203: Non-Authoritative Information

If you’re one of the 20 or so regular readers, you noticed that the theme here just changed. I went with something a lot simpler than the other theme. Hacking on the previous theme became tiresome, I’ve switched to the much more generic copyblogger that is known for it’s clean code and therefore is easy to bend to my needs. Another mistake I made with the previous theme was not keeping my changes in revision control, so now all my changes are in a bazaar repository. If you have any trouble with the new site post a comment here and I’ll take a look at it.

I also wanted to take a minute to plug Steven Jackson’s blog here, which has been added to the blogroll.  I should have had this on here earlier, he’s one of the developers I correspond with the most, and someone I run ideas by constantly.  Most of his content is gamedev/gamedesign related.  I know Steve from my sordid past as an member of the amateur game development community, he’s a freshman in college but has a pretty impressive skill set, and is one of the most determined developers I know.

As he mentioned on his blog I was working with him on an entry in PyWeek 6 which I’m sure even though it was my idea was somehow his plan to get me back into gamedev. Neither of us ended up having the time we would have liked to complete our idea, but we’re still talking about following through on it.  It gave me an excuse to learn Pyglet and Cocos, two excellent python libraries.  Most likely something (whether it’s our initial game or not) will come out of my having picked them up.

(This would also be a time to give a shoutout to his indie gamedev shop, Snowfall Media, that he’s set up with one other developer.)

Popularity: 6%

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the (fantastically organized) Rochester barcamp 3 on the RIT Campus.

A barcamp is basically a group of knowledgeable people that get together and give talks on subjects that they care about.  It’s quite possibly one of the coolest things I’ve had a chance to be involved in the entire time I’ve been at RIT.  (I didn’t hear about the first one, and last year I was out of town)

I was originally going to give my talk on Django, maybe sprinkling in a bit of discussion on political data, etc. if I had time.  Around midnight the night before Barcamp began however I decided to toss out my presentation and start from scratch.  What I ended up with was in my opinion a lot better.  95% of the people at barcamp are technical, but I realized hardly any would be political.. this in my opinion was a problem.

Of course, one might think it would be risky giving a political talk at a tech-oriented event on a tech-oriented campus.  My audience was on the small side, which was to be expected, and also brilliantly illustrated my first point: most of us are apathetic.

I only had 30 minutes, so my discussion on why people are apathetic was limited, but it led me to the discussion of a vicious circle wherein apathy fosters bad government which in turn fosters further apathy.

I closed the talk with examples of what developers can do which I grouped into two broad and somewhat overlapping categories: software to get people involved, and software to get people information.

Going beyond the obvious examples of flash mobs, blogs, wikis, and the like, I discussed several projects like the UK-based PledgeBank and WriteToThem.  These are projects that push individuals to get involved by encouraging either collective action (in the case of PledgeBank) or in the case of WriteToThem getting people to do more personal than sign their name to what are typically meaningless e-petitions.  (think “303,222 email addresses against Genocide in Darfur”)

I also pointed to examples of sites that aim to give people more information.  Django creator Adrian Holovaty’s new site EveryBlock is a great example of just getting as much information as possible out to people and letting them do with it what they like.  There is also the Sunlight Labs project EarmarkWatch which is a hybrid of sorts as it not only makes it easier to look at details of federal earmark spending, it also encourages citizen involvement due asking citizens to help research earmarks.  The very idea of researching an earmark on your own is empowering, and can also be seen as an approach to get people more involved in at least questioning government.

(Disclaimer: I was lead developer on EarmarkWatch, although my thoughts here do not necessarily reflect those of the Sunlight Foundation)

Wrapping up my talk I asked the developers in the audience to make use of the massive quantities of government data that is out there.  Or at the very least keep in mind the social responsibility that they have as being part of a uniquely skilled class with the power to control the machines and software that dominate so much of our everyday life.

The last slide ends with an equation: Django + Political Data APIs + Barcamp = ?

The discussion stemming from this talk actually led to a second talk later in the evening, where we attempted to answer this question.  We ended up having a 3 hour discussion on how a few developers from RIT most with no former political experience could move on a project that will “change the world.”

Expect to hear more about that in coming weeks.

v1 of the slides that I gave (I’m working on an update as these were done in about an hour)

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Slides in OO.org format

Slide overview in PDF format

Popularity: 6%

As I have done with every release since Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) I installed the latest Ubuntu Beta almost immediately upon release.

To be entirely honest, so far, I almost wish I hadn’t.

Now I know, that it’s rare to read an Ubuntu review that’s anything but glowing, but keep in mind this is a Beta, and there was just no reason for me to upgrade.

The major features advertised on the Beta release page include: Xorg 7.3, Kernel 2.6.24, Gnome 2.22, PolicyKit, PulseAudio, Firefox 3 Beta 4, Transmission Bittorrent Client, Vinagre VNC viewer, Brasero CD/DVD burning, World Clock Applet, Inkscape 0.46, and Wubi.

Xorg 7.3 promises to bring better multi-monitor support.  The thing is that for my laptop’s nvidia card nothing beats nvidia-settings.  I know it’s proprietary, but it just works with my setup and still has a much nicer interface than the “two white rectangles” that the new XRandR GUI offers.

It’s hard for me to judge what benefit I’m getting from the Kernel, I will say that as always with a Kernel upgrade a few drivers break, which is a hassle, but my own fault for upgrading to a Beta before everyone has the chance to catch up.

Gnome 2.22’s big thing is GVFS, which I’m sure in time will pay off.  So far I haven’t seen much benefit, but I understand that getting rid of the old underlying filesystem will allow some cool things in the future. Related to this is PolicyKit, which again, isn’t integrated with the system enough to bring real benefit so far, but is a nice idea to avoid having to gksudo everything.  The other feature of Gnome 2.22 is the World Clock Applet which is cool.  Of course, the practical use for most users is close to nil.

PulseAudio integration is another thing that lays some cool groundwork, but without integrated volume controls much of the benefit is lost.  I have to say that controlling volume on an application-by-application basis sounds awesome.

I was already running Beta 3 of Firefox 3, no real changes in Beta 4.  (I did notice that for some reason I was having X lockup issues with Twitterfox.  I unfortunately had to uninstall it they were so serious and 100% reproducible.  Unfortunately a coworker of mine couldn’t reproduce them on his Hardy Heron system so I have no idea what was actually to blame, so I haven’t been able to file a bug report yet.)

Transmission Bittorrent client looks nice, I only usually fire up bittorrent when downloading Ubuntu ISOs however, so I haven’t really taken it on a test drive.  Vinagre VNC viewer is another “looks nice but I’m not a VNC user”.  Same with the new CD burning application, typically the only CDs I burn are ISOs so this isn’t a huge deal for me.  Inkscape having PDF support built in by default is awesome.  I played around with it a bit and it seems pretty good.  I love Inkscape despite my lack of artistic ability, and being able to generate PDFs is quite nice.

Which of these application upgrades matters to you is a highly personal thing that depends on your usage, all four are nice polished applications that I feel are great choices for inclusion in a default install.

The memory protection and new firewall aren’t things that are very visible to an end user, although it certainly is nice to see the continued focus on security.  (Ubuntu being the last laptop standing in this “hack a laptop to win it” contest shows that it’s already somewhat ahead of Vista/OSX.)

The last thing, and one of the biggest features being plugged with the new Ubuntu release is Wubi.  Wubi allows you to install Ubuntu within Windows without repartitioning.  This is cool for people who have to be on Windows, but I’m a bit worried it’ll slow conversion rates.

I never meant to switch to Ubuntu. About a month after I installed 5.04 (3 years ago, happy anniversary!) I realized I hadn’t rebooted my computer (a rare feat in windows).  It was another 3 months until I went into windows again, and that was only to make sure that a hardware problem wasn’t to blame on Ubuntu (it wasn’t).   When I got my new laptop I hesitated before giving the whole drive to Ubuntu, but I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows in something like a year, and when I did (to test windows applications that refused to run under wine) a VM would have been must less of an interruption to my workflow.

It remains to be seen if users running Ubuntu within Windows will have this same realization that they don’t need windows anymore.  Of course, lowering the barrier to entry so drastically is a huge positive.  I rather preferred the idea of switching users away from Windows only apps (getting them to use OpenOffice, Firefox, and Pidgin) and then pointing out that they hardly needed Windows (this is what inadvertantly also switched a (non-computer geek for the record) girl I was dating a few years ago to Linux-only, she hasn’t rebooted her desktop since upgrading to 7.10).

As I said at the beginning of this review, I somewhat wish I had waited to upgrade.  I got virtually no benefit from upgrading as I had virtually no problems on 7.10 for the last 6 months.  This is not a negative review of 8.04 so much as it is a glowing review of 7.10 (which wasn’t even a LTS release).  That said, with the exception of the aforementioned TwitterFox issue and an issue with a new wireless driver I had early on, there is no reason not to upgrade to 8.04 at your leisure.

Popularity: 7%

If everything goes as planned in about 11 weeks I’ll graduate from RIT which means no more depending on RIT email or web space.

The most accessed public resource that I have on an RIT server is GLFT_Font, a very simple C++ library for drawing text with TTF fonts using OpenGL.  Despite it’s age I still get the occasional request for help or thank you letter, I certainly didn’t want to let it fall off the internet altogether in May so I’ve put up a new page about GLFT_Font in the new code section of polimath.

The old page (http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jpt2433/glftfont/) now redirects here.  I do still answer questions about GLFT_Font despite it’s age, and I’m happy to accept any patches or contributions that any users may have.

Popularity: 6%

A Peek Into My Life

• pack for upcoming DC trip
• get haircut
• exchange book at Barnes & Noble
• finish reading The Universe in a Single Atom
• confirm w/ someone that policy seminar will count for minor capstone
• …
• come up with a better system for organizing all of these things I need to do

I’ve been having discussions lately with quite a few people gathering my thoughts and theirs on what can be done to make an improved todo list application.  One of the tough parts of making a good todo list is that it that everyone’s mind is organized differently and therefore everyone seems to have different ideas of how a todo list should be organized.  Are tasks organized via projects, categories, tags, sub-tasks?  Do tasks have due dates? Can a task be recurring? What about priorities? Is there a need to estimate how long a task will take?

Everyone has their own answers to these questions, and because of this there is probably a new todo app created every day.  If you hadn’t already guessed this post seeks to explore the idea of making one more.

A Crowded Field

I’m well aware that there are a number of popular todo lists that are already available.  I used the extremely simple TaDa List for a while, for a long time I was a fan of the full featured Voo2do even spending a bit of time doing some email tech support for it’s creator.  Seeking better Google integration among other things I recently gave Remember the Milk a try but found it didn’t really match the way I think of todo lists.  I’ve taken a look at various others but they didn’t hold my interest as long as these three.  I suppose in the interest of completeness I should also mention my own efforts to keep organized using Tomboy notes and a personal wiki.

There are tons of todo lists out there that are extremely simple, little more than bulleted lists, occasionally with due dates attached.  There are quite a few that attempt to go in the other direction, offering countless features that are only useful to a select few (such as google maps integration or integrated time tracking).  There are also many out there that save their best features for paying users.

 What Now?

My issue with all of the above is that using a todo list should add value with minimal effort.  A bulleted todo list can easily be replicated on paper, in any text editor, or in Google docs or a personal wiki.  I really think that there is little reason to sign up for and learn to use an additional service to keep track of a bulleted list.  What I want from my todo list are powerful views on data that is easy to enter.  I want to be able to ask my todo list “what can/should I be working on now?” Ultimately this is the fundamental question, the reason we enter priorities, due dates, or can arbitrarily order our lists via fancy drag and drop interfaces.

The entire point of having a todo list is so we can always have a grasp of what is happening in the near future.

The problem then, is if our todo list offers an incomplete view of the near future.  If our todo list only has those tasks that we take the time to painstakingly enter and assign priorities to.  If our todo list only has those items that can easily be categorized and assigned a due date.

Rule 1: A todo list should be extremely easy to add to

A lot of the leading players get this right, requiring the minimal amount of information, and allowing for additional info to be added later.  Also falling under this rule would be making information as easy as possible to add through nice features such as flexible formats for entering due dates.  Making the interface nice and intuitive and allowing for things like emailing of tasks all increase the probability that a user will actually take the time to enter a task.

Rule 2: Not every item has a due date, but usually we have an idea of an approximate period in which we want something done.

Let’s look at my todo list, when is the due date for “pack for DC trip”?  Well my flight leaves around 7am on March 3rd, so perhaps 6am?  No I want to be packed the night before probably, so sometime this weekend would be good (perhaps instead of writing this blog post?)  Even harder would be getting a haircut or finish reading the Dalai Lama’s book.  Work tasks often are due within a week or so, but without a specific due date. When I’m back in classes in a week I’ll have more tasks with very specific due dates.

Nearly all of the existing offerings have two options for due dates, a specific day or no due date at all.  But in reality no due date at all might mean “this week” or “whenever I get a chance.”  In my discussions with people I’ve heard two common rebuttals to my claim that this distinction is important.  ” If something should be done this week, just put in the last day of the week” is a fair compromise, although I feel it unnecessarily overloads the meaning of a due date.  Perhaps “whenever I get a chance” is best left without a due date, but I find it is useful to at least set a general goal of when I’d like to finish a book by, if for no other reason as to keep me on track.

Now it’d certainly be nice if someone would come along and improve their todo list to support the concept of fuzzy dates.  Sadly not enough people read this blog for me to believe this is going to magically happen, so I suppose I’m stuck doing it myself.  My design skills are rusty so that part will probably take me a while (any volunteers are of course welcome).  Comments on what makes a todo list worth using or pointers towards a great todo list that’ll make me doing this pointless are of course welcome.

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Popularity: 18%