David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

It has been 41 days since we released GNOME Do 0.4.2, and today I’m honored to present GNOME Do 0.5: “The Fighting 0.5″. Without further ado, here are the main improvements and new features, accompanied by plenty of sexy screenshots (click for larger images).
First off, the Open with… action has been re-enabled!

The biggest new feature [...]

After spending eight months on GNOME Do, I gave a brief presentation (followed by a great, not-so-brief Q&A session) to an auditorium full of Computer Science students and faculty. In the presentation, I discuss five “rules” explicitly and implicitly imposed in undergraduate Computer Science coursework that I had to break in order to create GNOME [...]

I recently bought a Nokia n810 internet tablet because with all the iPhones and Blackberries and Treos around me, I felt like I was behind the curve for not having a fancy gadget. I also wanted to take a crack at getting Do running on Maemo. After a week of using the n810, here is [...]

I’d like to respond to some early criticism I’ve seen of GNOME Do.
“Why is it written in a Windows-specific language? It would have better for them to write it in Python.”

I get the idea that most of the people saying this simply don’t understand what they’re talking about. Yes, Do plugins have the extension “.dll”, [...]

I don’t create slideshows (a.k.a. PowerPoints), but my professors apparently love the challenge of homogenizing human knowledge in all its diversity into bullet points and transition animations, but that’s another story. Whenever I open a slideshow, I see this:

See the little box in the middle with blue and black text in it? That’s the only [...]

As of this post, GNOME Do draws most of its windows as splash screens in order to avoid some bugs in the way focus stealing and window raising is handled. Because of this, when GNOME Do windows are brought to the front, they are drawn abruptly and a bit blandly. If you’re using Compiz Fusion [...]

Today I received an email from the dean of my college, asking:
Dear College Student,
I’m excited to announce the creation of the SAS Computing Student Advisory
Board. The group’s purpose will be to advise SAS Computing and
administration officials on student technology projects and initiatives.
Students on the board will meet monthly, and sometimes ad hoc, with SAS
Computing [...]

After my last post regarding most people’s immediate reaction to the proposition of using free software, entitled I Don’t Know What Linux is but I Don’t Like It, I got many interesting comments and put the issue to rest for the time being. However, I take every occasion I can to promote free software—when I [...]

Sorry there’s no sound - I couldn’t figure out how to record it well. This is Songbird displaying a Flex component I built. I’m thinking about working on some sort of plug-in that integrates with Songbird. This is only a demonstration, but it works nonetheless.

In college, almost everyone has a personal computer. More and more people are using Macs - it seems that 10% of the class of 2007 uses Macs, whereas it appears that roughly half of freshman (class of 2010) are using Macs. I’ve used PCs, Macs, and lately a lot of Linux. I’ve even written my [...]