It was completely by accident that I stumbled upon this great EP by Welsh/British band Truckers of Husk. I was trying to find a video on YouTube when I accidentally clicked on one of the popular videos titled ‘Sleeveface‘. While the video was mildly amusing, it featured music by Truckers of Husk which led to me looking for the band, visiting their MySpace page and then on to Amazon UK and finally 7digital from where I bought and subsequently downloaded their recent EP, Physical Education EP, for £1.79 (€2.26).

Apparently increasingly popular in Wales and specifically Cardiff, the band plays a structured, yet extremely pleasing style of math rock with several elements of post rock thrown in, with a mellow sound that’s outlined by clean guitar arpeggios, edgy drumming, slap bass and cello, occasionally complemented by stylised vocals. The results are a very pleasant and intense soundscape.

You can listen to much of their work on MySpace, although I guess €2.26 is definitely worth it for the music, especially if you enjoy instrumental math rock in general.

GNOME, one of the two main linux desktop environments and platforms has become a very popular choice adopted by most major distributions as their desktop of choice, mostly due to its simplicity and minimalist design. While it does several things ‘right’, by generally providing a straightforward experience and ‘hiding’ advanced configuration options in its gconf system, its development has been unfocused and lacking in some areas where it needs additional work.

More specifically, the desktop is lacking very basic features one could find even on the original Macintosh or Windows 1.0. I’m going to list some of those critical omissions that should be a priority for any modern desktop and that GNOME seems to have missed:

1. Regional Settings. I’m really clueless as to why GNOME does not include a proper Regional Settings configuration panel by default. Sure, power users, programmers and *nixheads can sort out the enviroment variables, but this should be there anyway.
2. Audio Configuration. ALSA has been the standard for years, yet GNOME is missing a proper audio configuration panel. Audio is more than setting the event sounds and choosing a backend. The advent of PulseAudio has made things much worse, especially on systems where there are more than one soundcards available. Soundcard selection and configuration should be a couple of clicks away. And this includes multi-card systems and numerous backends.
3. Convoluted Settings. Why do we really need two panels for ‘Keyboard’ and ‘Keyboard shortcuts’? Why isn’t there a proper, functional ‘Service’ management panel? Why is gnome-control-center polluted with utilities such as ‘Network Tools’ and ‘System Monitor’? (hint: those are not configuration panels, but utilities). Why is ‘Default Printer’ a separate panel from ‘Printnig’ (and for those still in the 20th century, where on earth is Faxing configuration?)
4. Searching, Indexing: Chaos. On Ubuntu clicking on Places -> ‘Search for files’ shows the old GNOME ‘Search for files’ utility. Clicking the lens on the top right or going to Applications -> Accessories (?!) -> Tracker Search tool starts tracker. Pressing Ctrl-F when a Nautilus window has focus shows yet another dialogue. This is totally unacceptable.
5. Configuration: No CLI Requirement. There should be a concerted effort by all linux vendors, across all desktop environments to constitute a simple text based standard for configuration files with self-documenting facilities and coupled with a standard API for accessing, creating and modifying such files. This, in turn, could (possibly) allow for automatic generation of GUI applets capable of configuring every single aspect of the system in case a custom UI for a certain function is not available. Such a system would present a simpler, more pleasant experience to both users and developers. No GUI application, utility or system function should require the use of the terminal, although it should be possible to use a plain text editor to edit configuration files if that’s preferred. Since linux is a multi-desktop environment operating system, this should not be gconf, but something else; perhaps an XML-based standard.

I’ll be revisiting the topic over time in follow-up posts in order to add more usability annoyances of the modern linux desktop. Until then, I’d like to hear your comments.

Please do not ‘inform’ me of KDE’s strengths. I’m very well aware of them and I’ll provide a respective critique of its features as soon as the 4-series reaches a point of maturity worth spending some time for (I’m guessing 4.2 at the earliest, maybe a bit later).

Προ κάποιων εβδομάδων ο Νίκος Σμυρναίος έγραψε στο blog του σχετικά με το ζήτημα της παρακολούθησης των συνδέσεων του διαδικτύου στα πλαίσια της προσπάθειας, τόσο κρατικών όσο και ιδιωτικών φορέων για τη μείωση της ανταλλαγής πνευματικών έργων μέσω του διαδικτύου. Σήμερα διάβασα από το blog του Ματθαίου Τσιμιτάκη ένα παρεμφερές άρθρο που παραπέμπει και εμπλουτίζει το πρώτο. Ας σημειωθεί πως ο Ματθαίος αναφέρει και ένα κείμενο γραμμένο από τον Νίκο Δρανδάκη, το οποίο παρ’ότι συναφές έχει σαφώς διαφορετική θέση και περιεχόμενο και το οποίο δε θα σχολιάσω εδώ.

Ας τα πάρουμε όμως από την αρχή. Όταν διάβασα το άρθρο του Νίκου Σμυρναίου προβληματίστηκα. Η θέση μου σχετικά με την ΑΕΠΙ, τον ΟΠΙ, το copyright και τον επιχειρούμενο δαιμονισμό της μη-κερδοσκοπικής ανταλλαγής μέσων πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας από τις μεγαλοβιομηχανίες των ΗΠΑ και της Δυτικής Ευρώπης είναι γνωστή σε όσους διαβάζουν τακτικά τα κείμενά μου. Κατα συνέπεια συμφωνώ απόλυτα με και επικροτώ την δημοσιοποίηση της όποιας παράτυπης (πόσο μάλλον παράνομης) ενέργειας από τη πλευρά των εν λόγω οργανισμών και των εκπροσώπων τους σε κάποιο blog ή άλλο δημόσιο μέσο και τη προσπάθεια αποτροπής του στραγγαλισμού των ατομικών δικαιωμάτων στο διαδίκτυο μέσω αδιαφανών, αντικοινωνικών νομοθετικών ή άλλων κανονιστικών πράξεων.
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According to RTÉ, the Lisbon Treaty has been rejected by the Irish people after yesterday’s referendum.

This is not a Maastricht-type rejection. It is not even a 2005-type rejection of the Constitution by France and the Netherlands. This is something completely different; it is a rejection stemming from the fact that during the process of drafting, approving and signing both the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, no one seemed to care what people think; no one felt that it is necessary to inform the public and include it in the decision-making process. The rejection of the Treaty by the Irish is underlined by and a testament of the hastiness and complete lack of proper planning in which the 2004 and 2007 expansions to Eastern Europe (the Nice Treaty), the Constitution and now the Lisbon Treaty took place: quick, hastened and with insufficient planning and analysis of its consequences to the EU as a quasi-political entity and a multinational organisation. Most importantly, with minimal public consultation on the topics that matter to everyone, with practically no public involvement whatsoever. It is no accident that most of the arguments of the No campaign in Ireland had to do with topics that people were concerned with, that the Treaty addresses, but which were not communicated to them by the authorities.

This is not a unique situation to Ireland. I’m pretty certain that if more referenda took place, there’d be much more dissent than expected; even from those in favour of a stronger Union. Those arguing that an Irish ‘No’ should be translated in an expulsion of Ireland from the Union, forget that — besides this being totally unrealistic — it could very well be the case that their country too, had it had voted in a referendum, might have said no. The French suggestion that during the French presidency all the ‘important’ parts of the Treaty would be ratified in an ‘ad-hoc way’ are indications that the result of the referendum are not only misunderstood, but ignored; the EU has managed to create a relatively dangerous deadlock and one that cannot — easily, within the existing frameworks and norms — be broken.

Most people in Europe are still unfamiliar with the text of the treaty; national media rarely provide reports — or even a discussion — of its content; most governments simply don’t care; after all, no country other than Ireland gets to vote in a referendum. The precedent of the second referendum in Ireland in 2001 regarding the Treaty of Nice and the fact that no other country had a referendum on Lisbon means that it will not be so easy to move on from here on; at least not in a transparent, acceptable way, even to the same politicians from the 26 member states that would have signed the treaty.

Sadly, since 2004 the EU as an organisation has undergone a vast geopolitical — almost cultural — change, while its organisational and institutional frameworks and structures remained unchanged. The Lisbon Treaty was about changing all that. It’s thus ironic that an Irish rejection (along with 26 approvals in the respective parliaments of the remaining EU member states) proves why the organisational restructuring of the EU should have preceded its expansion (if not evolution) into a 27-state chaotic entity.

Nevertheless, while really unfortunate for the EU, the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty — like those of the Constitution three years earlier — is probably going to be followed by a secondary solution, perhaps another referendum coupled with minor adjustments to the Treaty, a more opaque solution with a mini-Treaty with merely the absolutely necessary parts for the operational reform and an eventual ‘approval’ of a much larger treaty when the time is ripe. Still, it seems to me that today’s rejection should serve as a reminder that if the european project is to succeed, it really needs to include its most significant members: its citizens. Otherwise it won’t be long until the EU dissolves into a sad reminder of what could’ve been the most prosperous and democratic era for the continent and beyond.