Finished another GNOME t-shirt which should in fact more accurately be described as a Gtk+ t-shirt.
Designing it made me wish Inkscape had diagonal guides. They could be set like orthogonal guides, with a click in and drag from the rulers. To differentiate setting one kind of guide vs. the other, diagonal guide creation could be started with a [Shift] + click or a [Ctrl] + click instead of the regular click alone.
I chose “mus in pice” as the title of this blog for reasons I will explain shortly. One thing I did not foresee then was that I would end up with the top hits on Google for this expression. Now I feel responsible for it and I worry that I'm making it difficult for people wishing to know what it means to do just that. This is my attempt at making things right.
“Mus in pice” is a Latin phrase meaning “a mouse in pitch” — the Latin word for “pitch” is pix (picis; f.) by the way. I came across it reading Michel de Montaigne's Essays (complete text in English from Project Gutenberg and in French from the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language). The passage in question is from Book III, Chapter XIII, “Of Experience”:
Men misconceive the natural disease of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and inquire and keeps whirling about, pilling things up, and wrapping itself in its own handiwork, like our silkworms, until it suffocates. “Mus in pice.” It believes it spotted some pretense of clarity and imaginary truth; but as it runs towards it so many obstacles stand in its way, so many difficulties and so many new questions, that they misguide it and confuse it.
The expression itself predates Montaigne and seems to be in fact a classical adage, “getting stuck like a mouse in pitch.” Montaigne uses it in a particular context, that of our endless curiosity, the “natural disease of [the] mind,” but it could just as easily apply to our thirst for material goods.
I have always liked this expression as it describes me pretty well so it seemed appropriate to use it when I was looking for a title for this blog. It's even more appropriate if you think that blogs are by nature one of the worst kinds of information “pitch” there is. I felt then that “mus in pice” applied not just to me individually but also to me as a participant in this giant broacasting mess we call blogs.
A week ago I bought this gizmo: the Asus WL-330g Wireless Access Point and Ethernet Adapter, to use “my” iBook anywhere there's a wireless connection with the least amount of messing with configuration and drivers. The iBook is running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and I'm happy to report that everything is working well. Since the WL-330g acts as an Ethernet adapter there's really no messing with anything at all; I just used the “Network Settings” dialog to set the iBook's network interface for DHCP.
One very strange thing happened on which I wasted nearly an entire afternoon. The device comes with a USB power adapter so that it can be used anywhere with a laptop. So far, so good. But it took me hours to figure out that I can't use just any of the iBook's two USB ports to power it. Only the 1st port seems to work. When the device is plugged in to the 2nd one, it connects and reboots 2 or 3 times before giving up entirely. Very strange!
The WL-330g comes with a Windows configuration utility which I couldn't use for obvious reasons. There is also a web configuration interface which is quite poor but usable — not the good kind of “usable” though. The documentation is virtually inexistent since it consists of screenshots of both configuration systems with little explanation about how the device really works.
Tristant Nitot pointed to some of the most recent numbers for Mozilla Firefox's market share: 14.4% in Oceania, 14.1% in Europe, 11.8% in North America (12.3% in the US), 5.8% in Asia, 5.2% in South America and 4.3% in Africa. The good news is that these numbers have been steadily growing for a while and continue to do so to reach significant levels now in certain parts of the world (31% in Finland! Go Finland!). The work done by the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla volunteers is definitely paying off.
This latest study also shows that Firefox is being installed at a higher rate in homes than in offices. In Europe for instance, there's a 2.5 point difference between Firefox usage on week days and on week-ends. Given the way most companies administer their software resources this is not particularly surprising. It does somewhat undermine the idea that software travels from offices to the homes with people installing on their home computer whatever piece of software they're using at work.
The low percentage points in developing regions like Asia, South America and Africa are surprising to me. Free software is usually said to do better in developing countries — since it can be distributed, customized and translated into minority languages freely — but this is not what I'm seeing here. Though I don't really know how to explain this phenomenon, widespread software piracy could be a factor.
In countries where law enforcement resources are limited and where therefore commercial software can be acquired cheap or at no cost, the freedom to redistribute copies guaranteed by free software licenses, arguably the most interesting of all “software freedoms” for non-technical users, is illegally granted to all making the benefits of true free software moot. Moreover, in these conditions, the need for consumers to critically evaluate the price of software vs. its actual worth disappears because the financial cost of using or trying unsatisfactory software is virtually null. And since software prices in developing nations are comparatively higher than they are elsewhere, the gap between price and expectations which could be more significant there than in “developed” nations actually ends up being narrower. This in turns makes for fewer opportunities for free software to spread as an alternative to commercial, and potentially expensive and unsatisfactory, software.
So what's the bad news? Well, nothing really, except that I am impatient by nature and that I can't help but thinking that things are moving too slowly. Firefox is technically better than its alternative, it is one of the best advertised Free/Open Source projects, and yet it is reaching “only” 14.4% of its intended audience at its best (on average, per continent). While this steady progression is good news for Firefox, the relatively low percentage worries me when I think about GNOME, the fantastic Linux desktop. How long before Linux and GNOME have 14% of the computer desktop market share?
I recently found out about John LoVerso's Proxy Auto Configuration ad-busting trick and tested it. It's quite efficient and integrates very easily with the GNOME desktop. By using John's file and GNOME's Network Proxy Preferences dialog you could be browsing the web free of annoying ad banners.
In the System menu, choose Preferences, then Network Proxy. Select the Proxy Configuration tab, pick Automatic proxy configuration and enter the path to the "no-ads.pac" file you'll have downloaded from the page referenced above.
If you're using Epiphany, that's it; you're done. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to change your connection settings to Auto-detect proxy settings for this network.
On a different and very anectodic note, if you happen to watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" — and you should — the kids are using Gaim to chat.
Ubuntu is a fantastic Linux distribution focusing on desktop users and their needs. Because of this focus, it picked GNOME has its desktop environment and several GNOME developers now work for Canonical, the company responsible for Ubuntu.
In a recent visit to ubuntulinux.org however, I noticed that GNOME's name did not appear there much at all. It is in fact eclipsed by a large link to Kubuntu, a project to bring KDE to Ubuntu. While geeks won't really mind — GNOME and KDE have lived side by side for a while — it seemed like a lost opportunity for GNOME at a time when Ubuntu is drawing a lot of attention.
One tiny mention towards the bottom of the page... ;-(
Scribus source files for GNOME posters and handouts are available at /gnome/promotion/source/. All of it is hereby released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
Those documents use the following set of typefaces. While some are free, others aren't unfortunately. ITC Mendoza, chosen to be the roman counterpart to Trebuchet—the typeface of GNOME's logo—might be the toughest one to substitute.
It's been 2 months of travelling and moving but I am finally now in Athens, Ohio, a pleasant liberal town in a sea of rural conservativeness. Things are not as lively here as they were in Belo Horizonte but I can't say I'll miss the air pollution or the idiocy of the Brazilian upper middle class.
Yesterday the marketing team had its first official IRC meeting on #marketing. The goal was to discuss how to pursue our nascent promotional efforts and I think we successfully did so. The plan for the next few months is to grow the amount of promotional material around one theme: GNOME, software for everyone. The consensus was that we should start relatively small by moving towards a better representation of the project in traditional FOSS circles – LUG members, students. Look for a Super Bowl ad in 2006 but not earlier.
For the time being, “software for everyone” is a theme more than a slogan. But it might stick. Its polysemy – “software designed so that anyone can use it” and “free software available to anyone” – is actually growing on me. That theme is to be developed around three points: freedom, ease of use, and accessibility. Stylistically there is no formal definition of what we’re trying to achieve. Successful designs will survive.
