Mid morning Thursday my roommate called me telling me he’d found an XBox 360 at the Nashua, NH Best Buy. I had said I’d drive him to pick it up somewhere in the metro Boston area, but luckily he found one that was pretty close to work. I took off on my lunch break and grabbed one of the remaining few premium systems they had. New stock had only been delivered that morning and I was there by 1:00.

Last night we played Dead Or Alive 4 and will be getting Full Auto when that comes out. Finding in stock XBox’s requires this cool little toy called the XBOX 360 In-Store Tracker. It’s written in C# and scours the Best Buy and Circuit City websites looking for in stock XBox 360s. Thank god for people with extra time on their hands and some programming skillz.

Update: Having at least one play and charge is key to staying up all night and playing.

In yet another instantiation of social software on the web I recently found upcoming.org which is a social calendaring application. Very similar to the way that del.icio.us works, you register, add your calendar events to the system and browse other peoples. It allows you to subscribe to any part of the system as RSS or iCal, so if you’re sad and lonely in boston you could check the Upcoming Boston Events to see what other people are doing.

In the begining.

Then there was the Pirate Invasion.

And now the decline… Hula Girl is gone, and some how he found a beer.

Seth and I are at the end of CHI 2005, I’m watching a presentation of a paper on topical blogs.

I’m planning on posting my notes on the conference sometime later, you know for the kids.

Pray to the travel gods that this doesn’t happen again. Tonight we hop on a plane at 11:30 pm leaving Portland, OR and flying to Chicago, IL. We land in the windy city at 5:30am with a long layover that gets us out of there by 7:00 am in order to land in Beantown at 10:00 am. And then I think we’re going to work?

I wrote an article in DeveloperWorks on Virtualizing Linux to test your apps. In the article I described how you can use Xen to run a stable base operating system for a web service. Then copy that base system, upgrade the packages to the latest releases and test the new system live before taking down the old one.

It was a lot of fun writing the article, while Xen is a pain to use right now, hopefully it won’t be for long.

Way too much wind blowing the snow around during the drive home, I could see about 30 feet in front of me. After arriving safely back home I stayed in to watch Club Dread with my roommates. Very weird film, but funny the whole way through.

Jrb and Marco are threading Evince. And Kristian removed xpdf and added poppler. Now we are posed to stand on the backs of PDF Giants.

Dave Camp has been in our office all day today. He hasn’t said much at all and I’m not sure if he’s talked to Hula Girl, but he hasn’t said a word to anyone else. As far as I know there is no explanation for his being here and it’s starting to freak me out having him sit back there and stare at me all day.

Going over to Davidz‘s place for the super bowl, anyone within the sound of my blog is welcome to join. I ordered food from Redbones and now we just need to pick up some beer.

Went to a Red Hat meetup tonight. I got there late and there was a presentation on PHP already happening when I arrived. PHP wasn’t really what I was interested in, but it was good to talk to some people who are using our stuff. It was a small group tonight, but they seemed like they are used to having some more people and would like to have more presetations on different topics. I guess the Red Hat Meetup has gotten some news recently as well.

How’s that for a somewhat misleading title? The CNN show Crossfire has been canceled according to this New York Times article where the new President of CNN mentions the criticism of John Stewart (of The Daily Show) on a Crossfire debate that Joe talked about a while back. The CNN President Klein says, I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.

Dave: It just would have been nice to have an option for Optimize Animation Size (will lose certain image information) as a default on. There was already another item in the export to animation that I didn’t care about (note the image), this one would have been the most helpful. But thanks for explaining, I should open a bug about this

The I don’t care option

Nice! Stuart Axon emailed and said he took the huge 6.9 meg gif from my fun startup post and used the optimize for gif option in gimp to turn it into 1.36mb (Kid tested, Mother approved!). He’s put it up off his site here, and I grabbed a copy as well.

A nice function to keep in mind the next time I use GIMP for gif animations. Why didn’t GIMP offer to do that automagically when I was making my gif? The world may never know…

Did some fun startup notification designs a while back and polished them up a bit the other day. The idea was just to brainstorm about new ways of showing startup notification from a launcher.

One of my ideas was to animate the launch of the item dropping into the taskbar. When applications are launched currently there is a short animation of a square that expands to the size of the screen which gives this kind of explosive effect. I’m not so much interested in conveying that you just “launched” something, since I think the mental model is a little broken.

I stuck to the giving lots of feedback to the user route, which never seems like a bad way to go. So here’s my shots of the item being launched. I assumed that we’d always be able to create a arc route between the launcher and the taskbar.

Initial launch of the application

Item after jrb’s cool menu effect (forgot to include it in the animation)

Item drops after the animation has curved and it settles in the taskbar

Now the application object settles in the taskbar

Here’s the animated gif (careful! 6.9 megs) You should watch this to really understand what’s happening.

Anyway, it was just a brainstorming design exercise to no worry about any implementation details and think about what might look cool and tell a good story to the user.

Looked at NetworkManager providing auto-proxy and auto-other information this weekend. There are a bunch of RFCs to look at for DHCP including the DHCP Option for Proxy Server Config. The second one is the more important one as it provides us with auto-proxy configuration information. There are also a bunch of other random and even helpful proxy information that we should be able to grab out of network manager. The SMTP server info is a nice one while a default IRC server is kind of random but still cool.

For NM it seems like the interface should not be too complicated except that we might have different network paths for different device types.

For wireless device we might have an access string that looks like this:/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/${dev}/Networks/${network}/dhcp/Options

So a wireless example could be:

/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/eth0/Networks/linksys/dhcp/Options

And for a wired device we have this:

/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/${dev}/dhcp/Options

So this is a wired exaple:

/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/eth1/dhcp/Options

This means that your application, say Epiphany, can use $access_string from above (any of the variable information can be grabbed from NetworkManager as well) and then do a get($access_string, $access_code) to return all the DHCP information for the specific code.

As far as I can tell auto-proxy configuration access code seems to be called custom-proxy-server. The other useful items are:

• time-servers (auto discover of tme server to check clock)

• pop-server
• smtp-server
• www-server (auto-intranet discovery)

See man dhcp-options for more. These items are of course all limited to how savy your DHCP administrator really is, and while they provide the ability to auto-discover this information we can’t blindly auto-use it.

This D-BUS string path isn’t settled yet so don’t get too worried if it needs some work still. If anyone out there is a DHCP guru / auto-proxy configure master please join the NetworkManager list and start some discussion on it. Patches are always welcome too, but I don’t use proxy config so it’s hard to understand it all when I’m not in the situation at all.

Jean-Franois has already begun work to integrate an automatic discovery of online vs. offline state for Epiphany via NetworkManger, I’m excited to see this in action. Soon Epiphany will have the ability to become much smarter about accessing the interweb by knowing if your connection is changing, offline or online. +1 for integration!

Update: Ok, so I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time. The wireless doesn’t need to be expanded over the networks available since you can only dhcp on a single network at time. Meaning that for wired/wireless they will all look like: /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/${dev}/dhcp/Options. More coffee, less crack...

Garret, cool ideas on a feed reader. One thing I’d add is that I’ve been wanting to integrate my blog writer into a blog reader. So often I comment off the items in other peoples blogs (just like this!) that I’d like to have that information glued together. Names, links, and titles would be nice to have in an auto-fill so I don’t have to swap back and forth between a web browser and my blog writer.

For this entry I would have appreciated if it was as simple as doing a Ctrl-R on your blog entry in my reader and getting the auto-title stuff, then perhaps I’d reply to a few others in the same entry and that same reply format would be appended to my current entry.

David, I have to say I’m not surprised. I recently happened upon this image and thought I should bring it to your attention.

Coincidence, I think not…

It’s a map of our lovely Cambridge, but when you connect the lines from Rob “Zombie” Love, Joe “Broke Your Car” Shaw, and Nat “Lefty” Friedman I think you’ll see something not quite so lovely. Now I’m not saying that this map is definitive evidence of a well coordinated and executed attack from certain people obviously directed at your car (look at the arrow!), but everything seems to suggest that.

My advice for now is to stay calm, lay low, while we coordinate our own blitzkrieg.

Matt, I think the bad chili has effected your mind.

A while back I did some mockups for ideas related to bubble up notifications, I was cleaning out some files in my design folder and saw them, so I figured I’d share.

Notification Area Bubble Up

This was to demonstrate how notifications can bubble out of an item in the notification area. This is a notification that requires interaction before it disappears, the user must click the [OK] button for this to clear.

Launchers responsible for their notifications

So taking the idea a little further I went for notifications where the launcher of the application was responsible for providing the notifications coming from the application. I was hoping this provided a better alignment between the mental models of the application, it’s launcher, and it’s notifications to the user.

If there were a queue of notifications for this application they would all remain bound to the launcher and history would be available via a context menu. I left out the image where I tried to show in the icon that the application was active, the idea still needs work.

Slight Fade In and Fade Out of Notification

Then I did a quick animation to show how a typical notification might appear and disapear. Note that the bubble doesn’t just appear, it has a slight fade in, which is quicker and less noticible than the fade out. In my sketch I made it grow out of the launcher, however it became too difficult for me to show it in The GIMP.

Thanks to the work of our next-generation x.org all stars, (owen, soren, and carl) who we are calling “The X-Men“, the design collective at Red Hat is constantly being asked to show more cool ways things like composite and transparency could be used. I have a cool app switching sketch drawn up right now, but I need to convert it to the computer before I can share.

Note: Just because this is about notifications and a notification system was proposed for inclusion in GNOME does not mean I approve that implementation or specification.

I was reviewing the gnome-games component this morning looking at whether we should be thinking about trimming out some of the games from the default install. Right now the menus in Fedora look pretty bloated with a lot of games that are not all that great.

Thanks to ADD I got distracted and started wondering if there is a Texas Hold’em game out there for GNOME. Seeing as we now have easy network support for gnome-games I was envisioning being able to play against other people in a quick game of poker but my attempt to search for this game revealed nothing, except the ugly world of blog comment spam.

Sadly I never did find a Texas Hold ‘Em game.