Boring screenshot is boring

This reminded me of a local meme ((“local meme” is a private meme referring to recurring joke forms that are local to a couple people. If you pay close attention you can track local memes as spreading from person to person, waning and dying, ressurecting themselves, etc. The meme meme sure does seem to describe them as phenomena. )) in my office, based on the blank cat is blank global meme.

But while I have your attention, I want to talk about my software plans.

• One thing I’ve meant to work on for a while is the “sessions” situation in Gnome. The fact that it’s not clear from the name what this is is the first indication of a thoroughly broken user interaction. If you want an application to start up whenever you log in you have to know to open the “Sessions Preferences” application, which looks like this:
  

  What is this?

  You actually have to type in the application name twice and know what options to pass to the program. Anyways, I’d like to come up with a complete solution for doing this the right way. In MacOS you get an option to add an application to startup just by context-clicking on it (I think xfce lets you do this with menu items in the menubar). There might be two parts to this. First would be some utility to encourage applications to offer to register themselves for startup. For example, Pidgin should ask if you want it to startup on login, duh (( Let’s see, Miro does this, but somehow in an annoying way. Gnome-Do has an option in its preferences to add itself to the session preferences. )). The second part might be an “application pool” that would be used to select applications (with sane defaults supplied for parameters) to have in startup (( For some reason I feel this program should be named Menagerie. )). This information is surely collected several times over in the system, but what seems to be missing is a single sortable, selectable list of all the applications, including non-gui commands, with relevant icons and descriptions. Something like this would be necessary to fix the above session preferences window.

• I keep meaning to jump into developing on Tracks, a nice hosted todo manager I use. Tracks needs todo sharing and delegation and also something like NowDoThis.
• My most recent contributed opensource code has been to ViGedit, doubly ironic because the code is in Python and because I still use GVim for everything.
• One of these days I’ll renew my commitment to Alexandria. I inherited this project from much more competent and dilligent Ruby programmers back when I didn’t know much Ruby. If I took a look at the codebase today I could probably hack on it much more quickly and effectively than I could a year ago.

Probably I shouldn’t even think of anything else.

Update (2/21/09):

But I should mention some other ideas I’ve had:

• Add a notification mechanism for the game Wesnoth. This is a turn-based game where it’s tempting to minimize the window and do something else until you hear the bell for your turn. Popup notifications would be useful in case someone is trying to tell you something important.
• Create a GUI for Boodler. I recently made use of this command-line tool to generate an hour’s-worth of pink noise so I can (occasionally) tune out my officemates’ music in order to concentrate.

Update (2/23/09):

• It’s surprising if you think about it that there isn’t a simple revision-control system available in any text editor that I know. I could be totally wrong about this. Thought about this again when I read about this: boingboing. Have to look at this: wizbit. I might try something with Gedit and bzr.
• Also, I’ve actually started playing with implementing Menagerie.

A dystopian “control” society based on distraction. Remember, in Brave New World it’s entertainment, in Brazil it’s bureaucracy and prolishness, in 1984 it’s fear and propaganda… but distraction as such is something different. You set your mind to do something and you get distracted, you forget to do it, you forget that you even wanted to do it. The political control is that you can only do what is programmed for you to do. The closest literary example I can think of is the thought-suppressing bells in Harrison Bergeron. GTD is about programming steps for yourself to do in the absence of a continuous memory, while any decent employer can provide you with a constant feed of Microsoft Exchange tasks to complete. I once read a cool story about a  guy with progressive alzheimer’s who programmed a computer to give him tasks and look out for his welfare after his mind went; it’s in this collection somewhere. Anyway, the genius of such a regime would be that it would sustain the illusion of purposive activity. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that we need to defend ourselves against our primate nature.

I actually wrote this a couple of months ago, but I was too shy to post it then.

I get the occasional weird spam mails that are sent to the alexandria-list-owner and I’m not sure if I can safely spam them in Gmail, so I end up reading a lot of interesting spam (( Obviously, I could have it not show up in my inbox, so I must have some purely sociological interest in it )). Most of the spam are about penis enlargement and viagra and are notable mainly for the creative euphemisms employed and the awesome shame tactics. Every once in a while I’ll open my inbox to something like this:

Stop being the weakling you are today.

Ouch. More recently, the spam has been related to fictional future events, apparently part of the Storm Worm, which Bruce Sterling has been following pretty closely. For example, I’ll get one that says:

Terrible earthquake devastated Beijing

with text “A new deadly catastrophe in China”. If you click through there will be a link to see videos, and this link will contain an .exe, which is how the worm spreads. The link, btw, is to an IP address which makes me wonder if the worm contains a small web server serving from a computer’s dynamic IP (cuz that would be smart).

Anyway, I got this new one today that struck me with its laughably hostile tone. It’s very rude and obscene, which is why I’m linking to the image. In other words, it’s NSFW: link. Tell me it doesn’t make you laugh a little with its absurdity.

Okay, so events are past public occurrences that get a URL. E.g., “a man who was wearing a gaudy green coat and playing a ukelele that disturbed people in the cafe at X.” In the case of crimes, these events would be linked to a crime report. But mostly the wiki page for an “event” would be for people to share an account about it, put a picture or video to it, etc. And there could be an interface that would essentially try to pinpoint events as an intersection between a timespan and a location. So this could really involve a Google maps mashup with two controls, an area box selector and a timerange selector. These would bring in sub- or dependent events from any larger set of events affecting the area. So for example, “the car crash at 6:15pm outside of the music festival venue (which occurred all day)” could coexist with the nearby event “woman who flashed traffic at 6:15pm outside of the music festival venue…”. Something like that. It would be a system that could report on mundane “shared urban events” or on crimes or on historical incidents. The main user story would be something like “I saw something remarkable today and wondered if others saw it and knew more about it; I went to the URL and shared a detail that only I noticed.” This is something that happens with local or topical blogs where an entry will become the canonical comment point for a public event, with the blog entry itself being updated through the incorporation of information from the comments.