TedPage

I've just been listening to an NPR story on the case before the supreme court about the holding of enemy combatants. Now, I can kinda understand that while you are still completing major millitary operations (to use Mr. Bush's words) you need to be able to hold people who are effectively POWs. But, people in the US? There is no gray area here for me. Those people, while perhaps plotting to kill people in the US, they deserve a trial promised to them by the constitution. There is too much power in the presidency if the president can hold people indefinately just because he applies a label on them. If you'll remember, Hitler imprisioned much of the legislative branch before key votes in his rise to power. The executive branch can not be allowed to hold people indefinately by just placing a label on them.

Over the years governments have removed civil rights under modivation of fear. Our greatest enemy is fear itself.

posted on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 at 11:43 | permanent link

There is a really cool site: www.geourl.com which relates a website to a possition in the real world. I love this, I think that it can provide more community than exists today. For instance, I don't really know my neighbors that well, but I do know that they are familiar with technology from the short conversations that we've had. It is totally plausable that they would have a blog. Perhaps, if I found out about and read that blog, we'd have something to talk about the next time we're at the post box together.

But, this also scares me. If I give the location of my home in my blog, do I now need to be careful about what I write? Can 'being excited about my vacation next week' cause my house to get robbed next week? But, on the flip side, anyone who knows my name and the city I'm living in can type that into Google and come out with location of my home. Perhaps I should be more careful about what I put in my blog today?

posted on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 at 02:07 | permanent link

I've been throwing around this idea of links in my head. Basically this is a GUI element that describes when two objects have a relationship to each other. There are alot of relationships that currently exist in Inkscape, and there are going to be lots more. Bulia has added in support for clone, which makes two objects identical aside from their location. This can be very cool. But how do you know that they're together?

I'm thinking that there should be a 50% alpha line between two objects that are linked, with an icon in the middle that describes how they are linked. I want something non-intrusive, but yet can be seen. I think that this should only be shown when the object is selected.

As far as links to be shown, another one that exists today but is hard for users to visualize is between gradients. You can have one linear gradient that is both used circularly, but also used in a variety of different obejcts all over the screen. When you edit the colors in this gradient, all of them change. This can be useful, but also confusing to a new user.

The question then comes to focus: Okay smartypants, what happens when there are five objects using a gradient? Do you interconnect all of them? Hmmm, good question.

Other things that could use links are things like attaching objects, or attaching objects to guidelines. Peter had support for this in Inkscape a while back, but took it out as there was no way to control it. It is a really cool feature when you need it, we need to come up with a good way to control it.

posted on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 at 02:06 | permanent link

Well, I've started hacking in support for the BINS picture format into Gthumb. This isn't say that Gthumb in inferior, it is just that I like that format better. And, actually, it isn't really the format as much as the fact that the descriptions are in the same directory as the pictures themselves. This allows me to store them in the same subversion database, and move them arround together.

I've got the first part done, I was happy with how quickly I could do that. All the Gthumb code that I've looked at is nicely modular and easy to play with. My biggest problem now is that I want more fields than Gthumb currently supports. This will be a touch of a headache as I'll probably have to end up touching more files than the one I'm currently playing with.

posted on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 at 02:02 | permanent link