i crashed out early last night and slept until 13:00. i was woken twice in the morning, once by the phone and once by a thoughtful delivery of goods (mmm... coffee; razors and nice too) by m. but don't really remember much about them as i was completely hazed out. when i got back home i felt on the edge of burn out. i've been there before (burn out) and it ain't fun. a good sleep helps a lot, though, and i plan on spending tomorrow (which is a holiday here in canada) with my son just enjoying the day. that should give me enough "harumph" to hit the floor with guns blazing again. i already am feeling the "must code now" itch but am holding off on it so that my batteries can fully recharge. it's interesting how that used to take weeks when i was younger and now it takes but a couple days every few months.
those who read my blog may have noticed a couple of blank entries recently. that's because something changed either in blogger or khtml in svn ... either way it was screwing up. and then someone (i forget who; sorry.. but props to ya, man!) on irc mentioned that if one flips the user agent to Firefox 1.0 is works fine. bingo! stupid. bloody. blogger. that and web site creators who can't code their way out of a paper bag.
since people are blogging about books i thought i'd join in the chorus. i picked up "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" which is mark haddon's first novel. the protagonist is autistic and the writing style is very interesting. i really connect with his obsessive detail oriented mind and relationship of obliviousness to the common world of people.
i also picked up a book for p. (a star wars universe young adult novel) and "oryx and crake" for t. atwood may not be much to look at (personally, her pictures give me the willies) but damn! can she write.
celeste blogged about target audiences today, which is something we really do need to look at. as i mentioned in a recent blog entry, i don't think the open source desktop is of interest to the enterprise yet to the point they will deploy it in any serious fashion. this is based both on my personal conversations with such folk as well as simply watching the market and where deployments are (and aren't) happening. this is confirmed as well by the actions of linux companies who concentrate on enterprise sales.
so who is our target audience? it's something i've been thinking quite a bit about lately, and ettrich and i had some conversations about it in oslo this last week. obviously we have a lot of enthusiast and others who fit into various "individual user" type categories. how can we make kde more interesting, compelling and worthwhile for those people?
second, i have the inkling that we have a lot of small and medium sized business deployments out there. personally i count anything under 500 seats to be in that umbrella. at the table (which i picked at random) i ate lunch at in munich during trolltech dev days there i found myself sandwiched between two such examples. while eating the rather amazingly good food, i discovered that on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.
have you ever heard of either of these deployments? i'll bet you a pint of the best that you haven't. why? because we (the royal 'we') don't know about them. why? that's a good question. what do they need? another good question.
we often create somewhat blindly when it comes to our user's needs, and that's not always a good thing. for many apps it's easy enough to guess at, but for many (including the part i'm working on these days), it's not.
the rest of this month i'll be blogging mostly about the questions raised above in an attempt to empty my addled head enough on the topic to approximate some possible directions.
p.s. i'll be doing an article on the hospital deployment as one of the people was kind enough to respond in the positive to such a request today by email
p.p.s. the whole gnome and kde and blah blah blah kindergarten fest is silly. please people, let's just put on our big boy and girl clothes and move on. we have exciting and fun things to do, and pissing on each other is neither of those.
p.p.p.s. while in oslo i got to meet brad hughes of blackbox fame who now works for trolltech. he was one of my coding heroes when i first started using linux for my desktop so it was really cool to meet up with him. it was even more cool to sit and do some software design stuff. and yes, i'll be working on that whiteboard app =)
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Heh, funny, I've read the "dog in the night-time" book as well just a few weeks ago. Thought it was a nice read and I also often found myself seeing things very similar to many of this boy's observations. Maybe that's just how us computer people tend to think but at a more extreme level in his case. Should probably be a recommended reading for coders ;)
Hey, I just wanted to point out that a large part of KDE users are european universities. I think every computer pool of a maths or physics department runs linux (SuSE) with KDE on top of it.
p.p.s. the whole gnome and kde and blah blah blah kindergarten fest is silly. please people, let's just put on our big boy and girl clothes and move on. we have exciting and fun things to do, and pissing on each other is neither of those.
Hear! hear!
--
jorge
and yes, i'll be working on that whiteboard app =)
Talking about business market... More info please.
(Saw MS Live Meeting being used recently. Liked it. It's like a very complicated IM, with OneNote as a pallet. Sadly, with so much of a tie-in into their server product felt too heavy of a package. I wander what you are working towards?)
"atwood may not be much to look at (personally, her pictures give me the willies) but damn! can she write."
I'm sort of disturbed by this sentence... Would you ever say that about a male author? I mean, frankly, a lot of them are dang ugly, but nobody would ever think of saying that apropos of their books.
> Would you ever say that about a
> male author?
yes, in fact, i have. when authors put their faces on the back of the book (as many seem wont to do for whatever reason) i tend to react to that image.
william gibson, for instance, has a gauntness about his face in his promo pics that makes me want to send him some home cookin'.
You posed the question: "what could SMB's use in KDE?" I would like to take a moment and answer that question. I have been using KDE for about 3 years now, and I am very happy with it as an desktop enviroment. I tell people that I am a linux user, but this really is not accurate, I am a KDE user. (addict?) I think KDE is much more intuitive and user friendly than any other GUI that I have ever used. I own an SMB, a small manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio with about 30 employees. We are too small to have our own IT dept, so I do all the IT work myself. I use KDE on my own desktop and I just deployed KDE to one other user about a year ago. I am currently planning to upgrade everyone to KDE, one computer at a time, as the users need a hardware upgrade. With OpenOffice, Kontact and rdesktop (to a win2k terminal server), the two KDE boxes have assimilated very well into our network.
To answer the question what can be done better for SMB's? I can really only think of one critical tool that I am missing: Active Directory. KDE (linux) needs some type of glue to bring many of the disparate servers and programs together. Webadmin does this pretty well, but I think it can be done better. With Active Directory, I can go to one place to manage users and computers for the entire system. With Active Directory, it is very trivial for me to add a user, and they have an exchange mailbox, and permissions to use certain network shares, it is all very simple. The management is very centralized, and I like that. Linux tends to be much more decentralized, both a blessing and a curse. I am not sure that KDE is the appropriate place for this tool to be born, but you asked! I have not experimented too much with LDAP, but my impression is that LDAP is not as emcompassing as Active Directory. Webadmin accomplishes this task fairly well, but I think it can be done better.
Luckily my company has an unusually low turnover. So user management is not a huge issue for me. All the worms, viruses and security flaws that windows presents, take up more of my time than managing users in KDE. I am just letting you know that Active Directory is the only tool that I miss, but it is not holding me back. In talking with fellow business owners, the lack of that central management tool is also a sticking point for them also.
While I have the microphone, there is one other addition that I could find beneficial in my business. Find these people: www.pocketmod.com and figure out if you can build this into Kontact. I think this is a really creative tool, and I think I would find it very useful if I could pull it up in Kontact and print it out with the data already on the form! Maybe the Kontact people could come up with something similar?
Aaron, Mandrake used to have a website called Mandrake Bizcases. It was full of reports of small businesses and how they used Linux (Mandrake) and what their experiences were. Too bad it doesn't exist anymore. The archive still has copies though : http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mandrakebizcases.org
If you liked "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", The God of War by Marisa Silver in The New Yorker of Nov 7 might blow you away. Another kid's-eye view, but I found it much denser and richer. In case it's not at your doctor's office or library, it's online.
(I didn't pay much attention to the alleged hacker->Asperger's->autism continuum until I read about autism's correlation with poor depth perception. I can't parallel-park unless the space is 20 feet long!)
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Hoodia has begun to appear on the market as a nutritional supplement, sold as pills which contain small amounts of Hoodia. This is exciting for many people, as a large number of North American people struggle with their weight, and there have been a few studies done which have shown amazing results and Hoodia users in the study lost weight easily without feeling hungry at all. In a set of clinical trials, obese people were given Hoodia, and instructed not to do anything but eat, read, or watch TV. They still lowered their calorie intake and lost weight. This has caused a great deal of excitement and prompted a number of companies to produce nutritional supplements which they say contain Hoodia. It has also become more popular after rumors that TV actresses were eating Hoodia to stave off weight gain.
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