transparency

A Little Transparency Helps

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In my past I’ve been a theatrical lighting designer. I’m not professionally trained, I just sort of picked it up by working with community theater groups. A friend who is a professionally-trained lighting designer once gave me a tip about darkness, in one of those situations where I was trying to illuminate only a small part of the stage for a particular scene: “Always leave some light on the rest of the stage. Humans get curious about what they can’t see, and they won’t realize it but they’ll spend a bunch of time watching the absolute darkness instead of what you want them to watch.” When I light a show I usually have some general “down” light available, so the …

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Why I Don't Use Third-Party Binary Packages

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There are a number of third-party package repositories out there for Linux distributions. For example, Fedora runs the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, which contains builds of open source software that isn’t supplied with Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Similarly, a lot of projects have their own repositories that supply builds of software for OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-school, and maybe it’s because I enjoy compiling things, but I really don’t like the idea of using binaries found on the Internet. I never have. As an aside, I really tried hard to make the rest of this post not be critical, or seem like criticism, but instead just be a reflection of …

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Two Things I Really Would Like From Mozilla Thunderbird

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While I was on vacation I noticed that the Mozilla Foundation released Thunderbird 5.0. From the release notes it’s clear that a lot of cleanup work happened with this release, improving “speed, performance, stability and security,” but not very many new or revolutionary features. I like Thunderbird a lot, and I like that they’ve focused on stability more, but I still have two feature requests for future releases. Multi-client synchronization The promise of IMAP is that you are able to check your email anywhere, and it can stay on the server. There are also some nice things about thick email clients, like better searching, easy junk mail processing, offline modes, etc. The problem lies in having two copies of Thunderbird …

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