Open Source Software

Icon Illustration In Practice

by Steven Garrity

Jakub Steiner is an artist that works on Linux icons and interfaces at Novell. He is responsible for much of the look and feel of the Gnome icon set.

This week, he posted a fascinating movie of his illustration process. He was drawing a small dog/puppy icon for a notification panel applet and recorded the entire illustration process.

As he suggests, you should watch the video at a high speed, since it would be a bit long to watch the whole thing in real-time (about 10 minutes). I’ve re-encoded his video at a faster speed: download the high-speed version of Jakub’s video.

 

Telling the World About Open Source Software

by Steven Garrity

Firefox Ad Campaign

When I first heard of the idea for the latest community campaign to help promote Firefox, I was a little skeptical. The idea was (is) to ask for donations of $30 from people. With the money, they will buy an ad (hopefully full page) in the New York Times about the 1.0 release of Firefox (coming Nov. 9). The name of each person who contributed to the campaign will be listed in the ad.

Well, I was wrong to be skeptical. Not only is it working, but I’m finding myself strangely excited about it. There’s something really cool about the open source software community sending a bellwether through the mainstream press.

I can almost hear Gandalf in my ear saying, “I come to you now, at the turn of the tide.” My name will be on the ad. Ad yours.

 

Notes from the Gnome Summit in Boston

by Steven Garrity

Photos from the Gnome Summit in Boston

I drove down to Boston this weekend for the Gnome Summit. I have posted my photos from the trip and collected some rough notes on the experience:

  • The who/what/where/when/why/how of marketing open source software to normal humans (non-developers) is uncharted territory. I’m skeptical that we should worry ourselves much about marketing at all.
  • It takes about 10 hours to drive from Charlottetown to Boston
  • Americans like to express their partisan politics with bumper stickers. Some stickers noted on the I-95: “Veterans for Bush”, “Veterans for Kerry”, “Veterans Against Bush”. There was no “Veterans Against Kerry” – but I guess Massachusetts is a blue state.
  • The Stata building at MIT (photos) is fascinating, compelling, and beautiful. However, it strikes me as architectural masturbation.
  • MIT has really nice projectors in the class rooms
  • Harvard is bustling with culture and diversity. MIT is eerily sterile.
  • The Gnome Summit was held in the William H. Gates building. I was please that this was not the subject of as much mocking as I had feared.
  • Where my hos at, biatch? (translations: “Open source software is suffering from a significant gender bias that will hinder the long term prospects of the movement. Biatch.”)
  • Geeks can be really set in their ways. I met people who still think the classic Mozilla browser is “more usable” than Firefox because it has more options and someone (you know who you are) that thinks Gaim sucks (it doesn’t). The hard-core geeks were in the minority now. There is a growing respect for artists, usability-dudes, and general well-roudnedness.
  • I met my first AIBO.
  • My father drove down with me to visit some friends and relative in Boston. It was fun and strange to travel with my father as two adults. He said it was the first time in his life he’s been on a trip and one of his children has paid for the gas.
  • People were nice to me.
 

SpreadFirefox.com Likes Me

by Steven Garrity

Slice illustration

Being as humble as I am, it can be difficult for me when I’m showered with praise. However, it does soften the humility blow when the praise is written cleverly and with wit. Such is the case in my selection as Volunteer of the Week at SpreadFirefox.com.

SpreadFirefox.com, is a community site focused on promoting the Firefox browser through a variety of campaigns. They’ve been tracking the progress as 2 million copies of Firefox Preview Release 1 have been downloaded in the last 10 days.

The best part (after, of course, the illustration of myself in the style of the Slice of the Month) is being referred to as the “Martha Stewart of Web Browsers”.

Thanks!

 

Firefox on Local CBC Radio

by Steven Garrity

CBC Radio’s head geek, Tod Maffin, did a great piece about Firefox for CBC Radio today. I was invited into the local evening CBC Radio show, Mainstreet with Matt Rainnie to talk about the local connection we have to Firefox.

Today, Mainstreet played Todd’s piece and followed up with my interview. Listen to the two pieces together (6.4MB MP3 – 16 minutes).

I’m reluctantly becoming a local media representative for all things Firefox. I’m talking to the evening TV news tomorrow afternoon. It’s not a full-page spread in the New Zealand Herald, but it’ll do.

 

Service Pack 2: Sympathy for Microsoft from a Linux User

by Steven Garrity

Windows XP Flag

Perhaps because I frequent web news outlets with a geeky bent, I’ve seen a lot of negative reaction to Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 update to Windows XP. Much of this criticism is understandable. Microsoft has been pushing the security issue hard, and it will be near impossible for them to live up to their promises.

That said, let’s be fair to Microsoft. They’ve been criticized for a delayed roll-out of SP2 and for a slew of applications that “break” after it is installed. Well, rolling out a major (free) update to the worlds most popular operating system is not easy. The amount of backwards compatibility issues that Microsoft deals with dwarfs that of competing operating systems given their install base. Upgrading the install base of Windows XP is a massive engineering undertaking.

As for some applications “breaking” after SP2 is installed – sure, there may be (and likely) are bugs in SP2. However, much of the “breaking” I’ve heard of is due to new security policies that Microsoft has been criticized for not having in the past. For example, their Firewall is now turned on by default. This will wreak havoc on all kinds of applications (it messed up some online gaming software for me in the past). However, it is a necessary change. Sure, it will cause some annoyances in the short term – but it will make computing safer in the long term.

We can’t criticize Microsoft for shipping an operating system with no firewall turned on by default, then not give them credit when they finally do ship with a firewall on by default.

SP2 probably doesn’t make Windows secure. From my (admitted limited)understanding, there are fundamental architectural decisions that will prevent Windows from ever being as secure as the more network aware alternatives (Linux and Mac OS X). However, SP2 helps – if only a bit.

I now run Linux as my primary operating system. I run Windows XP occasionally, and I updated my XP partition on my laptop to SP2 today. When an application started to load up in the background, XP with SP2 told me about it, and asked me if it was ok for it to run. If I make legitimate software that runs in the background, this will be an annoyance and may make for a slew of calls to my support line. However, it will make it a hell of a lot easier to find all of that spy-ware running on your moms computer.

Bottom line: SP2 will help make home computers a little bit less annoying for our families to use. I think Microsoft deserves at least a bit of credit for that.

 

New Mozilla.org Design is Live!

by Steven Garrity

It’s up! The new design for Mozilla.org by Daniel Burka, myself, and the others here at silverorange, working with the brilliant and patient people at the Mozilla Foundation has just gone live.

Here’s the CVS checkin:

dbaron%dbaron.org – 2004-08-31 14:31
Landing BETA_20040721_BRANCH: new template, homepage, and product page design by Steven Garrity and Daniel Burka from silverorange, and required tools changes by Myk Melez.

Be sure to refresh! Thanks to all involved (especially bart, dbaron, and myk).

Of course, there is still lots to do to improve the site, and we’ll keep working on it – but for now, it feels good to be live.

 

Luna Blue Theme (v0.3) for Mozilla Thunderbird Update

by Steven Garrity

I was contacted this week by Alexander Klimetschek, who has built on the work of Hal Hockersmith to get finally get out a version 0.3 of the Luna Blue Theme for Mozilla Thunderbird.

My motivation for working on this theme was purely selfish, and now that I’m running Linux instead of Windows, I don’t have that motivation anymore. Fortunately, others have picked up the slack.

This version should work with Thunderbird 0.7.

Zip Icon Download/Install Luna Blue (v0.3) for Mozilla Thunderbird

lunablue-thunderbird-0.2.jar – 703Kb RAR File

UPDATE: Alexander Klimetschek has created an updated version of this theme (Download v0.4) as mentioned in this comment.

I know this won’t make any difference, but it’s worth a shot: I am not maintaining this theme anymore. I’ve just posted it here as a convenient location for people to find it.