[Tue Jun 30 15:34:28 CEST 2009]

A couple of GNOME apps that look quite promising. First of all, GNOME Shell, which offers a new way to launch applications, accessing documents and organizing open windows. It may very well be an alternative to GNOME Do. Second, GNOME Zeitgeist, a file manager that offers a different approach to managing files on your filesystem. It revolves around metadata, rather than the old concept of folders and files. This other one may very well prove to be an alternative to Nautilus. Both projects are still in a very early stage though. {link to this story}

[Tue Jun 23 18:01:27 CEST 2009]

Dot Net Perls publishes a study comparing the memory usage in three different browsers (Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome) and, to everybody's surprise, Firefox is the winner by far. The trick? They didn't use Firefox 3, but rather the 3.5 release candidate. I must say I was sick and tired of killing the Firefox process at least twice a day on my Ubuntu Hardy Heron machine because of runaway memory leaks that start bogging the system down. So, after reading this piece today, I decided to download the release candidate and give it a try. It does seem to be a significant improvement over the previous release, that's for sure. However, it's still too early to tell.

By the way, check out the discussion Google developers were having after learning about these results. I truly like to see that quite a few of them took it as a chance to learn and improve their browser, instead of blaming it on the people who published the report and shooting the messenger, which is the way most companies react. Kudos to those engineers. {link to this story}

[Tue Jun 23 15:04:25 CEST 2009]

After a good friend highly recommended the application to me, I have been using GNOME Do for a few days. It's a Quicksilver-like application for GNOME. In other words, it's a tool that can be used as an application launcher, although you can also configure it to perform certain customized actions (such as starting an email or an IM conversation) via the plugins. It always takes a while to get used to this sort of apps, but for the time being I'm not finding it extremely useful, to be honest. In general, I only start applications at the beginning of the day and it makes more sense to just go click-click-click on a bunh of icons than going through all the motions to launch them via this tool. Once the applications are running, I'm familiar enough with the keyboard shortcuts to do what I need in each one of them anyways. So, for instance, it takes me just as long to switch to Evolution and do a Ctrl+n to start a new email than bringing GNOME Do up, typing email, hitting the tab key and entering the name of the person I want to send the message to (actually, come to think of it, chances are this latter method is actually slower). Add to that the fact that in quite a few cases I enter something in GNOME Do (the name of a folder in my filesystem, for example), and it doesn't do what I'd expect and is advertised (i.e., display the folder so I can tab and open it in Nautilus) but rather attempt to open a URL that somehow contains similar characters. Since I browse quite a bit throughout the day, this keeps happening all the time.

In conclusion, I will continue testing it for a while. One never knows. I may get used to it in a couple of weeks and think that it's the best discovery since sliced bread, but for the time being I'm just not finding it very useful for what I do... which is not to say that other people may not find it extremely cool, of course. One way or another, I'm not sure the launcher part of the application is so important, to be honest. On the other hand, I find Docky far more intriguing, since I keep telling myself that I should try to improve the way my GNOME desktop looks in order to make it look sleek. Anyways, here's a video showing off GNOME Do.

{link to this story}

[Tue Jun 23 13:07:35 CEST 2009]

According to The New York Times, Ridley Scott is working on a web series tied to Blade Runner that will be released under a Creative Commons license. The idea is to put together a series of linked 5-10 minute shorts set in a world that resembles the one from Blade Runner, although for obvious copyright issues they won't be able to come up with anything too similar to the original. Still, it should be exciting for the fans.

{link to this story}

[Tue Jun 23 12:06:05 CEST 2009]

The Cyberpunk Review has a story on Tim Berners-Lee's Web Science Research Inititative (direct link to their website here) that I found intriguing. Here are Berners-Lee's words explaining what web science is:

When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term "science" in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find microscopic laws that, extrapolated to the macroscopic realm, would generate the behavior observed. Computer science, by contrast, though partly analytic, is principally synthetic: It is concerned with the construction of new languages and algorithms in order to produce novel desired computer behaviors. Web science is a combination of these two features. The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.

The piece also includes a graph depicting the field of the different sciences that collide in the realm of the what Berners-Lee calls "Web Sciences":

I know, I know, it sounds like a lot of hot air. Yet, I'm convinced that the future will be full of interdisciplinary projects and sciences like this. The future belongs to interdisciplinary projecs with a practical application to the world that surrounds us and its problems. {link to this story}