No, it's not from The Onion

Laptops Give Hope to the Homeless

They may not have roofs over their heads, but some homeless people are toting around old laptops and trading tips on the best hot spots. Some are even blogging. Jacob Ogles reports from Fillmore, California.

I found this article with the built-in rss agregator in flock, and I'm blogging on the article with the "Blog" link the aggregator has for each entry.  I automatically adds the quote you see above.  Very cool.

I have to admit that flock is not quite as polished as I thought earlier, but I still think it is relatively stable.  There are a few bugs that I need to report when I get time.  Obviously I have not blogged in a while, and that is because work has gotten pretty crazy.  At this very moment I have someone urgently pinging me on IM to do some testing. :-)

Anyway, the article.... All I can say is, "wtf."  I imagine if I were ever homeless this would probably be me.  I can't afford rent, but darn it I'm not giving up my laptop!!  However, I almost say this in jest.  It just occurred to me though that this is a good argument for city-wide wifi.

Ok, must go.  Going to get into trouble.

Blogged with Flock

Day 3: Flock on Mac and Linux

So this is the third day of using Flock.  Yesterday I installed Flock on my Linux laptop, and it has been working very well.  What I'm surprised to see is that at version 0.7 Flock is performing as well as Firefox 1.5.x.  I'm not sure if they used the Firefox base, and created a different graphical frontend or not.  I have yet to have a crash, though admittedly I probably haven't worked it very hard for the purposes it is intended.

A neat feature I found, but have not had the chance to use yet is this little icon on the right-hand side of the status bar (lives at the very bottom of the browser window) where you can drag both text and images to use later.  Maybe I will try to incorporate that into a blog entry.

Another cool thing I noticed that Macromedia Flash already works.  It wasn't distributed with the product, and it doesn't use the version of Flash already install (afaict).  However, when I went to a Flash-enabled site I received the notice that I was missing a need plugin.  I clicked on
[ Install plugin ], and amazingly it just installed.  Anyone who is used to Mac or Windows will say, "...so what..."  However, this was on Linux.  Often what you get on Linux with a "new" web browser is "There is no plugin available..."  So to have it work flawlessly was a thing of beauty. ;-)

One thing that annoys me is that the search bar uses Yahoo! Search by default.  I like Google, and would rather have that be the default.  I can click on a drop-down and choose to do the same search with Google, but it is just another step.  I will look to see if I can change the default.  Yahoo! seems to be rather prominent in this product, and I wonder if that means Yahoo! is somehow funding or contributing to this project.  It would make sense.

Need to get back to work.  I really like this blog tool. :-)

Blogged with Flock

Software Junkie

I am such a software Junkie.  And, admittedly, a big fan of the Mozilla Foundation.  I'm trying out the Flock web browser.  I saw something about this before, but never really bothered to download and install it.  Often I will checking stuff like this out to see what advantages it may give me or any new features, and often I am disappointed.

For instance, I tried Seamonkey, and found it to be nothing more than a re-birth of the Mozilla project and the Netscape browser (maybe that is a bit harsh).  Flock, however, seems to actually have a different purpose and a different audience.  It is the browser for the constant Internet junkie.  I can't say I'm an avid blogger (as is obvious) or that I share my photos with the world on Fliker (because my photos largely suck), but that is often because it is just to much of a PITA.  There are some neat tools you can find about, but Flock seems to nicely integrate these tools, and make it easy.

So, as the software junkie that I am, I am trying it out.  So far it is neat, but I will have to reserve judgment for a week or so.  I guess we'll know if the blogging feature is that easy if I manage to blog more. ;-)

Blogged with Flock

Leveling the scales

A friend of mine just sent me a link to an article on ZDnet about how Google is giving Microsoft a run for their money. Microsoft is being forced to reinvent themselves in order to keep pace. Some in the Linux community look at an article like this, and see the giant beginning it's decent. However, I don't see evidence like this as evidence that Microsoft is finished. Microsoft isn't going anytime soon, nor would I want them to.

Fair competition keeps us on our toes. What I see is a leveling of the scales. When you grow as large as Microsoft it becomes difficult to stay agile. It is an inevitability. We may even see a day when Microsoft begins to have offshoots, that can grow on their own.

One thing that Microsoft can't seem to let go of is associating everything back to the Microsoft name. Making it part of the borg. They incessantly purchase other companies or start new projects, immediately roll it into Windows, and re-brand it. They hang on to that association like the egotistical old man that names his own children after himself with the thought that this will make him live forever.

Sun needs to get a clue

Just read an article entitled, "Sun make peace with the Linux world" I think there needs to be some type of temperature gage that measures Sun's position on Linux daily. Maybe even hourly!

"Today Sun's position is:  <insert-johnathan-schwartz-comment-here>".

Make up your mind, Sun, and stick with it.

Cool new blogging tool

This may make things easier for me. ;-) I'm running the final release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.0, and there is a cool applet in GNOME to add a blog entry! There have been so many things to blog about in the last few months, but I "...haven't gotten around to it."

Most notably I attended the KDE World Conference, aKademy, in Malaga, Spain. I know it sounds odd that a GNOME person would attend a KDE development conference, but I was doing a talk on the usability study my company conducted earlier this year. I learned a lot about their community, and the way KDE works. I found my talk was very well received, and it is encouraging to see so much interest in usability from both the KDE and GNOME communities.

After that I was home for a few weeks, and flew back to Spain, Barcelona this time, to attend Novell Brainshare. The food was wonderful. :-D

Hopefully this cool blog tool will help me blog more (with more interesting stuff...). Check out the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.0. You can download it for free!

Evolution Notes component!

I've been using Evolution since version 0.12. I used to be a big Outlook user, and used Outlook along with some type of PDA. I frequently used the Notes component, and sorely missed it. A Notes component (no, not Lotus Notes) was one of the top requested features, but Ximian just never had time to implement it. I added myself to the CC for the bug requesting a Notes component, and finally someone has created it. You can find the project at Sourceforge.

First post

I always said there was no reason for me to start a blog... But here I am. Hopefully I'll have some interesting stuff to put here. There are definitely times where I would like to have a public voice, and I guess this is it. :-)

And to start...
Scary stuff afoot with software patents in the EU.