(no subject)

Stolen from angelfire1969
Directions: Type "(your name) is" with the quotes into a Google search. Copy your favorite responses into an LJ post.

"Matt is the one associating Republicans with extremists."
"Metal is in, Matt is out."
"Matt is the straight-edge, Catholic raver/virgin."
"Matt: Is there any evidence at all that goes against evolution?"
"Matt is the web accessibility/usability guru and the manager of the Free Firefox project."
"Matt is super talented fiddle player."

"Find where Matt Arnold is credited alongside another name"
"Matt Arnold is an architect with three wonderful kids. ... Matt is still learning to use an umbrella but is very handy at cartoons.
"Matt Arnold is behind the Mr Projectile project, veteran of the Toytronic imprint, collaborator on this year's fantastic collaboration with 1010 and curator of his sooncome own label - watch this space!"

PC Turnoff Week

PC Turnoff Organization wants us to turn off our computers August 1 through 7. Their website features articles like "Give Your Kids The Gift Of Boredom." I am not making this up. For a moment I thought it was a parody, but it's not.

I can hardly wait five years to carry a computer with voice recognition in a hip pack, wirelessly connected to a heads-up display and headphones embedded in a pair of glasses. Through augmented reality, networking with each other would no longer involve staring through a window into another "cyberspace" reality. Computer-mediation is coming out of the screen, and layering over our entire environment.

I'm all in favor of getting up from a desk to interact with the world around us. I'll do that more often after wearable computers with augmented reality have made the two worlds become one and the same. Lose the ball and chain to the location, not the computer.

Mezzo Desktop Environment

What can you tell me about Mezzo, the new desktop environment for a Debian-based flavor of Linux called Symphony OS? This looks exciting and I can't wait to play around and experiment with it. I don't like downloading a program in Linux and then wondering where it went. Any interface that actually puts my programs where I can find the start icon after I install them will have me for a faithful user. Here's hoping it does so. I'm currently running Ubuntu, so I wonder if this desktop environment be downloaded to run on any other Linux than Symphony. Also, would a new desktop environment be restricted to running only programs developed specifically for it?

Mezzo is based on the Laws of Interface Design. Instead of a start menu, the four categories (computer settings, programs, documents, trash) are assigned a corner of the screen and accessed by ramming the mouse into a corner and clicking. When dragging/resizing application windows, the edges of the screen are solid so you can't lose them out of view. The desktop-as-folder is done away with. Technically there are no "icons" in the sense of something that can be moved like a piece of paper on a desk surface-- only buttons with icon pictures and captions. Other than the MacOSX-dock-like area, the desktop normally is covered only in nine slots for widgets just like the ones in Konfabulator. This is how it looks when you have some application windows un-minimized. (You can still put a background image behind the widgets, if I understand correctly.) Clicking a corner of the screen auto-minimizes all windows into the dock and covers the screen (except the dock) in that interface. There are no drop-down nested menus or scrolling in the file browser or the screens the corners bring up; instead, the view of the list zooms out until it fits. Drop-downs and scroll bars only appear in applications, since they've been pre-programmed that way.

Reportedly, in his OSCON keynote Paul Graham said "People don't switch to open source because they want to hack the code. People switch to Firefox because its better. Microsoft can't pay people enough to build something better than the people who are building it out of love." What's incongruous is that so many in tech have denied the existence of the type of FLOSS developer who is competing for my usage. The Firefox kind, whose attitude is "We're here to increase open source market share and save the world from Trusted Computing domination. We're here to compete and win. So we design for easy entry for n00bs instead of just driving them off with RTFM." I thought I had recently been told that Linux was only intended for power users and TUX Magazine is engaging in false advertising by claiming it was ready for the desktop. I thought I had been told that open source programmers write software only for themselves and none of them are driven by socially-conscious free-culture hippie egalitarianism. Then why are Symphony and Mezzo being created at all? The site names their mission "the easiest to use Linux experience there is." That doesn't say "power user" to me. Are shoemaker elves doing that? No, the Firefox kind of open source programmer is doing that. That's what gives me some hope for desktop-focused open source operating systems to be viable within the next decade. They are tantalizing me with promises...

P.S. As you can see from the concept images, it appears that Jason Spisak (or someone) badly needs a proofreader. Since I can do graphics, maybe I could do that for the open source community if I knew who to talk to about it.