Category Pointers

For a hacker, the Pre is incredible

Great stuff. Perhaps I should start looking at the Pre as one of the candidate platforms for the Geo|Ads platform and the apps it is currently featured on. Since AthensBook 1.0.0 came out in early March we've been focusing on way too many things and looking at what Palm has to one of them --- besides registering for the early SDK access back in April, there were few reasons to focus on the Pre: it is only available stateside for now, and we're already focusing on providing current releases of our apps and ad SDK on iPhone/Android and Blackberry. Still, with Android still featuring a decade-old UI and no devices not being available in Hellas in any sort of mainstream way yet [soon that's bound to change of course] and with the BlackBerry OS seeming increasingly dated, perhaps the Pre should be getting some more developer love from us. If only we could get a device in this part of the world. =)

Palm Pre's Custom Font 'Prelude'

While the Palm Pre is intriguing in many respects, I am not particularly excited about its User Interface; it's modern and has that 'new' feel that seems to be gone from the iPhone [something Android never had] and it seems sophisticated and well-designed from a usability point of view, but it also seems somewhat busy and over-the-top æsthetically. One of the things that did catch my eye, however, is the new font that the Pre includes. Very similar to Avenir, the font, apparently called Prelude, is a sans-serif design with good readability and a look that makes it distinguishable from many other fonts in use in modern operating systems today. There are various reports online stating that Prelude does not support non-Roman character sets, such as Hellenic, Cyrillic, or East-asian. I'm not even sure how good its support is for Central European languages either. If this is true, it strikes me as very naive on Palm's part: given that this is a font that was custom designed in 2008 (?) for a product that's bound to be internationally sold, proper international character support should've been a high priority. If anything the omission will make the Pre much less attractive to customers outside of North America and Western Europe, something that other companies learnt the hard way over the years. Hopefully Palm won't have to do so too.

Positive Side-effects.

Perhaps the single positive thing that may come out of the continuing and utterly pointless legal wrangling between Microsoft and the European Commission is that the totally sub-par, archetypical Windows administrator will now be forced to either go on and download the equally sub-par Internet Explorer 8 or choose one of the far superior alternatives, instead of just sitting there idle, counting the number of hotfixes that have come out of Redmond in the last month. =)

Internet User Who Joins Service And Then Quits Immediately

Yep, it's about Twitter, one of the most, if not the most pointless, time-wasting fads that came out of the big ol' Web 2.0. Like it or not, more than half of Twitter's users never even posted a single tweet, let alone 'followed' anyone. Read the report at Ars.

Οδεύουμε προς μια έντονα συγκρουσιακή κοινωνία.

Συμβολικό, ίσως σχεδόν λυρικό σε σημεία κι'όμως τόσο ακριβές. Το άρθρο της Tασουλας Kαραϊσκακη στην Καθημερινή σκιαγραφεί την ολοένα εντονότερη εθνικιστική, μισαλλόδοξη κοινωνία στην οποία ζούμε. Μια κοινωνία που αποτελείται από ομάδες που αγνοούν πως να συμβιώσουν μεταξύ τους, που στερούνται τους θεσμούς και τη πολιτισμική κληρονομιά που θα τους επέτρεπε να προοδεύσουν μαζί. Μια κοινωνία που --- σαφώς --- οφείλει να 'μάθει' γρήγορα και να αλλάξει εαν πρόκεται να επιβιώσει.

Forget me not!

Canonical announces its support for Moblin, just a year after Intel dropped Ubuntu as the basis for the project in favour of Fedora. A great move by Canonical, as Moblin seems to provide the best overall optimisations for netbooks --- and some really great æsthetics/usability --- for that class of devices.

Lopssi 2

Lopsided if anything. Yet another gross error in judgment from Mini Napoleon Wannabe. Yet another nail in the coffin of French Legislation. Much can be said of Sarkozy's predecessors; both Chirac and Mitterrand were accused of corruption, sleaze, excess etc. None were as classless, blatantly ignorant or downright corrupt as Sarkozy has proved to be in less than two years in office.

Straight from Microsoft's Rulebook.

Apple's rumoured upcoming software crippling 'segmentation' for the iPhone stinks of Microsoft's 'Windows Vista SKU' nastiness. But then again Apple is no stranger to controversy or bad decisions.

Benchmarks

When OS X first made its appearance in 2001 and for many years afterwards, the performance of xnu, its kernel, and many of its subsystems was ridiculed as it was way slower than its competitors. Elitism, slower development cycle, closed source etc. aside, Apple has managed to make Mac OS X much faster than the leading linux distributions in the span of a couple of years, while at the same time the desktop linux projects and companies struggle with reinventing the wheel and fixing regressions. The situation on the desktop today for linux users is --- comparatively --- worse than it was a decade: traditional strongholds are gone [e.g. performance] while usability, stability and features are more or less unchanged for many years. Sad for Open Source, sad for competition.

One Big Problem.

If there is any one big problem with kernel development and Linux it is the complete disconnection of the development process from normal users. You know, the ones who constitute 99.9% of the Linux user base.

Con Kolivas, 2007

An interesting interview and some views on the priorities of the linux development community and the history of the personal computer that I generally agree with. Con's quoted statement sadly rings true for Open Source development in general. After years of development, the Linux Desktop, the applications, the libraries, the documentation seem incomplete, archaic, chaotic and riddled with critical, esoteric issues that the 'fix it yourself' mentality of the stereotypical linux hacker is not going to remedy; that --- if anything --- is what keeps the wonderful idea of FLOSS from attaining the position it deserves.