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@jarown you can buy boxes full of them. (know by accidentaly buying à box once)

Tuesday, March 10 2009

Year of the gnome desktop talk

I promised to put up my previous presentation as soon as I had some time. Well that took a bit longer then excepted but here it is.

the year of the gnome desktop.odp
the year of the gnome desktop.pdf

You are free to use and adopt this presentation as you see fit and I will try to explain the story that goes with it.

Slide 1: I start up explaining why the question "The year of the Linux Desktop" is very relevant to gnome, and can equally be stated as "The year of the gnome Desktop". I reference to various distributions and their preference of shipping gnome as the default.

Slide 1-9: These are basically a joke in which I show that the question is a very old one. When ending on number nine i take some time to recall some issues those articles have stated for linux not being ready yet for the desktop.

Slide 10: This slide shows some adoption numbers from the gnome marketing page. I make the point here that while the articles are saying one thing, there are governments and companies that are investing in linux as a desktop solution.

Slide 11-12: Here i pose the question, is linux ready for the desktop. I go over some issues that have been resolved and go over some issues that are still problems.

Slide 13: I talk about suppliers who are already delivering linux desktops to the public.

Slide 14: I talk about the software needs of people, what people are getting from windows/Mac and what they will expect to find.

Slide 15-16: I show the solutions for the previously shown needs. I also work in a little joke by changing firefox to Epiphany

Slide 17: I pose the same question as before, but directed not at Linux but at users. I also talk about about some usability work that has been done for gnome.

Slide 18: I end with a novell linux commercial.

The above talk is about 30 minutes based on how much you can tell at each slide. But it could easily be filled up a bit with more recent developments to get in more time.

Tuesday, February 12 2009

Nu.nl blog post

Just made a blog post on my corperate blog about my work on nu.nl. NU.nl; the back-end

Sunday, January 11 2009

7 things

I've been tagged by Lorna Jane in the current internet meme of telling seven things about myself that nobody knew. If your reading this because your following planet gnome-nl, then you have probably missed the meme, but it's the current rage in the php community. But i'll be sure to facilitate some cross over.

So without further ado, let's begin.

• I knew i wanted to become a programmer at a rather young age. I can clearly remember lending a "programming" book from the local library containing programmes for the C64 that my family had at that time. However, the book simply contained multiple pages of "code" you needed to copy by hand, and seeing as i was around 10 years old then, with the attention span of your average house cat, it didn't really work out. However, a few years later when we had a PC my mother taught me how to create simple quizzes in DBase, and later i started writing and adapting programs in Basic. After that i never really stopped.
• Not much of a new thing, but i used to have long hair starting from 2000 til early 2008. I actually wanted to cut it before i started working at ibuildings, but as things went i forgot about it until i was already working there. There was no real reason to cut it beyond, there being no real reason to keep it, and i needed a change. Any photographic evidence to me having long hair will be categorically denied.
• I speak a very small amount of japanese. I've always been fascinated by japanese culture and as such tried to learn the language. I'm still planning to learn it one day, but i'm not in a hurry.
• The first "real" program i wrote, that could be called a program, was 'pong' in qbasic. It made use of the graphics mode and contained a algorithm to draw numerals and variable refresh for speed. You played against the computer, who had 3 difficulty settings. The difficulty basically determined how fast his paddle could move.
• My first 'hack' was editing the save game of the shareware version of 'one must fall', a old robot centered beat-em up. I used a hex editor to change a certain position to 0xFF, to give me lots of money.
• My first involvement with gnome was when gnome-nl announced that they wanted to expand into doing a bit more with marketing and such. Before gnome-nl had been primarily a translation effort. Since i had a lot of trouble contributing back by writing code, i figured this would be a nice way to do something. Before i knew it i was at the novell congress with reinout, vincent and ronald and had a absolute blast telling people about the wonderful world of gnome.
• I didn't realise PHP had a professional community before coming to ibuildings and meeting all these people being really passionate about a PHP. Before that, i always figured PHP was a bit of a ragtag community without any real substance. Which was a pretty nice eye opener, and i will certainly try to become apart of this community.

And now you know.
Below in no particular order are the 7 new people i tag.

• Harrie Verveer - I knew harrie for a long time from the cafe, but never knew he was a programmer until i joined ibuildings.
• Reinout van Schouwen - A crossover to gnome. reinout is one of the mayor gnome-nl contributors.
• Wouter Bolsterlee - A fallback crossover to gnome. Wouter is another mayor contributor, and also a php developer if i'm not mistaken.
• Boy Baukema - Another of the ibuildings developers farm, passionate about JS and this should be a good excuse to write something new on that blog of his.
• Dade - He liked Ruby on Rails, but i'm not going to hold it against him. (yet)
• Willem Spruijt - Willem Spruijt is one of the people behind Qash, and since i think Qash is a absolutely brilliant application, i'm tagging him as well.
• Paul van Veenendaal - A old-time co-worker of mine, his current job description is (i kid you not) Wizard Digital Lab. I have no idea what that means, but i'm hoping to find out.