First, I have had a relapse and early-wake-up-itis has caught be in a fever grip again. I wake after four hours of sleep on a Saturday, and I'm bright and cheerful, eager to blog. Somebody send a cure.
Second, I like noisy houses. I really do and moving to a noisy neighbourhood after three years of quiet places in Madison brings back all those noisy Mumbai memories. Now if only all states to the east of Wisconsin would sink under the Atlantic, then I could get my beloved ocean with its beaches and sunsets back too.
In other news, something perplexing. I don't understand this mad rush in geekdom to get Gmail accounts? I have one and don't even use it. No point unless Google decides to give an IMAP or POP interface.
In more new, something even more perplexing. I'm talking about the Open Source communities ability to gleefully hammer it's own toes. I am talking about the recent UI "updates" being applied to a plethora of Open Source products.
- Firefox 0.9 changed the default skin to something much less prettier then the old default. The lead developer claimed that the skin author was uncommunicative when asked about skin licensing. Funny how the same author's skin is still being used on Firefox's sister product Thunderbird 0.7. Good leadership involves making tough negotiations to get a better product (and not throwing your hands up in the air helplessly and looking for an inferior alternative).
- Wikipedia.org, the excellent web-based collaborative encyclopedia recently updated their look too. While the new version of the site looks much more modern, the developers decided to use a sans serif font for main body text. Couple this with wikipedia's tendency to put large amounts of word's per line (something like 20 at my default resolution) and readers are faced with a serious readability problem. Might I suggest changing the stylesheet to bring wordcount per line to something like 10-13 words per line. And giving readers an easy option to change article font to a serif one. And when I say easy option I mean something which does not involve any form of logging on.
- And I am not even going to comment about the Gnome project's ridiculous blunder of forcing spatial filemanager browsing down their users' throats. Way to go Open Source leadership.
I've just spent the better part of my Saturday morning ranting about geek-related issues which nobody cares about. I need a life.