

Another nice thing is the status message “selector”. Whereas you used to have to use the menubar or system tray menu to set an away message, now you can set your status in the main window by way of a menu bar at the bottom (see the screenshot). It’s very nice; you can select from a few different types of statuses (though I honestly don’t know if all of them apply to the different protocols).

And the little things are nice too:
1. There’s now a keyboard shortcut to open the formatting bar (I normally keep it off but want it on at a keystroke).
2. The tooltips in the buddy list are a little better-looking now, though I’d have a hard time describing how. 3. The Buddy List can be made smaller now without seeming cramped.
4. New messages don’t just appear at the bottom; the rest of the text “slides” upward to make room for the new message. Not only does it look slick, but it’s more eye-catching.

A few peeves, though all may be gone by 2.0:
1. The absence of the connection window is not (yet) replaced with any kind of notification, so it’s hard to know at a glance if a connection has been dropped.
2. The idle times of buddies cannot be turned off (the option is gone), so when I make the Buddy List smaller, I still end up with things cut off. (I trust that this will option be added back in before 2.0.)
3. IRC/chat handling is still less polished. I’m of the mind that Gaim should remember window position, but even barring that, you can’t keep the user list off in chat windows and they always open at the same (big) size. I filed some bugs in Gaim’s bugtracker a while ago (and I know they’re focusing on lower-level code changes first) but I hope that they get to them before 2.0 is released. (I’d patch the UI code myself if I knew C.)

All told, some nice changes in Gaim already. I still recommend it to anyone as the IM client of choice; it’s only short of Trillian’s* functionality (and only in a few less-than-critical ways), it supports all your accounts at once, it’s completely free, and it just plain rocks.

*- Plus, Trillian is not available for Linux and costs money to get all the features. ($25 for an IM program?!)

I don’t think I’d care as much, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen GNOME saying such things. This 2.12 preview lists Evolution as a “mail client for GNOME”, but I happily use it when not in GNOME. And this leads me to a sore point with GNOME apps.

Many GNOME apps carry extra dependencies that a non-GNOME user wouldn’t have. Often, these dependencies are unnecessary. A popular example lately is Evince, which relies on gnome-vfs. Nautilus, GNOME’s file manager, also controls the desktop, but the default behavior of running the “nautilus” command is to open a file manager window and, if not already, take over the desktop. There’s a flag (–no-desktop) and a GConf setting that can be set, but in my opinion, the default is a poor choice. Better would be to have “nautilus –desktop” run the desktop process and have “nautilus” only open a file manager window. The GNOME startup settings are very good, and you can have the desktop started therein.

This kind of development and publicity, in my opinion, is telling. It seems GNOME developers are developing for GNOME. They have a very respectable integrated desktop, but these types of things belie a narrow-minded attitude that hurts Linux as a whole in my opinion. With Linux being generally modular–customizable from the kernel up, chock full of functionality whether on the command line or in a GUI (of which you have many choices), and many choices of applications to suit your need and taste, etc.–I think it’s frustrating to see GNOME be so self-oriented.

Rather, I prefer Xfce’s attitude towards their software; they make things such that the user can use any piece of their choosing in any environment. No unnecessary dependencies, because the user’s choice is valued. In fact, thinking about it, I’d say that whereas it seems that GNOME develops for GNOME, Xfce develops for the user. For example, Thunar, Xfce’s upcoming file manager (being developed currently), looks very much like Nautilus and will provide comparable functionality, but performs faster (in my experience, and I understand that this is not a completely fair comparison at this point) and has a shorter dependency list. Xfmedia, a media player that uses Xine, doesn’t do as much as GNOME’s default, Totem, but performs better (when using GStreamer or Xine) and has a simpler UI. Of course, there’s also the fact that Xfce’s window manager, perhaps the most important piece of the desktop puzzle, is incredibly more useful and elegantly designed than GNOME’s metacity.

I really appreciate GNOME’s efforts on the desktop and recommend them to any person new to Linux, but as someone who’s been around for a little while, I’m just a bit disappointed.

Disclaimer: I do not represent Xfce in any way (though I use it primarily and enjoy it) and in fact, I run GNOME’s panel and volume manager on my Xfce desktop because I like them.

Decklin Foster also graced us with his presence (and code) this past weekend and he has already made some good improvements on my code. He also has some good ideas about what to do in the future. For example, he has started implementing a parsing engine using the empy system. I haven’t tried this out (or even heard of it before Decklin mentioned it), but I look forward to it. (As of now, Decklin has access to and will be patching our SVN tree. He also recommended we give the browser window a name, Bantu. I like this because that gives credence to the (eventual) fact that you can run the browser on its own.

All in all, it’s been a fun time. This project has increasingly been a learning experience in OSS development and as such, has been constantly humbling! Decklin’s patches, for example, have focused on cleaning up some of my badly organized code, which is a result of me learning how to do things as I’m implementing them. There are interesting ways of categorizing and classifying things; Python keeps on impressing me!

Look for a release in the next few days!

From the article: “OOo is a massive project, and so it is fitting to have an in-depth interview with one of OpenOffice.org’s main project leads to look at where OOo has come from, how it got here, and where it is going.”

read more | digg story

And here’s one last year of my littlest sister and me. She isn’t quite so little anymore; she just turned 9 in July!

I love them both very much, as you might have guessed.

Second thought, from one of the comments at the Slashdot link: artificial limitations. Windows is making all of this stuff, but they’ll only give it to you if you pay more. This doesn’t even sound like a good business model, let alone the fact that GNU software is simply free: Word and Outlook, widely used applications, have limited imitations in Windows by default (WordPad and Outlook Express), because they can’t give away the major draw–MS Office–with the OS. Gosh.

Why do we understand these truths or feel empathy from the world at large when rock singers belt it out? This song has little to do with the way things have been going in my life presently, but there is the same undercurrent. But, when I heard this song on the radio this morning, I suddenly felt like the world understood, like I wasn’t alone. Not that I felt alone before, but somehow Don Henley makes it seem universal. Strange. I’m not sure I want to know what that implies about me.

I also read another blog about user interfaces in which he talks about the fact that computer interfaces are designed with beginners in mind. However, once the user gets over the learning curve, the interface is a crutch. He asks a rather tough question: “So is it possible to design a system that’s suits both beginners and professionals?” No easy answer for that. We could probably all rant about how certain implementations fail, but do we have anything better to offer? (For all my GNU/Linux snobbery, I must admit the problems with the two major open-source interfaces: GNOME is too simple and KDE too complex.)

As for “idiots”, I don’t really mean it. The same could be said for everyone driving a car: I certainly don’t know very well how to diagnose the internal workings when something goes wrong. Yet I do appreciate a working knowledge of things. And I can certainly empathize that the trend (rather frustrating for developers) in computing seems to be trying to completely diminish the learning curve, and as usual, that makes most of the usefulness of computing null and void. (If you don’t know how to use a mouse or to save a file, you won’t be very productive.) Does that mean the learning curve should be a bit higher and computers demand a bit more knowledge before using them? Or does that mean we should all invest in our local computer education center?