TedPage

So, I've decided that I'm just not good at writing error dialogs. They either end up confusing or just don't plain have the best information. So, if someone is going to have to change them anyway, I might as well have fun with them.

posted on Sun, 23 Jan 2005 at 21:15 | permanent link

On Friday Jimmac did a review of Inkscape, which was overall possitive but definitely had some suggestions for improvement. The reason that this is important though is that he is an artist for Novell. It would be ideal if all the art on the Linux desktop was done using free tools, but that just isn't the case today. Alot of the artwork today is done in applications like Adobe Illustrator, which is a good app, but not free. If we can get converts in the major open source houses, that is a good start. Now, we just have to fix the problems that he has -- luckly most are underway.

posted on Sat, 22 Jan 2005 at 23:17 | permanent link

I saw an article in the Google blog about stoping comment spam by adding a "rel=nofollow" to tags in comments. I think that this is a great idea that needs to be advertised more. Hopefully this will convince spammers to avoid the comments sections on blog, and maybe even Wikis. This makes it more convincing that perhaps I should put comments on my blog.

posted on Wed, 19 Jan 2005 at 01:22 | permanent link

We were driving down the highway and saw a window sticker on a truck which said "Powered by MEXICAN." Now, I realize that this was probably a showing of national pride, but that is not the first thing that I thought about. I kept picturing a set of hamster wheels with Mexicans in them under the hood. When he passed me later I just kept thinking: "Hmm, hotter salsa!"

posted on Wed, 19 Jan 2005 at 00:59 | permanent link

I was talking to someone at Google, and that started me think about the idea of improving Google. If you think about it, there are really two searches going on every time you query Google:

1. A computerized search through all the documents on the Internet to find one that matches your key words. Google does very good at this.
2. A search through the results to find the document you're actually looking for. I think that this is someplace that Google can improve.

I think, for me, many times Google doesn't get the relationship between the terms I'm looking for. So, being able to determine the relationship of the terms in a given document while I'm looking through the results would make the second search faster, atleast for me.

I think that one way to do that is provide a 'virtual document' which would represent the document with colorized sections. I've put one of those to the right. Basically I've colorized all of the search terms, and put them inside the document. This way you can see that the blue terms appear very close together, but not close to the red or green term. Depending on the terms, this location may be very important.

Another way would just being able to tell the intensity of the terms in a particular document. I'd do that with some colored icons on the side, each representing the 'intensity' of that search term in the document. Something like this:

I searched for the terms: Inkscape, Ted and Gould. One of the pages that comes up is the Inkscape homepage. Obviously, the Inkscape homepage has a lot to do with Inkscape, but less to do with Ted and Gould. The squares to the right represent that through their intensities of color.

It would be interesting to see how these might help users make faster choices from the pages presented. I don't know that a novice user would gain any benefit, but I wonder if you started to use them if you would start to increase your accuracy of choosing search results.

Interesting ideas -- I wonder if they'd actually help.

posted on Sun, 09 Jan 2005 at 00:24 | permanent link

I'm not sure about the source but, this guy says that MS is no longer pushing WVG (posted in '03). They are planning on just integrating the feature into Avalon, and making just one XML GUI definition. I can see that from one perspective, but I think that it gives a good opening for SVG. I was concerned that WVG would become the defacto vector graphics format for the web if MS built it into IE. But, if they're only going to put it into XAML -- I'm happy.

posted on Sat, 08 Jan 2005 at 21:41 | permanent link

I found this term in a comment on Slashdot discussing corporate loyalty which describes it as next-generation of loyalty. Basically, the idea of being loyal to a corporation or employer has faded as they have no loyalty to you -- in the end, you should be loyal to your Rolodex, because that will find you your next job. Aparently the term was coined by Tom Peters and I like it. I don't know what the answer here is, but I think this goes up there with "it's not what you know, but who you know."

posted on Fri, 07 Jan 2005 at 10:55 | permanent link

I thought it was pretty cool when Bryce posted info about my SCALE talk on the Inkscape homepage. Now there is an article on svg.org which is very, very cool. I'm now even more excited about the talk -- better get working on those slides!

posted on Wed, 05 Jan 2005 at 02:09 | permanent link

I was looking at my blog and realized that I hadn't talked about Inkscape much lately. This is probably because I don't have alot of finished results right now -- but that doesn't mean there isn't progress.

Currently, the codebase as a whole is getting ready for 0.41. There are some major bugfixes, plus the new tileable clones, which made everyone think that we should do a quick release to get those to users. Recently, Ishmal has extended the tracing to do some color quantizing and multi-pass tracing to make some better pictures. His results are very impressive. I think that Inkscape may become a great app to take photos and turn them into vectored images.

Personally, I've been trying to get extensions and effects in better shape. I had already rewritten the verbs system to allow for dynamic creation (and make it cleaner and more object-oriented) so that was integrated into the effects menu creation. Now, by uncommenting one line, you can configure your interface.cpp file to have an effects menu. This only has a couple of entries on it, but they both work reasonably well, but need some more clean up.

I'm now working to get the dialogs using a plug/socket system from GTKmm to make it so that all extensions can have GUI setting of parameters. This is being a little tricky, but I seem to have it under control.

I expect to, in the near future, get to categorizing extensions. This would make for submenus in the effects menu, but also allow for grouping in the open/import/save dialogs. That would make all of them easier to use. This will have to be done and a pretty base level -- not bad, but just makes the abstraction a little bit tricker. I'm hoping that I can use some of the same constructs to build collections (extensions of clip-art) later.

That's the quick update. Stay tuned for 0.41, and more effects on the way!

posted on Wed, 05 Jan 2005 at 01:59 | permanent link

There was a story on Slashdot about how Linux is now mainstream. This is a topic that has been debated, and I'm sure the debates will continue. One commenter talked about how he switched his mom to run Linux. On the surface, this is just another story about Linux, but I like the last paragraph. Geeks beware!

She has gone from calling me twice a day for tech support to once a fortnight since the switch from Windoze to Linux. I can fix any problem that does occur remotely. So now instead of talking exclusively about Blue Screens of Death, anti-virus software and automated updates we talk about me not providing any grandchildren.

posted on Tue, 04 Jan 2005 at 23:41 | permanent link