1. The writers for the Onion
2. The Firebug developers
3. NASA rocket scientists

Seriously though…Firebug is amazing. Quite easily the most pleasant software for development I’ve ever used. I’m sure almost everyone who ever programs in javascript/css/html out there has heard of it, but if you’ve been living under a rock and are still debugging by using alert() or something…well, you should install it. That is all.

I am coming to believe that the software development industry in general has essentially an obsession with software that simply exists to “box” other software. Virtualization is a multi-billion dollar subsector that is the most obvious example. But this boxing obsession isn’t something really new.

I know I refer to this fairly often, but take a look again at the top two Linux applications according to Mugshot statistics. Both Firefox and GNOME Terminal are “boxes”. The entire purpose of existence of those two applications is to contain (launch,control) other applications. They are a means – not an end.

Further examples abound. The “window manager” is a literal display of the metaphor: it actually draws visible boxes around other software. And besides the window manager, the other most visible component of GNOME on my screen (in terms of pixels) is the task list applet – again – it’s just drawing boxes around the names of other software.

What actually started me thinking along these lines was Miguel’s post about .NET security, in particular how Microsoft implemented this CAS system that basically no one ended up using. CAS is a great example of a “box” for other software (in fact a huge swath of the general computer security industry is all about boxes). Probably a few very bright Microsoft engineers spent quite a bit of time on that, but it just didn’t end up being useful.

A lot of the Linux community spends a huge amount of time discussing “packages” – also just boxes. I posted about the endless nature of this particular boxing before. Someone should explain to me sometime why .spec files and debian/{control,rules} couldn’t just be replaced with something that looks a lot more like just a jhbuild moduleset, and put the stuff like descriptions on a web page somewhere.

Anyways, getting closer to the point I’m trying to make here – I think the entire development industry would be better off if we spent less time creating boxes. Don’t get me wrong – boxes are useful sometimes! I’m not dismissing virtualization for example – being able to just “turn on” a few more servers is really cool.

What I think would help for a lot of software development projects is to keep a central goal in mind. I have a proposal for that goal, which I am calling

The Central Question in Computing:

How does this software help my sister buy more shoes on Ebay?

To this end, one thing I changed recently in the online-desktop session is to start the browser by default. When I made the change, it was almost an afterthought. I was trying to set things up so that the sidebar started by default, and I realized – hey, why don’t I just start the browser too?

Bryan mentioned how I had observed that for my sisters, Marc Andreessen’s famous quote about Netscape reducing Windows to a set of device drivers has already arrived, in fact has been true for some time. For them, Windows is right now really nothing more than a glorified launcher for Internet Explorer to get to Ebay.
I had to ask myself – why aren’t we to the point where when they get to the computer, Ebay is right there instead of having to go through multiple boxes.

The Andreessen quote brings another one to mind, from one of my favorite authors, William Gibson:

The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.
So, launching the browser by default was one small change that I made recently, but it was a huge perspective shift for me. The desktop used to look like this:

Traditional desktop

And now:

Online desktop

I’ve been working recently on some code to further reduce the pointless work my sister would have to do to get to Ebay. It’s of course more general than that – in fact I think it’s turned out amazingly well. I know I’m being vague, but I’ll post more about that hopefully in the next few days when it’s ready for general consumption. It’ll have been worth the wait.

But until then – ponder this – what did you do today to help my sister buy new shoes?

Quite possibly the funniest article I’ve seen on the New York Times.

It’s pretty simple – the online desktop is this task list. Which is just a start (please add more!). It isn’t a single product you can download, though we’ve been working on prototyping components such as the GConf synchronization, a new sidebar, etc.
I’m excited by discussion like this that shows developers are interested. If you are looking to jump in – a really cool yet discrete project would be implementing the pick-a-service dialog from that todo list. In other words, the thing that should appear from F-Spot if you plug in a digital camera, but don’t have a photo site in your accounts.

Right now, you can get a person’s contact network from the data model, and then enumerate the “external accounts” (sites used) by those people. In fact, this is exactly how the BigBoard Photos Stock works. What you’d need to do is have some way of tagging services by what kind they are (e.g. photos). Then code the widget to query those, uniquify it, order it by some criteria, then just stuff it all in a treeview.

Mozilla supporting IronPython and IronRuby seems like pretty big news…not sure how I missed it. I’m going to have to pay closer attention to happenings in Mozilla-land.
So if I understand correctly, the way it would work is that Tamarin would include a translator from CIL bytecode to Tamarin bytecode? So finally when a website includes: <script lang=”text/python”>, what would happen is that the code would be compiled via IronPython (which itself was originally in CIL form, now translated to Tamarin) to CIL, and then Tamarin would translate that to its bytecode, and execute it?
Wow…why aren’t they just using Mono directly?

Really good mail from Bill Nottingham about target markets for Fedora. It is pretty crazy how much software in general is written without thinking about who will be using it, why they’ll want it, and how it will be used.
A current example of the wrong way (in my opinion) to create software is OpenSolaris’ NetworkManager-type program. They call all this work design, but really almost all of it is the engineering implementation design, especially this thread. It has very little to do with how people use the software; there are some sentences to the effect of “oh yeah, there will be GUI popups or something”. The UI page doesn’t exist yet even. To be fair to them, maybe I’m looking in the wrong place, but I didn’t see any non-engineering design.
Having been next to Bryan, Seth and Dan when they were working on NetworkManager, I saw firsthand how a good interaction design and an understanding of the target market is key. For example, in the initial design, they made a decision not to support static IP addresses. That may seem crazy to a programmer, but the target market (Fedora wireless users) basically never uses static addresses. Thus, no need to support them, and the design became much simpler.
Nowadays, I wouldn’t even try to write real software unless I had a good interaction designer on the team. From the start. Not like someone pulled in 70% of the way through to double check the widget spacing on all the incomprehensible popup dialogs I’d created.

Pyro is the right technology

If you haven’t seen it, Pyro Desktop is a cool project. Alex is spot on about developers and HTML/JavaScript in particular. It’s not that are current desktop APIs are necessarily bad – but they are different. Someone who wants to code something cool that may be coming from a OS X or Windows background will have to drop down for a week while they learn the APIs.

A window manager, or…?

Now, what confused me honestly is that Pyro seems mainly to be focused on being a compositing window manager. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t find the desktop bling that interesting – from any source, Compiz/Pyro/whatever. Sure, it looks pretty, but at the end of the day it feels like there are just a few things (fade-in menus) that are definite improvements, and everything else is just “because we can”. Maybe it’s also because I’m an all-windows-maximized+alt-tab person. I also don’t use workspaces.

The apps

What I thought was missing from the Pyro demo was the apps. To someone who’s not a developer, it looks like a desktop theme. The Flickr feed I see on the website is more interesting to me. Certainly, if I was going to start a project like the Big Board part of the Online Desktop now, it would make a lot of sense to write it using Firefox/Pyro. I had to spend at least a solid week of work on the HTTP library in BigBoard alone. One thought is it may be interesting to embed Firefox iframes inside Big Board.

-JavaScript

If you’re like me, you acknowledge JavaScript’s ubiquity, but you still hate its crazy prototype “object system”. Enter Google Web Toolkit. I can definitely imagine the future of application development being HTML+CSS+Java (or another sane language).

Online Desktop

Havoc had a good summary. One thing I think that should have been stressed more strongly is that in a lot of cases, being online is just a matter of changing workflow or defaults for existing regular GNOME apps, not just dropping them. For example, changing F-Spot to make it easier to get your photos online – getting your account info (or pointing you to some samples if you don’t have one), but still having a good local photo tool for picking which photos to upload, fixing redeye, etc. I think there was actually a talk about this which I missed.

Hotwire

Gave a lightning talk on Hotwire and talked to a few people about it. Seemed like people were interested, but it’s really hard to get people to switch. But I think it’s been successful in letting me prototype out some shell ideas. I have been having some different UI ideas lately though, and am also pretty frustrated right now with the Python runtime (not the language) – the GIL is a serious brick wall for improving Hotwire.
Update – Just discovered POSH when googling for the GIL link – this may be exactly what I need.

Photos

Haven’t seen many people blog their GUADEC photos (I’m sure it’ll happen en masse after the conference), but I tossed my current photo set online.

Beach


Victoria square


Hackers in Etap

Did a fresh Fedora 7 install on my laptop, and I went through my usual routine of fixing up a few details. We’ve actually gotten pretty good about being “stateless”; I already store almost everything online (GMail, delicious, Last.fm, Mugshot, Picasa, etc.), so there was little data to copy around manually, basically just reinstall developer tools.

However, I have to spend a bit of time killing passwords:

• Fix usermode to not prompt for the root password – This forum thread describes how to do it.
• Delete my user password – Run passwd -d walters. That way I just click my username. My laptop is either right next to me, or in a trusted environment, so I don’t need a password. Ideally GDM would auto-login the user if they didn’t have a password, so I wouldn’t even have to click.
• Install Google Browser Sync – By far my biggest annoyance with the web is remembering all my website passwords. Google Browser Sync is the best solution I’ve found so far.

The next thing I’m going to add to this list is to install pam_keyring, just about to try that. Though honestly I’d like a way to basically disable all prompts from the GNOME keyring – I don’t need my local keyring encrypted (for the same reason I don’t need a local password), and I trust my local apps.

In Python

Definitely been enjoying my mostly pure Python hacking recently. It feels so…empowering. Like I can just sit down and bend the computer to my will, instead of fighting details.
Some updates from that front:

• Put up the code for the guest-account project for Fedora, based on a quick discussion/design session with Bryan about how we can improve account creation and login process. The current code is functional but could use a bit of polish. I had to drop back into C-land to make GDM able to execute my little PyGTK program, but it works. Hoping to squish some of the details in that patch and get it into GDM, then the guest-account programs polished, probably into GNOME SVN, and packaged for Fedora.
• On the bigboard front, Owen landed a patch for integrating his really cool data model stuff so we get efficient updates from the server. When I get back, going to take a look at using this to help fix temporarily-disconnected operation and caching issues
• While stuck at the Chicago airport yesterday (and I do mean basically all of yesterday, thanks United), spent a bit of time getting a new release of Hotwire out the door. Nothing earth-shattering, but some important bugs have been fixed, and I’m getting ready to add a dependency on Twisted so Hotwire can start doing some cool things over ssh.

In Portland

Some quick facts about Portland I have discovered in my first day here:

No sales tax

Seeing an item listed at $2.95, walking up to the register, and actually paying $2.95 (instead of $3.1x and therefore receiving a big pile of change) is something I could get used to. Really fast.

Punk lives

Portland has quite a lot of punk. If I still had my early-college ear piercings I’d probably fit in better. I first realized Portland was punk when a 50s-ish woman with dyed blue hair, black leather jacket, and this T-shirt (unrelated photo found via Google image search) walked by while I was eating lunch.
Unfortunately on this trip, I managed to forget my camera. Now if you saw my earlier attempts at photography, you may not consider my inability to take high-resolution photos a great loss to the Internet. However – I had to bust out my phone to get this picture while I was wandering downtown:

Punk guy with Siamese cat perched on shoulder

The cat seemed…well practiced at staying in that position. I have to admit, witnessing punk-guy-with-siamese-cat-on-shoulder was a new experience for me.

Portland is not flat

This one kind of messed up my plan to use my Hypno skates as my primary means of transportation. Because multiple people independently recommended it (and it was close to my hotel), I went to check out the Portland Japanese Garden. Which was very cool, albeit deceptively small. However, my plan to skate there didn’t exactly work out:

Slightly hilly
I had two choices for speed, embodied by the above photo: Thigh-exhaustingly slow, or pedestrian-creaming no-hope-of-stopping fast. I spent most of the time with my blades detached, walking.