Another Call for Sanity

Another call for sanity has been issued by Jem Matzan of the Jem Report:

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

And another appreciated insight:

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

I don’t agree 100% with the ideas in this article, but thought it was interesting to see another recommendation to Firefox-ify OpenOffice.

MORE OpenOffice

There’s some more discussion over here and over here that resembles some of my thoughts on the development of the OpenOffice.org office suite (a replacement for Microsoft Office).
Once again, my take on it is that:

1. While each individual OO.o application should be pared down and allowed to have “extensions” like Firefox does, the applications should be kept together as a complete suite. Otherwise, individual applications could lose steam/critical mass;
2. OpenOffice should be ported to a standard toolkit such as GTK+ so it doesn’t look so ugly! That is to say, so that it has an interface that really blends with the rest of the desktop rather than using GUI hacks to almost blend in.

Perfidia?

And now she has a boyfriend! Salt in the wound, insult to injury, a slap in the face. But really, it’s not so bad. I hope she finds happiness. I don’t suppose I want to be around her, at all really. There’s a lot of pain tied up in my memories of her. So, may she find joy and peace, but may I never see her again!? That doesn’t seem right. Well, I’ll think about it.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of great things to do around here. Here’s tonight’s nighttime hike to Stewart Falls up by Sundance:

Along with the usual suspects, of course: All of my roommates with their dates. We got going a bit later than planned, so by the time we got up to the falls it was pretty much pitch black. That did have the great advantage of allowing us to see the beautiful, clear night sky as we ate Paul’s famous chili with some grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to be going to Salt Lake with the BYU Interpretation and Translation Training Club. We’re going to take a tour of the Church’s translation and interpretation facilities at the Conference Center. I plan on sleeping on the ride up!

Also, I did a long phonetic transcription of Bob Vila explaining in Spanish how to prepare for a hurricane. “Estamos en estado de alerta por un huracán….” I listened to that recording many more times than I really wanted to, but hey, it’s Bob! There are worse things.

Good night!

OpenOffice

I’d also like to say that in general OpenOffice.org is a pretty lame piece of software. is rather good but has quite a number of areas for improvement (sorry about the previous negative attitude ;-)

First off, does it even use a standard GUI toolkit? No. Why not? Because it’s legacy software: OO.o has a long history, dating back to its StarOffice days before coming under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. First order of business: move over to Qt or Gtk, both of which are ported onto every significant platform OO.o would want to be involved in.

Second: it’s huge and slow. The “Options” window is cluttered worse the the KDE Control Center (and that says quite a bit). Some of the components depend on Java. The “Draw” program can’t even import SVG files and never prints correctly. Because it doesn’t use a standard toolkit, it has issues with some Unicode characters, even when using a font that supports those characters. Usability and UI design also seem to be a low priority for the project (I know it’s not, but it appears so).

So what do I recommend? Since the likelihood of OpenOffice ever actually being ported to a standard GUI toolkit is essentially zero, I recommend that development effort be focused on bringing apps such as Gnumeric and Abiword up to speed with the featurefulness of OO.o.

My dream recommendation, given any amount of resources being made available, is that OO.o be ported to Gtk. Then, it would be restructured to be the Firefox of office software - a lean core functionality and a flexible “Extensions” mechanism. This would hopefully lower the barrier-to-entry for programmers sufficiently as to encourage wide participation by people interested in improving the office suite. The lean core could then be focused on and maintained more effectively than the massive bulk of the do-it-all office program.

Cute Girls

They look wonderful. They smell wonderful. They’re wonderful to hug. I’m a big fan of cute girls.

In other Ramblings… I love to spend time with people. Really, I love to. That’s why this first half of the semester is driving me crazy. I’m taking a First Block class that requires at least 10 hours of time in class each week. It’s made me so wildly short on time that I almost never get to spend time with friends, or even make many friends in the first place. I’ve decided that while yes, I do need to be busy and have things to do, I also need time to be a person. I need to be able to play a little bit and remind myself that there is a life to live! That I’m not in college for its own sake, but to be able to support myself and a family so I can live that life.

I’ve also decided lately: I don’t think Spanish Teaching is for me. Here are some of my reasons. First, I have a lot of really negative memories from my school experience growing up. I mean, I had some teachers who did some pretty crummy things that I didn’t know how to deal with when I was so young. They honestly were complicit in the production of the negative atmosphere upon which some of my most difficult times in life festered. I had a lot of teachers who were just plain bad teachers - only the teachers union seemed to be keeping them in place. Teachers with emotional issues that should have kept them from teaching. Those memories make it so school is not the #1 place I want to go back to.

Second, I love learning to speak Spanish, but I don’t love Spanish. On top of that, my Spanish skills really aren’t so wonderful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really come a long way and I’m proud of where I’m at considering the limits of my learning opportunities. However, I don’t think that my proficiency will ever get to the point it needs to be at to do justice to the subject and to the students who enroll in it. The main issue here, however, is that I don’t enjoy the subject itself enough.

Finally, I don’t want to be stressed out all the time about finances because I’m trying to survive on the meager salary of a teacher in America’s public schools. This reminds me of the talk Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave at the last General Conference of the Church. Describing the differences between the use of the priesthood authority in the Church versus in the home, he said, “Church callings are always temporary, but family relationships are permanent.” I believe that that can be extended to imply that because family relationships extend into eternity, whereas career/profession/employment is only a temporary situation during mortality, the good that I could do to society through my career is secondary to the good I will be able to do for my family by supporting them and being an emotionally-available father for them. I doubt I would be able to operate at top capacity if I was constantly fretting over finances.

So those are my latest thoughts. I also recently discovered that BYU has a “Computers and Language” minor that I could combine easily with a Linguistics major. Hmm… now to find myself one of those cute girls!

"That's a Promise!"

In a recent interview, KDE developer Zack Rusin made some bold and (from my point of view) much-welcomed promises about the future of the Linux Desktop as a result of the Plasma and (by implication) Appeal subprojects of KDE:

Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you’ve ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you’ll experience with Plasma. And that’s a promise.

Personally, I’m way excited about this. You know how you can use “Extensions” to add to or modify the functionality of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser? Well, one component of the Plasma project is to allow that sort of functionality, for your desktop. Apparently this function is already available in Mac OS X’s latest incarnation.