FreeSide wiki
In the hope of getting a manageable framework together before we go back to uni in September, I've launched a FreeSide wiki for discussion/preparation of/for the relaunch in September/November (hopefully).
Don't know what FreeSide is? It's here.
Don't know what a wiki is? It's here.
If you want to have your say about the future of FS, and/or get involved in how things are done, or just fancy taking a look at the planned workings of the mighty student UNIX network project, the wiki is open and free for both viewing, adding and editing by anyone, no registration required, so pop along and say $freeside: echo 'Hello'!
Tech: Konfaftermath
It now seems that the creator of Konfabulator is also up in arms over Dashboard; maybe it's just me being rather simple minded about the whole affair, but I still believe there's too much being made about nothing.
Look at it this way, once the Dashboard API's are introduced, with the release of Tiger which probably isn't for another year or more yet, even adept programmers aren't going to want to launch Xcode to write a full blown Objective C application, just to have a newsfeed pop-up, or data about the amount of CPU time being used on processes etc., and novices to the art of coding aren't even going to touch such a process with a proverbial ten-foot pole, of the barge variety.
On the other hand of the spectrum, if you are at an advanced level of programming skill, do you really want to mess about with AppleScript or JavaScript (which is what Konfab uses for it's scripting engine)? I definitely wouldn't want to write anything for everyday tasks in JavaScript, so if I really wanted to get some complex little widget to help my day to day tasks, the Apple Dashboard API's for tying into the user interface methods would be awesome, as despite my unwillingness to pop to a higher level such as Konfab, I cringe at the thought of developing my own widget-orientated HCI.
With Dashboard and Konfab together people can have the best of both worlds, there's a standard way of creating a widget user interface for OS X built into Dashboard which Konfab can take advantage of, and for everyone else we can develop (if we wanted to, can't say I'm a fan of widgets myself) them more easily at other levels without having to reinvent the wheel, or use JavaScript.
I think people need to get these things into perspective before leaping in with the battle flags waved high.
Some may wonder why I've gone on about this rather unimportant issue, well, I'm planning on posting later my thoughts on the process of discovery employed by many programmers, and I think this situation illustrates a large misunderstanding about such things by both the highly mythical "average user" and most programmers alike.
The puffin's are coming
In anticipation of Andrea's birthday on Friday, I have been embracing the puffin side; my darling's a puffin fanatic, she loves the odd little birds to bits, and because of this love it gives me a nice starting point to what I should get her for special events.
This year I've been getting a few rather special (although, if I do say so myself, some of my past presents have had some oddities to pleasantly surprise) gifts together. One such gift is hand made (99% all my own), with a few clever tricks employed to work just right and deliver on expectations.
Obviously I can't say too much just right now, as so early in the way there's a chance Andrea might read here for hints, but around Thursday night, I'll start chucking out the details. Stay tuned.