ο μύθος του αντικειμενικά ορθού design
με αφορμή μια ερώτηση για την επιλογή γραμματοσειράς σε δημόσια έγγραφα, έγινε μια συζήτηση με τον @trianta στο twitter η οποία μου επιβεβαίωσε κάποιες παρεξηγήσεις ή μύθους που είναι κοινός τόπος σε αρκετό κόσμο. (εννοώντας δεν είναι η πρώτη φορά που ακούω παρόμοια επιχειρήματα.)
ας τα πάρουμε απ’ την αρχή. δεν θα μπω στην ουσία του ερωτήματος. έχω επιχειρηματολογήσει άπειρες φορές (είτε στο παρόν blog είτε σε social media) γιατί οι επιλογές που κάνει το κράτος για πληροφοριακά συστήματα ή ψηφιακά δεδομένα πρέπει να έχουν γνώμονα την ελεύθερη και ανοιχτή διακίνηση τους. ας μην το κάνω άλλη μία φορά.
μυθος 1: όσοι ασχολούνται με ελεύθερο λογισμικό είναι engineers (ή geeks) και σίγουρα δεν έχουν καμία επαφή με design και αισθητική.
στην προκειμένη περίπτωση θεωρείται δεδομένο πως τα liberation fonts τα φτιάχνουν engineers, γιατί αν τα έφτιαχνα σοβαροί designers σιγά μην ήταν ελεύθερα! και φυσικά σιγά μην έχει designers η redhat.
μυθος 2: η υπάρχουσα κατάσταση είναι καλύτερη. κατηγορώντας αξιωματικά το καινούριο ως κακέκτυπο γλυτώνουμε τον κόπο επιχειρηματολογίας.
μυθος 3: το ίδιο αξιωματικά… το linux χρησιμοποιείται μόνο από geeks, ενώ είναι τοις πάσι γνωστό πως mac και windows έχουν πολύ καλύτερο user experience.
δεν θα μπω φυσικά στη διαδικασία να αντικρούσω κάτι απ’ αυτά, γιατί όσο κι αν κάνει εντύπωση σε πολλούς, το user experience είναι εντελώς υποκειμενικό θέμα. εδώ προβάλεται σαν επιχείρημα και η έννοια της παράδοσης. αφού λοιπόν υπάρχει τουλάχιστον μια καλή γραμματοσειρά που μας έχει εξυπηρετήσει τόσα χρόνια (helvetica) μπορούμε να σταματήσουμε να σχεδιάζουμε γραμματοσειρές.
Στο τέλος η συζήτηση περιστράφηκε γύρω απ’ το κατά πόσο το marketing καλύπτει τις ανάγκες των χρηστών/καταναλωτών ή αν τις δημιουργεί (aka το αυγό και η κότα). Το marketing μπαίνει στη συζήτηση γιατί ενώ πολλοί χρησιμοποιούν ως επιχείρημα το χαμηλό user base του linux, αδυνατούν να εξηγήσουν το χαμηλό user base του “αντικειμενικά” εύχρηστου και υπέροχου mac os.
Η ουσία είναι πως υπάρχει μια στρεβλή εικόνα σε πολύ κόσμο για την έννοια της αισθητικής, του usability και άλλων τέτοιων θεμάτων. χαρακτηριστικό είναι πως πολλοί designers χρησιμοποιούν τους ίδιους αισθητικούς κανόνες ανεξαρτήτως αντικειμένου. ανεξαρτήτως αν μιλάμε για ένα διαφημιστικό φυλλάδιο, για ένα δημόσιο έγγραφο, για ένα mail interface, για ένα λειτουργικό σύστημα ή για ένα κουτί υπολογιστή. το αποτέλεσμα είναι πως πολλές φορές βλέπουμε ένα ωραίο αισθητικά site, αλλά ταυτόχρονα αρκετά δύσχρηστο.
Στρεβλή εικόνα υπάρχει φυσικά και για το ελεύθερο λογισμικό (και τις άδειες creative commons), συνοδευόμενη με πλήρη άγνοια της φιλοσοφίας τους. Ειδικά στο θέμα της αισθητικής υπάρχει μια αντίληψη (μύθος) πως το linux μπορεί να είναι τεχνικά καλύτερο αλλά είναι άσχημο. Φυσικά, όπως έχω ξαναγράψει εδώ, η πλειοψηφεία αυτών των ανθρώπων δεν το έχουν δοκιμάσει ποτέ.
Και κάτι τελευταίο για designers και apple lovers. Αν νομίζετε πως τα λευκά πλαίσια με μαύρο περίγραμμα και 66.34% opacity είναι μινιμαλισμος… κάτι έχετε καταλάβει λάθος.
παγκόσμια ημέρα ελεύθερου λογισμικού (on radio)
ακούστε απόσπασμα απ’ την εκπομπή του γιάννη ανδριτσόπουλου στον alpha radio 98.9, όπου συμμετείχα στο 10λεπτο αφιέρωμα στην παγκόσμια ημέρα ελεύθερου λογισμικού:
social media through jabber
i ‘m currently using three social networking sites. identica, twitter, facebook. so i needed a tool to update all three simultaneously. even better i ‘d like to have the ability to choose an update to show up only on identica/twitter and not on facebook.
it seems that ping.fm is what i needed, so i signed up for a account. but i didn’t want to use its web interface, so i started looking for a desktop client. unfortunately with no luck. then a friend pointed to me that ping.fm supports im accounts!
so here is what i did. i added pingdotfm at gmail.com as a jabber contact on my client (pidgin) and connected my jabber account with my jabber account sending my verification code. you can find yours here, after you login to ping.fm.
so now i ‘m able to update all three networks through pidgin. additionally ping.fm has triggers for every network. for instance if i want to update only identica i just use the @id trigger at the start of my message. i also created a group that contains identica and twitter (since i update them more frequently) with a hash tag for trigger.
the only problem is that pidgin can’t count characters. but hey! i can’t have everything :P of course i can’t read network streams through pidgin (although there are some 3rd party plugins) so i’m thinking of using gwibber that supports all three of them.
good news is that twitterfeed also supports ping.fm, so my feeds can hit all three networks at once :)
PS. i don’t like the term social networking, i consider identica and twitter to be new/social media services (social networking is not the main thing) and facebook just a social networking service.
vim as a password manager
this is a small post for the technique i ‘m currently using to save my passwords, implemented on vim.
i added these two lines at my ~/.vimrc file:
map <F12> <Esc>:%!gpg –decrypt 2>/dev/null<CR><CR><C-l>
map <S-F12> <Esc>:%!gpg –encrypt –armor –recipient mymail@mail.com<CR><CR><C-l>
these settings map two shortcuts (f12 and shift+f12) that encrypt and decrypt a plain text file respectively using gpg.
it is importand to note that the file is stored on disk only in the encrypted state. so the decrypted state of the file never touches the disk (paranoid exception: there is always the possibility that the memory space holding the file is on swap).
so no special password manager software needed. no extra master passphrase. just my gpg one.
greek coding camp 2009
diary post for the greek coding camp 2009 that took place at paleochora (chania, crete, greece) for 5 days (4-7 july 2009).
day 1 (4/7)
we reached the island at 5.30 in the morning. we made a stop to enjoy the local hospitality with a rich breakfast and an hour of sleep. we travelled by car (about 1.30h) to the camping (paleochora) and we set up our tents.
first thing to do is share the projects:
- OpenOffice Templates translation
- OpenOffice greek numbered lists
- OpenOffice greek build testing
- Transifex work-flow support
- Letterscript for greek final “s” bug
lunch break with greek mousaka and tsikoudia :D
personally i was more interested on openoffice projects and especially the greek build testing.
day ended with a quick visit at the cold sea and a few glass of wine.
day 2 (5/7)
day started with some network problems. it seems that some lady rested her bag over the router, so it got warm beyond accepted limits :P
two more new guys arrives, so during lunch break we had some great conversations.
after some installation problems we managed to install the latest release candidate on cmpachar’s fedora laptop and on ubuntu virtualbox installation on my netbook. thanx to ntua we had access to a (12g ram, 16 core cpu) fast machine, so we also compiled openoffice straight from the subversion.
day 3 (6/7)
early waking. some of us did a nice conversation about lost and its timeline :D
later we had a sort seminar-like conversation about pgp essentials and gpg usage. just to convince everyone who didn’t have a key to sign ours :P
later at night we visited the near by village and we were enlightened by hoo2 about rubick cube solution mind algorithms.
day 4 (7/7)
day began with openoffice testing again. cmpachar did a great job there.
a new page added to the event wiki, since we managed to convience a young user for the benefits of free software (potato guy really helped on this one).
highlights: openoffice greek build testing completed for the greek build by cmpachar and me, glezos and alupo completed the transifex task, elias and manolis translated openoffice templates to greek, pantelis and hoo2 almost finished adding usb dsl modems support at the network manager.
totally 16 hackers joined the greek coding camp. we had great fun, combining swimming at the libyan sea and tsikoudia with coding. i hope this will be a new event series in greece, so we can terrorize every greek camping with our geek conversations and habits :D
foss devs conference 2009
another great libre software event just ended. this time was the foss developers conference organized by eellak.gr. two full days with presentations (6 sessions) and workshops (14).
my highlights from the conference: openerp greek community announced at the conference, moodle workshop, great olpc workshop by re-public e-zine, a complete foss guide for education by kaskamanidis, a vivid presentation about ltsp by kainourgiakis (the last two were a good brainstorm input for me concerning my educational linux distributuion). and of course it was nice to see again some good friends :)
i have to admit that it was a great experience since i helped organizing this conference. more to come :)
working inside libre software ecosystem (aka love and marriage)
i have to admit that i’m really excited lately. it’s great combining my interests with my job and working on something that i love doing.
three weeks ago i started working for a non-profit corporation (eellak.gr) that aims in promoting and advocating free software to greek society. it consists of the majority of greek universities and research institutes (and hopefully hellug in a few months).
my job is about organizing operational tasks and supervising projects, based on my technical skills and activity inside the greek libre software community. additionally i sysadmin corporation’s infrastructures.
till now the job is very interesting and fulfilling but also very demanding. i hope i’ll meet the standards :)
2nd fosscomm
back in athens after a great weekend at larisa, where the 2nd fosscomm (greek foss communities conference) took place.
most presentations had a great interest and workshops where the new addition of this year event. i had the chance to participate in two presentations. on saturday along with kranidiotis we talked about the role that hellug can play inside the greek foss community and on sunday along with tampakrap we made a brief presentation of gentoo linux project and gentoo greek community.
additionally, the greek gentoo community organized a workshop about gentoo installation process, with wired leading this one and the rest of us helping the participants (who were unexpected a lot).
but i think the best thing in these kind of events is the fact that we have the chance to meet again all the greek free software hackers and talk (or flame :P)
you can see my photo set from fosscomm on my flickr here.
speed up firefox
firefox 3 features an awesome address bar that helps you search through your history (and bookmarks) by just typing a word or phrase that’s part of either the url or the title.
the problem is that if you keep the browsing history for a long time (lime me) the address bar search process becomes very slow.
a cool solution is to place the ~/.mozilla folder on ram (which is a lot faster than disk). i already have /tmp on ram, so i made a symbolic link ~/.mozilla pointing to /tmp/mozilla. and then i use the script below in order to save/restore the contents of mozilla folder:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
echo "usage: ff_sync.sh save/restore"
exit 0
fi
action=$1
if [ "$action" = "save" ]; then
size=`du -xs /home/user/.mozilla/ | awk '{print $1}'`
digits=`expr length $size`
if [ $digits -gt 4 ]; then
rsync -avi --delete /home/user/.mozilla/ /home/user/.mozilla_save/
else
echo 'no!'
exit 0
fi
fi
if [ "$action" = "restore" ]; then
mkdir -p /tmp/mozilla\
rsync -avi --delete /home/user/.mozilla_save/ /home/user/.mozilla/
fi
all i have to do is run this script with the appropriate option when booting/halting the pc. on gentoo you have /etc/conf.d/local.start and /etc/conf.d/local.stop for this kind of things.
and i have to say that i’m really impressed. firefox speed improved amazingly. and i mean firefox overall speed, not just the address bar ;)
alphabet linux
for the past three years i work in greek elementary schools, and very recently i started building my own linux distribution for the school lab. so i thought why not share it with the rest of the world ;)
the distribution goal is to cover the first two levels of greek education system. greek school labs are famous for their very old hardware, so this distribution is based on gentoo (with xfce as window manager) in order to be lightweight.
i won’t explain (at least not at this post) why i think that free (as in speech) software is the only way to go when comes to education. the purpose of this post is just to point the web site of the distribution:
alphabet linux
PS. many thanks to kargig. his experience from iloog development helped me a lot.
