The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

Okay, there aren’t many holes to speak of in GNOME, but continuing the Beatles motif was irresistible.

Since I have been drooling over the new features of Ubuntu Linux, I thought it only appropriate to attribute some of the more stylish features to their source, GNOME.

Ubuntu development tracks GNOME development almost exactly, so the new release of Ubuntu should coincide perfectly with the release of GNOME (just a few weeks away now)

Davyd Madeley has his perennial preview of GNOME 2.14 out and the new features are worth more than my perfunctory GNOME lovefest.

For the first part, remember GNOME Love Day? Well, some people more talented than myself succeeded in making GNOME faster; much faster. From font rendering to memory allocation, there are some drastic speedups in 2.14

From the taking-eye-candy-from-strangers department, we have a composite-enabled Metacity now, incorporating many of the more impressive features of Luminocity, the technological testbed for future features. Wobbly Windows are only the beginning. Think Mac-ish people, it’s coming.

Home users will also enjoy fast user switching, enabled from the desktop. I know the members of my family that use Ubuntu have been wanting something like this for a while. The wait is over.

Beagle searching is implemented from Nautilus and the Panel now, and searches can be saved like folders and called back instantaneously. Run two searches on your computer, files returned by both searches will be in both “Saved Search folders” without changing location. This is the beginning of the end for hierarchical organization of data as we know it. For example, files related to Ubuntu and/or Novell could both be stored in one GNOME folder and organized by dynamically updating “Search Folders”. Cool, huh?

Features friendly to a corporate environment, like H.323 for voice and video over IP, seamlessly integrated with Evolution’s contact list and LDAP directory, makes videoconferencing a trivial implementation. CalDAV makes scheduling the aforementioned videoconferencing relatively pain free, since everyone works around the same calendar server.

So what are we left with? A speedy, pretty, full-featured and stable desktop with lots of extra stuff for productivity neatly packaged inside it. With a $0 price tag.

Which makes one think: if Windows Vista isn’t stunning, and I mean thoroughly amazing, the word “entrenched” might not mean what it used to.

The great thing about Ubuntu’s regular release cycle, is it gives me new stories on a six month basis. I tend to start obsessing over the new version as feature freezes start and the next release starts to take shape.

So what’s new in the fastest growing Linux distro? Quite a bit.

Someone hacked up a patch to Evolution to support bogofilter over spamassasin so now we have fast, reliably working Bayesian filtering.

XGL looks like it’s going to make it in, which puts some pressure on me to install Ubuntu on something other than my aging laptop. Hear that Gentoo? Your days on my younger-but-still-aging desktop may be numbered. In case you at home are wondering, hardware accelerated desktops are what make Macs so pretty and fluid. Longhorn/Vista promises a hardware accelerated desktop, but it looks like Novell and Ubuntu are going to beat them to it. Yay Open Source!

Speaking of cool Mac features, we’ve had Beagle for a while, but in effort to make things even more Spotlight-ish, the deskbar-applet now launches right into Beagle. Pretty nifty.

Oh, and for your development (outside of clisp) we have Scribes now.

I have to admit, it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time.

I once posted about the addition of free wireless Internet access to express buses from New Tampa. It got shot down pretty quickly as a service largely unneeded by the “underprivileged.” At yesterday’s town hall meeting with the president, someone raised the question about why the highway bill earmarks money for projects that aren’t in our local budget yet. Hence this money sits there, unable to be used until we decide to build a light-rail system. The response?

I’m just not one of these guys — if there’s no hope, I got to let you know, brother. There ain’t no hope. (Laughter and applause.) They’re not going to — they’re not going to revisit the highway bill.

I think all of this attitude of how to spend money on mass transit stems from an error in perception. To be clear, I respect the person who shot down my previous post. I think she’s intelligent and has good and valuable opinions. I really try not to take it personally when people characterize my fellow riders as “underprivileged” or when a pro-transit article calls us the working poor. We’re certainly not over-privileged by any stretch of the imagination, but some of us wear ties to work; we carry briefcases, or laptops. We value getting to work on time, comfortably, without adding to or having to fight with the mob of cars trying to find the fastest way out of downtown Tampa from 4:30 to 6 pm every day.

But who can blame any individual when highway expansion is called an investment in infrastructure, but mass transit is given the unfortunate moniker of subsidy?

Why am I complaining though? The whole point of a blog is to influence public opinion. Honestly, if you’ve never ridden a bus, you don’t have a good idea of who rides them, why they ride, and what areas they see for improvement. Sounds like the makings of some real in-depth amateur journalism if you ask me.

Over the years, you’ve been the relationship that has lasted. You are what I read as soon as I wake up and you’re the last thing I watch before I retire to bed.

You tell the best stories. You make me laugh; sometimes you make me cry. Other times you do things like this and I do a little of both. I feel like I carry you with me at all times.

I feel I can trust you. Around you I can be myself, and though we’ve had our rough spots, times when you’ve withheld the truth, well, you know I never stay mad at you for long.

I hope everyone enjoys their V-Day. I know that the St. Pete Times and I are going to have a great day today.

Set up this Rails thing after hearing so much about it.

I really have to hand it to it, time to getting some bits under my fingernails from blank console is under 5 minutes.

Looking forward to playing around. For fun, check out the Rails screencasts where the developer creates a weblog engine with comments and all in under 15 minutes, or the “Flickr interface in 5 minutes.” It’s even AJAX-y, to use the buzzword of the year.

If you’re near a television in the Tampa Bay area tomorrow around 12 pm, be sure to flip over to Bay News 9.

The Suncoast Tiger Bay Club, a non-partisan political group, plans to have a politician for lunch tomorrow. Their website says they “carve up” politicians for lunch. It should be pretty lively with a 20 minute free-form Q & A session.

If you haven’t been to Scott’s website recently, you might want to check back over the coming days. Let’s just say there might be some significant changes in the near future.

In the interest of full disclosure: I work for Scott, but I certainly don’t receive any compensation or creative oversight with regard to my blog. “The Casimir Effect” is still independent and I always reserve the right to promote and annoy public figures at will.

Okay, blogs are all about public ego-stroking, so you’ll excuse me if I engage in some right about now.

Open up this PDF, scroll down to page 6 and read the bit about NuSOAP, then read a bit more about who NGP software is.

It’s not much, but poor college students work for recognition almost exclusively, so this is kind of a surprise bonus for me.

In a recent poll by GlobeScan, Inc., public opinion on several of the more influential countries in global politics was surveyed. The results?

Well, as far as negative opinion goes, the world doesn’t seem to hate us as much as it hates Iran. Iran bumped us out of first place, where we were in last year’s poll.

The polling agency goes into surprising detail about who specifically doesn’t like our policies. The breakdown is this: African countries love us like the rich uncle that never colonized them. Middle eastern countries for the most part don’t like us, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, which can’t make up its mind either way, and Afghanistan, who loves us in a way that should be illegal.

I’m guessing that when the polling agency made its composite numbers, they were weighted by the nation’s percent of the global population. I guess this since the agency conducting the poll meets international standards, whatever that means.

Their polling methodology is listed in a pretty obvious location, where you can see who was asked what questions, where, how, as well as what the weather was like. Most of the countries surveyed had sample sizes of around 1000 represented. The notable outliers are South Africa with 3497 people surveyed, Afghanistan with 2098 people surveyed, and Iraq with 2200 people surveyed. To someone who knows more about statistics, my question is this: does this constitute a sampling error and if so, would such an error provide a significant bump in either direction, positive or negative?