November 2011 Archives

I've been spending time each day working in Ubuntu 11.10's GNOME 3/Unity and Fedora 16's GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktops.

They're more alike than you think. Rather than do things the GNOME way, Ubuntu/Canonical decided to take its own direction with Unity, which is now, like GNOME Shell, built on top of GNOME 3.

They look and work more alike than you'd think.

I find it puzzling. But in a way it makes sense.

The more I figure out how GNOME 3/Shell works in Fedora 16, the more I like it.

I'm not at the point where I can say, "Oh, it's totally better than GNOME 2," but I'm increasingly able to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing in the GNOME Shell environment.

I will refrain from comparing how things work in Fedora 16/GNOME Shell vs. Ubuntu 11.10/Unity until I spend more time in the latter. But this comparison is at the forefront of my thinking about which direction my Linux desktop use will go in during the year ahead.

Responding to Rob Reed's Google+ post on the dark side of huge corporate entities -- read: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube -- controlling what we see and don't see on the Internet, I wrote a couple of responses (instead of one because you can't edit an existing post or comment on Google+'s Android client), which I will repeat here because, a) they're not bad and b) I'm against "giving away" content to social networks and c) the irony of us having this discussion about Facebook on the newest, shiniest corporate-created social network, Google+ is particularly rich (and I acknowledge my part in it).

Here is what I wrote:

The whole idea that blogging, the phenomenon, had its year in the sun, and now the idea of regular people writing things on the web is all about Facebook and Twitter, is terrible.

That so many abandon what they're doing for another thing because that other new thing is posited as the solution to all of life's problems speaks to our society's continual fascination with the new.

I've traditionally used stand-alone FTP clients like FileZilla and gFTP to interact with the servers I use.

Only recently have I decided to start using the GNOME Nautilus file manager's FTP/SFTP capabilities to manage the content in some of my servers.

Including my Ode server (a shared hosting account). Rather than write up text files in my favorite editor, save them, then start up FileZilla and transfer those files into the proper Ode documents folder, I've been using the file manager as my "window into Ode."

I try to automatically send links to my blog entries to all the social networks on which I maintain accounts (the exception being Google +, which I'm still updating manually).

Over the past couple of years, I've had a thicket of services set up to do this. Some work along, others work together. Some social networks themselves will push their entries to other social networks.

It can all be extremely confusing.

So over the last week or so, I went about disconnecting every helper app I could from my accounts at Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook.

I did this because I had another service in mind to handle all of this.

Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are "hybrid" images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it.

I've spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded "I ran the live CD of Project X and here's what happened" posts.

But I'm in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those "I ran the live CD for an hour" reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it's worth.

My earlier tests of GNOME 3 (in OpenSUSE) were a bit of a bust, and while my tests of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04's live environment went well, I wasn't sufficiently moved enough to take the next step (which I suppose would be throwing over good ol' Debian Squeeze and GNOME 2 for Ubuntu with Unity).

Today I decided to give Fedora 16 and its GNOME 3/GNOME Shell desktop a try.

http://fedora.org/

Read my Dailynews.com story about Alan Alda's use of QR-coded wristbands to promote his Marie Curie play at the Geffen Playhouse.

One of the founders of the nascent Diaspora social network has died at age 22. Here is the story from the Associated Press:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the founders of the social networking site Diaspora, has died. He was 22.

Nina Fiore, executive secretary in the San Francisco medical examiner's office, confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday that Zhitomirskiy died in San Francisco. She would not say how or when he died.

Diaspora, an alternative to Facebook, was founded by four New York University students in 2010.

The site lets users keep control over their photos, videos and status updates while sharing them with friends.

Zhitomirskiy co-founded the website with Raphael Sofaer, Dan Grippi, and Max Salzber. The group raised more than $200,000 for the project by collecting contributions through the website Kickstarter.

Chromatic, author of "Modern Perl," writes in a recent blog post anybody interested in programming should read, How to Learn Perl, these words to live by:

Find something that interests you. Find a way to automate it. Keep a list of changes or improvements or new techniques you might apply. Write down what you think about when you're commuting or walking or falling asleep or bathing. When you can't get it out of your head, break it into small pieces, test and experiment, and see what happens.

Programming well requires knowledge, certainly, but like anything else it requires passion to keep you practicing in a disciplined way. The resources I've mentioned here can give you knowledge and will help you develop your discipline. (They're not the only resources, but I believe they're great resources.) What's left is up to you.

Just because I'm writing about how I'm editing these videos in OpenShot (including this one a few days ago), don't think that I'm some kind of video-editing expert.

I'm learning. And I'm excited about it. Beats the alternative, don't you think?

In the video I just cut today, from footage provided by L.A. Daily News reporter Susan Abram, I used OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze, I am refining the way I use multiple tracks to organize and edit the video.

First, here's the video itself (delivered by Brightcove):

Here's a screen-grab of my OpenShot window as it looked after the video was edited. Notice that I "name" the clips in the filenames. Once I gather the clips together, I watch all of them and label those I'm going to use.

Here's a video I put together today with OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze (I've been using the OpenShot .deb package from the OpenShot Launchpad page to make sure I had the latest version):

It's of the new Muse School in Calabasas that Suzy Amis Cameron and husband James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) created, and it contains a mix of video, audio and still images shot by Los Angeles Daily News staff photographer Dean Musgrove.

Once he brought me the raw footage and I saw that it featured children from the school singing a song, I knew I wanted to mix stills and video over the audio track.

As I said in a recent entry, I don't consider myself a "GNOME user," though I find myself using GNOME all the time.

I guess that makes me ... a GNOME user. Since I run Debian Squeeze, that means the now-all-but-dead GNOME 2. Version 2.30.2, to be exact.

Though I've flirted with console e-mail in the form of Mutt and Pine, I came to the realization long ago that GUI mail clients are the thing for me. I've used Claws Mail, and I pretty much centered my mail-client universe on Thunderbird, running it on every platform I can.

But I have kept a fully configured Evolution mail client at the ready on my Debian laptop.

And lately I've been using it -- with IMAP so I can go back to Thunderbird at any time.

You know what? Evolution is pretty good. It's calendar integrates with Google Calendar. (And it that calendar is integrated into the app, unlike the plugin-based Sunbird/Lightning/Iceowl plugin that Thunderbird/Icedove uses and which doesn't work at all in the Debian Backports/Debian Mozilla APT Archive version of Icedove).

It looks great. I can actually understand how to configure it.

But as much as I'm liking this mail client, knowing that my future may very well be outside of GNOME, I'm keeping Thunderbird on the front-burner right next to Evolution.