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Featured on Brentwood Home Page
Saturday, February 9th, 2013 @ 3:38PM
Here is the BHP article announcing my candidacy for Brentwood City Commissioner. Please share with all of your friends, as we will be rolling out our campaign very shortly. Thanks for all of your support!
Posted by admin
Categories: Brentwood Election, Press
Tags: Brentwood Home Page, Brentwood TN, Campaign, City Commissioner, City Election, Jay Galbreath for Brentwood City Commissioner, Press, Running for Office
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Rockstar/Makita LeDuc Racing looks forward to another strong season in 2010
MARCH 22, 2010 – La Mirada, Calif. – Makita Industrial Power Tools and LeDuc Racing have agreed to a third straight year of partnership in short course off-road racing. Makita joins Rockstar Energy as primary cosponsors of Rockstar Makita LeDuc Racing.
Rockstar Makita Racing ended the 2009 season with a strong finish, and the team is looking forward to carrying the winning momentum and partnership into 2010. Read More→

subset: commoncrawl


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Heartland Institute
Newspaper Articles – Scott Cleland
Heartland Daily Podcast: A Modern Vision of the FCC- Scott Cleland
Scott Cleland
December 16, 2013
In this podcast, The Heartland Institute Director of Communications, Jim Lakely and Senio
Read more
Are Google Glass' Recordings Illegal Wiretapping Too? -- Part 19 Google Spying Series
Scott Cleland
December 10, 2013
Google Glass' easy eavesdropping on people may be illegal wiretapping.
Read more
FCC's Special Access Delay of its IP Transition
Scott Cleland
December 10, 2013
FCC staff just muffed an easy opportunity to advance the IP transition on the FCC's timetable in the National Broadband Plan.
Read more
Why Chairmen Upton and Walden Plan a Communications Act Update
Scott Cleland
December 06, 2013
The most modern part of America's economy has the most obsolete law.
Read more
FCC Shouldn't Pick Wireless Technologies
Scott Cleland
December 02, 2013
Some wireless competitors and the
Read more
Real vs. Contrived "Modern" FCC Policy Thinking – Part 20 Obsolete Communications Law Series
Scott Cleland
November 05, 2013
Just like the wisdom that one cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear; one cannot make "modern" FCC policy from obsolete communications law.
Read more
Dial-up Rules for the Broadband Age?
Scott Cleland
November 05, 2013
Eventually the truth comes out. The call for net neutrality is really a call for a return to monopoly common carrier regulation for broadband networks.
Read more
Google's Faux Outrage over NSA Spying – Part 17 Google Spying Series
Scott Cleland
November 01, 2013
Big Brother Inc. Google is outraged at Big Brother NSA?
Read more
The Modern FCC Competition-Policy Linchpin
Scott Cleland
October 23, 2013
When will the FCC acknowledge the obvious?
Read more
Arbitrary Spectrum Policy
Scott Cleland
July 03, 2013
The FCC is picking market winners and losers again.
Read more
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You are here
Concert show at Spīķeri Creative Quarter. At the Pianist's Study
At the piano Juris Žvikovs — winner of international piano competitions, who has performed together with the best Latvian orchestras, as well as participated in several international music festivals.
Venue name:
Spīķeru koncertzāle
Maskavas iela 4/1, LV-1050
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My 30-Day Orgasmic Yoga Challenge
I like to share that I am into my second week of a 30-day Orgasmic Yoga journey - Day 12 as a matter of fact.
I hesitated for a number of days before deciding to take the step of documenting it and sharing with you my experience.
What is Orgasmic Yoga?
Orgasmic Yoga involves pleasurable, intimate and transformative practices. When practiced regularly over time, Orgasmic Yoga can change your life. The practice sessions involve breathing, savoring, sound, movement, touch, placement of attention, and awareness of intention.
Erotic practice sessions weave together the heart and genitals. This alone is a profound reason to commit to practice. Orgasmic Yoga often produces a state of arousal that is free of fantasy, unfinished emotional business, religious dogma, cultural caveats and habitual sexual behaviors. In this erotic trance state, an individual becomes aware of the body as a source of wisdom, happiness and freedom.
For more, view my video here!
Part of the transcript:
"Orgasmic Yoga is a term coined by Joseph Kramer, who is a Somatic sex educator, and what it means is he's very much of a body-based sex educator; and this term Orgasmic Yoga, basically, in a nutshell, means that you masturbate everyday for 30 days, for 30 minutes - so, 30-days, 30-minutes, and surely it will make a difference even if you don't do 30-days for 30-minutes, even if you do 15-days for 15-minutes, but the real thing that he developed is 30-minutes for 30-days.
So I made a pact with a person and I've decided to support her in her journey as she go through Orgasmic Yoga, and so I decided to just do it also myself and the reason is, I don't recommend things to people that, that I haven't done myself before and actually, I've done this myself – twice before, properly… properly… properly, as in 30-days. I've also done it another 2 times, where I didn't really get an idea – I wasn't serious about it – and so I didn't really follow through and just kind of stopped doing it after just a few days, you know? Say I was busy and things like that.
So, why 30-minutes? At first, I thought it's also excessive, right? In Orgasmic Yoga, first, first, you need to understand with Orgasmic Yoga, it's really about pleasure. We kind of stop ourselves from having pleasure because we, we go into how important we are; how busy we are; how tired we are; and we don't focus on our…bringing our attention back to our bodies, and we don't bring enough attention to pleasure. So, Orgasmic Yoga is such a practice where you keep coming back to pleasure, coming back to body, and after 30-days – there is a shift and your body starts to feel different and your connection with sexuality and with ecstasy is different."
And how did I do my first week? View this video as I talk about my first week of Orgasmic Yoga practice!


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FDA Approves Akynzeo for Nausea, Vomiting Associated with Chemotherapy »
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Akynzeo (netupitant and palonosetron) to treat nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy.
Akynzeo is a fixed combination capsule comprised of two drugs. Oral palonose"...
Read the FDA Approves Akynzeo for Nausea, Vomiting Associated with Chemotherapy article »
Emend Capsules
(aprepitant) Capsules
EMEND (aprepitant) is a substance P/neurokinin 1 (NK1) receptor antagonist, chemically described as 5-[[(2R,3S)-2-[(1R)-1-[3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl]ethoxy]-3-(4-fluorophenyl)-4-morpholinyl]methyl]-1,2-dihydro-3H-1,2,4-triazol-3-one.
Its empirical formula is C23H21F7N4O3, and its structural formula is:
Aprepitant is a white to off-white crystalline solid, with a molecular weight of 534.43. It is practically insoluble in water. Aprepitant is sparingly soluble in ethanol and isopropyl acetate and slightly soluble in acetonitrile.
Each capsule of EMEND for oral administration contains either 40 mg, 80 mg, or 125 mg of aprepitant and the following inactive ingredients: sucrose, microcrystalline cellulose, hydroxypropyl cellulose and sodium lauryl sulfate. The capsule shell excipients are gelatin, titanium dioxide, and may contain sodium lauryl sulfate and silicon dioxide. The 40-mg capsule shell also contains yellow ferric oxide, and the 125-mg capsule also contains red ferric oxide and yellow ferric oxide.
What are the possible side effects of aprepitant (Emend, Emend 2-Day, Emend 3-Day)?
Get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction: hives; difficulty breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.
Call your doctor at once if you have a serious side effect such as:
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- fever, chills, body aches, flu symptoms, sores in your mouth and throat.
Less serious side effects may include:
- nausea, vomiting, heartburn, stomach...
Read All Potential Side Effects and See Pictures of Emend Capsules »
What are the precautions when taking aprepitant capsules (Emend Capsules)?
Before using aprepitant, tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are allergic to it; or to fosaprepitant; or if you have any other allergies. This product may contain inactive ingredients, which can cause allergic reactions or other problems. Talk to your pharmacist for more details.
Before using this medication, tell your doctor or pharmacist your medical history, especially of: liver problems.
During pregnancy, this medication should be used only when clearly needed. Discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor.
It is not known if this drug passes into breast milk. Consult your doctor before...
Last reviewed on RxList: 7/12/2012
This monograph has been modified to include the generic and brand name in many instances.
Emend Capsules FDA Prescribing Information
Additional Emend Capsules Information
Emend Capsules - User Reviews
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You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit the FDA MedWatch website or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
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More About SHERYLDS
Visit My SparkPage
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Recipes I've Shared:
Sherylds Mock Chicken Fried Rice
I created this dish in order to use lots of common veggies and still enjoy a take out treat. It can easily be done with pork or shrimp or beef.
sherylds tuscan chicken bean stew (1.5 cup)
hearty stew/soup great basis for a pasta sauce as well.
tastes even better day 2
add baby spinach after cooking for a different variation


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Spyder Auto Import
Categories: Shops & Market > Automobiles
Address: 40/1 Moo 10, Bangna Trad Rd., Bang Na, Bang Na, Bangkok 10260 Thailand See map
1 reply, 12,714 viewed
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40/1 Moo 10, Bangna Trad Rd., Bang Na, Bang Na, Bangkok 10260 Thailand
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Another in the long list of grey market car importers who lack the saavy for service and buy from a list of vehicles that may or may not be spec'd for the Thai climate. Buyer beware. Read all story
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Stockpickr Lists: ExxonMobil
Editor's Note: In this feature from Stockpickr, we highlight lists of stocks that have made new highs, lows or seen other unusual activity.
52-Week Highs: As the price of crude oil rose on the New York Mercantile Exchange Thursday, industry heavyweight Exxon Mobil (XOM - Get Report) added $1.42, or 1.7%, to a 52-week high of $84.77.
Biggest % Gainers: Fuel cell maker Hoku Scientific (HOKU) skyrocketed 47% after the company announced a $678 million polysilicon contract. Beginning in 2009, Hoku will deliver polyscilicon to Suntech Power (STP) over a 10-year period. Hoku shares rose $2.15 to $6.75.
52-Week Lows: Drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis (SNY - Get Report) plunged to $41.33, a 52-week low, after the Food and Drug Administration indicated it would reject the company's weight-loss drug Zimulti. The news sent shares tumbling $1.74, or 4%.
Biggest % Losers: Capstone Turbine (CPST) decreased 8% Thursday, after the microturbine maker reported a slump in fourth-quarter and full-year revenue. Shares of the Chatsworth, Calif.-based company fell 9 cents, landing at $1.03. Rising on Unusual Volume: Trading at double its average volume, Homex Development (HXM - Get Report) increased 3.8% during Thursday's rally. Unlike its fellow American homebuilders, the Mexico-based company is steadily expanding and recently reported 20% growth in first-quarter revenues. Shares gained $2.29 closing at $62.59. Stocks With Unusual Option Activity: Exelon (EXC - Get Report) was experiencing unusual options activity.Forum of the Day
HazyDavy is getting very tired of NYSE Euronext (NYX).Do You Know the Answer?
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If You Say So...
What the USPS was like before best practices took effect
It used to be legal to send kids in the mail.Hokay.— Fact (@Fact) April 6, 2013
If you thought the USPS had issues nowadays (my friend is still waiting on her retainer), you wouldn't believe the goings on that took place way back when.
According to OMG Facts, when the United States Postal Service first got started back in 1913, Americans were so into sending packages across the country at a reasonable rate, that at least two stuck a bunch of stamps on kids and sent them on their way.
At that point, the Postmaster General had to step in and play social services, implementing regulations on what was and wasn't appropriate to ship.


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Last year's UT Campus Sustainability Symposium bolstered growing support for sustainability-related projects across campus. This year's event happening Friday, Sept. 23, showcases more innovative research in the field.
Read this story
Browse the Social Media Directory to view all the social media sites at The University of Texas at Austin, including blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and more.


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My Profile
Tallahassee, Florida
Member since Jan 2007
Flag This ProfileFlag as Inappropriate
Reviewed Sweet Potato Pancakes
Dec 1, 2012 in Food Network Community Toolbox on FoodNetwork.com
"I thought this was an excellent recipe, however you have to keep the pan on a very low heat and I suggest using vegetable oil instead of butter in the pan to cook the pancakes as the butter tried to burn before the pancake was cooked through. (Or make you own clarifed butter to cook them in) I will defeintely be making this recipe again.""
Reviewed Tequila Mai Tai Oh My!
Jul 24, 2011 in Food Network Community Toolbox on FoodNetwork.com
"This was an excellent refreshing cocktail. The fresh fruit was perfect with the tequila, but even if you wanted to make this without the tequila, I bet it would make a great smoothie for the kids and they would not even know it had so may real fruits in it!""


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BMW 335i 2007+
rayainsw Posts: 2,614First: Thanks to all on this Forum that ( repeatedly ) provide valuable information & insights.
Resistance was futile.
I ordered a 2007 Corvette Coupe on Wednesday. Expected delivery in 5 – 6 weeks.
Monterey Red \ Titanium Gray
Now I may check in here occasionally, to read owner's impressions, once US deliveries of 335 Sedans begin in earnest.
I did look very carefully and very seriously at this BMW, as I think it has much to recommend it. And the boost in HP, and particularly in TQ raises the 3 Series to a new level \ class, in my view. And there are already reports that 350 or 375 HP \ TQ may be relatively easy to obtain through reconfiguration of the turbochargers' boost.
And I do like the BMW 3 sedan interior styling & ergonomics, the fact that I could have had a "real" sliding sunroof ( vs a removable glass Targa top as the Corvette has ) and European Delivery with my Daughter would have been a 'Trip'. [Pun intended.]
Yet I chose the Corvette. For exterior styling that I really like – a lot. For interior styling that ( finally, in the C6 ) I also like – a lot. For 400 \ 400 without having to resort to aftermarket tuner Powertrain Control Module reflash and potential warrantee issues. ( I am also impressed with the 5 YR, 100,000 mile transferable powertrain warrantee on the new Corvette. Would have loved BtoB, but oh well. . . ) And a few other things.
- Ray
Soon to be Corvette Driver . . .
Counting the weeks and the days already . . . -
bimmer9111 Posts: 1I've got to chime in on the new 335i. I just got one yesterday and it's out of control. I've had a few Porsche twin turbo's and this bimmer hits hard!!! I couldn't believe it, I was in the dealership looking at convertibles for my wife and after one test drive of this thing I was sold. You can't buy a used twin turbo Porsche for less than 65K. There is absolutely NO CAR that hits like this for 46K period. Forget the Boxster, Forget a regular 911, Forget an M3 this car will smoke them all. I read about a guy who dino'd it and it came out at 350lbs of tourque. You gotta drive it to belive it!!!!!!!!!
habitat1 Posts: 4,282The same C&D that got the 4.8 second 0-60 and 13.5 quarter mile time for the 335i posted a 4.1 and 12.6 second time for the 911S. The base 911 is marginally slower.
So, with all due respect to the 335i which appears to be a very impressive car, your exaggerated impressions are full of crap. And more than a little suspect from someone claiming to have owned a "few" 911 TT's. :confuse: -
spiritinthesky Posts: 207
johnny420 Posts: 473Plus, you can only put so much horsepower in a car without suspension upgrade due to the weight increase. No one wants a car that can only go straight, and will not turn. I think American Classic, Road Runner, was one of those.
No one? Heck, I'd venture to guess 90% of Americans define an automobiles performance by its straight-line speed numbers. It's enthusiasts like the people that frequent this and other sites that appreciate more sublime attributes like handling, steering feel, gearbox performance, etc.
We are in the minority in America. -
jspence Posts: 3Coming from a 90,000.00 M5, what do you expect?!?!?! Are you really comparing a 335i to the 911/Boxster/M5 etc? Sounds fair, a 45k car with several options, compared against cars that are 60k-90k with their options. LOL!
For the money, the 335i is an outstanding car. Easily one of the best cars out there in the 40k-50k range, and even MORE so when you look at the value of it. I seriously doubt in any magazine we will see a comparo of a 335i and the M5, or a 335i and the Porsche 911. More than likely, you'll see comparo's with the IS350 and the Audi S4, maybe Infiniti G35. -
dewey Posts: 5,243Hey folks thanks for confusing me with the facts!
All this time I thought my soon-to-be BMW335i was equivalent to or even better than any Lambo or even a SLR McLaren Benz. And now all of a sudden I find out from all you informative members that my new car is nothing more than a plain vanilla 335i that cannot even compete with a humble 911 Carrea S or a M5 (I mean what do you expect from a car with a base price of $40K?)? Oh well at least in my humble opinion the 335i is the best value for the buck in the sports sedan market (something that cannot be said about any M Series model ) :P -
rockylee Wyoming, MichiganPosts: 13,989
rockylee Wyoming, MichiganPosts: 13,989
rayainsw Posts: 2,614carjim –
HA! I showed up on the Lincoln LS board in late 1999!
I see the C6, as of MY 2006 ( with the addition of the A6 trans. ) as a world class GT car and a world class bargain.
Not cheap, mind you. The MSRP of the one I ordered is over $10,000 more than my 2003 LS. And the actual transaction price is higher by even more . . .
If the C6 did not exist, in its current state, I'd certainly be looking hard at the 335i. The ( relative ) lack of low end TQ is one of the few things that has kept me out of 6 cylinder BMWs. The TT 335 addresses that quite well!
Enjoy the G35. ( Drove 3 or 4 sedans & 1 coupe. )
- Ray
Counting the days 'till delivery of "my" 2007 . . . -
dewey Posts: 5,243You're not alone with your 17s observations. A reviewer from the British mag called Car (Sept. edition) found the 17s more preferable too.
In my case I wanted my sedan with sport suspension and the only way I could get that was by ordering a sport package that includes 18s.
Despite the above the 335i I test drove had 18s and they felt real good . How are they relative to the 17s I really dont know? At least if I bought the coupe I would have had an option between 17s and 18s. -
circlew Posts: 8,417Ray, I had an '03 LS but los it in NY on the Tappan Zee on ice. Went with the '06 330xi and loving it. But you are my new hero with your new purchase. Wish you well and many happy/safe miles! It's a legend!
BTW, LS built strong but misses mark on performance (handling. Lincoln is in BIG trouble! -
dhanley Posts: 1,531True. I'd prefer the 17's just because the roads here are so choppy and i tend to drive over train tacks at full speed. But i think i want the sport package, so i'm pondering...
Did you drive the 335 with both the sport and non-sport package?
Perhaps if you are in the BMWCCA you can find another 3-series owner and arrange a tire swap and get a few dollars out of the deal. -
dewey Posts: 5,243Did you drive the 335 with both the sport and non-sport package?
The dealers I had visited only had a 335i coupes with a sport package.
I think test driving a BMW 335i sedan without a sport package will be a waste of time since unlike the basic coupe a basic sedan does not include sport suspension as a standard feature. All I want to do at this point of time is to compare 17s and 18s on a sedan with sport suspension.
Perhaps if you are in the BMWCCA you can find another 3-series owner and arrange a tire swap and get a few dollars out of the deal.
Not a bad idea.
I read Car & Driver's test drives of both the 335i coupe and sedan and they raved about the two cars. Both cars were equipped with 18s and they had no complaints. Similarily I had no complaints about the 18s but at least I would like to compare one with 17s. I guess I will have to try harder in finding a tester with 17s.
If I dont then I will remain content with my 18s. -
dhanley Posts: 1,531The sedan--i think. I do think the coupe looks substantially better, and may be a good compromise between a sensible sedan and the little sports car i really want, and i can only justify one car for myself now.
But, for now, the sedan. I end up carting my family around a lot, and they're all "husky." But maybe i should tell them "you're lucky i didn't get a miata!"
I seem to be the only prospective BMW buyer on edmunds who may opt to not get the sport suspension. I think the sport package rides a bit sportier, but is not the night and day diff everyone else seems to think it is. So, i factor in harsher ride, cost of the package, probably using more tires and rims.... -
fasterthanyou Posts: 131
fasterthanyou Posts: 131
dterrie Posts: 7I've recently test-driven both the 335i and 328i coupes, and have been frankly disappointed in the engines. Rough feel, iffy performance. I drove a 530i that felt a bit better, but nothing to write home about. I drove a second 328i that was a bit better than the first. The salesperson keeps reassuring me that it's just engine break-in, but frankly I was so disappointed in the 335i, I've settled on the 328i if I do go forward. I owned a 1980 528i for ten years and these engines don't measure up. However, BMW would not get the reviews it gets if my experience were universal. I was told at a car show that I should drive the broken in 335i with a manual a the dealer to experience the real deal, which I'll do (the guy had a really interesting breakin method - said his cars were always the fastest afterwards), but as I said to the salesperson 'these engines did now show well'.
I do currently drive a 2004 Jaguar S-Type 4.2 (coming off lease in January), which has a great engine, very smooth and powerful, so maybe it's just the 6 vs 8 thing. But honestly, shouldn't even an un-broken in BMW 328i or 335i give you the smooth surge of power I remember? Being on the highway at about 50-60 mph, dropping into third and flooring it - now that was fun, a little hesitation and you were at 6000 rpm and shifting into 4th. Phew. By contrast, these engines - even the 335i - were working hard and getting nowhere fast.
This discussion has been closed.


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text:
A year ago, when Pia thought it might be cool to bring Tim Berners-Lee to Australia for linux.conf.au 2013, she didn't foresee quite how much work the project would involve.
Interesting and prominent public figures like TBL attract rather large fees for speaking appearances, so Pia rallied together a group of sponsors to help out. You can see the list of (awesome) sponsors and the (impressive) list of Tim's appearances on the TBL Down Under tour information page.
Pia has volunteered hundreds of hours of her time to pull together the project; wrangle sponsors, minders and media requests; and assist with the tour as TBL has travelled through New Zealand and Australia.
But in addition to her time and energy, Pia also put up a large sum of her own money to see the project through, hoping that late sponsorship agreements would cover her risk.
Please thank Pia for bringing Tim Berners-Lee to Australia and New Zealand by making a quick donation to help cover her financial contribution to the project.
While I won't reveal how much Pia has invested without her permission, the percentage report will let you know how close we are to meeting the target. (If you're concerned that I might have some financial interest in doing this, please note that Pia and I are no longer married.)
Thanks Pia, and thank you for contributing to the tip jar!
]]>Over the last twelve months or so I've gone through something of a sexual awakening. I want to tell you, my Twitter friends, about it first.
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
For as long as I can remember, I have been attracted to women. I have loved a number of great women, deeply, sometimes athletically.
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
Lately, I've discovered that something has been missing in that equation. It was challenging to come to terms with at first, but now I know.
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
I am sexually attracted to burritos. I am a burritosexual. Label it, label me, I don't mind. But I have found love in unleavened bread.
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
I am being forcibly ejected from the Taquería. You can't deny this love! GIVE ME BACK MY BURRITO!
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
]]>I *will* be back. And there *will* be black beans.
— Jeff Waugh (@jdub) August 6, 2012
In summary, LCA remains unique in its combination of strongly technical talks, freedom-oriented and hands-on orientation, wide variety of topics covered, and infectious Australian humor. There is a reason some of us seem to end up there every year despite the painful air-travel experiences required. Linux Australia has put together a structure that allows the conference to be handed off to a new team in a new city every year, bringing a fresh view while upholding the standards set in the previous years.
— LWN's Jon Corbet on linux.conf.au, An LCA 2012 Summary
]]>Today, I'm fighting depression. And winning.
Every experience of depression is different, but for what it's worth, you might find this story worth reading. I hope it helps you fight depression in your life, be it yours or that of someone close to you.
Some people refer to feelings associated with depression as anthropomorphic avatars, such as their black dog, stalking shadow, or dark passenger (hopefully without the Dexter connotation). For me, it has always been an insidious evil, a cancer within, and rather like my arthritis — both conditions arrived at about the same time, with roughly the same effect.
One night in my late teens, I awoke to the most intense pain I had yet experienced. My left knee and ankle were roaring emergency signals back to my brain with such ferocity, I couldn't even tell you if it was dull or sharp. Tears were spurting from my eyes, and I didn't have enough breath to scream. Unable to move, I banged as hard as I could on the wall behind my head.
Soon enough, my father and stepmother woke and came downstairs to my room. Dad was asking questions, but I still couldn't speak. My knuckles were white, face contorted, right leg out straight to the toes, left leg raised and bent at the knee. I pointed at my left knee and let out a whimper.
My stepmother decided to take control of the situation. She bent down to forcefully straighten my left leg, completely smashing my record for the most intense pain I had yet experienced.
I had the classic fairytale stepmother: Jealous, duplicitous, manipulative, evil. I don't say that lightly. By comparison, my stepfather was merely a violent alcoholic. (So now you're beginning to see some contributing family circumstances…)
I have had a few acute arthritis attacks like this over the years, but more recently it is just an inconvenience. I have to be careful not to provoke it. Sometimes get the vague sense that I should take an umbrella.
My first experience with depression was similar. During my last two years at school, I felt a growing, previously unimaginable, newly inconsolable sadness. There wasn't any one reason that I put my finger on. Plenty of correlation, very little causation.
I was well off, went to a good private school, had lots of friends and things that I loved to do: What right did I have to be unhappy?
As it got worse, friends would say, "Why are you so quiet?" and "You're no fun to be around" and "You should just snap out of it". But it's true: I wasn't fun to be around. I was a morose motherfucker. I went to fewer and fewer gatherings, and received fewer and fewer invitations.
Then I stopped going to school altogether. For weeks. Months. No one called. Not even the school, which prided itself on "pastoral care".
One day, during the trial HSC exams, I got a phone call from one of my friends. Had I heard the news? One of our classmates had taken his life. Was I okay? I got another call, and then another. Suddenly, with one student gone for months and another gone forever, the "school community" was taking notice.
I wasn't close to Lucas Wood. We didn't share a circle of friends, but knew each other through cadets and music. It seems almost absurd to say that Lucas "saved" me, but right at that time I was closer to giving up than I have ever been since, and his actions prompted the intervention. In part, I am here because Lucas isn't, and that's hard to forget.
I returned to school for the rest of the year, mostly to shoot and edit the Year 12 leaving video and visit the counselor. There wasn't much to say to my friends. I was charitably invited to a post-school getaway, which was fun, but we didn't stay in touch.
This experience (plus a massive, negative culture shift with an awful new principal and head of music) is why I rarely talk about my age, or where I went to school. Few of my friends know at all, let alone first hand. Not talking about it eventually became a habit.
But things are changing: I went to Barker College, graduated in 1996, and I'm 32 years old.
Since my first experience of depression, I've had some fantastic ups and awful downs, and managed to achieve some great things despite periods of nothingness. But I functioned, performed and achieved only at its mercy.
Instead of fighting, I declared surrender, ceded authority, and allowed it to define my choices. I don't say that to lay the blame for my actions (or, more often, inaction) on depression as an external force. It is part of me, and I was complicit. My worst failure was to let depression (and contributing factors) become habitual.
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
After a long bout of truly awful depression, becoming seriously non-functional in the process, things are looking up. The change began in the middle of last year, as pinholes of light in the darkness. I finally kicked open the door in April.
The key, for me, was two words: "I can". I can fight this. I can adopt better habits to fight it long term, and stop it from owning me again. I can feel better. I can sleep better. I can eat better. I can lose weight. I can talk to people. I can beat this.
So, step-by-step, I did.
I started waking up at the same time every morning. Making the bed. Going for a walk. Having a shower. Getting dressed. Eating breakfast. Maintaining a to-do list. Getting out of the house at least once a day. Cooking dinner. Not looking at computer or TV screens late at night. Going to bed at a sensible time.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, then imagine how bad it was before. Most of the time I didn't want to get out of bed. I'd rather sleep than hurt all day. If I did, I wouldn't dress. I'd distract myself with things that might have felt slightly productive. I'd eat total crap. I'd go to bed only when absolutely exhausted, usually in the early morning, because laying awake in bed meant letting my brain run without distraction.
I didn't give up, and it started working.
Months later, I exercise every morning, keep my apartment neat and tidy, have a wonderful morning routine and a proper place for everything (using my mild OCD for good, not evil).
I cut sugar out of my diet (almost entirely by not consuming huge energy drinks, which come with all kinds of other problems). I eat breakfast and keep to sensible portions most of the time. I drink lots of water.
I'm 30kg lighter. I'm wearing 36″ jeans, down from 42″. I threw away my old belt, and have already moved a belt-hole down on my new one. I'm wearing clothes I haven't for years.
I'm slowly apologising to the people I failed while I was very deeply depressed over the last few years. This is probably the most "12 step" part of the journey, but it's important to me. It means I'm taking responsibility for what happened, and taking responsibility for not letting it happen again.
I am even deriving satisfaction and enjoyment from activities and people. That was a distant memory and unlikely fantasy only 6-12 months ago.
Not to mention that I moved to Sydney for a great job, which I pretty much asked to be created for me. "I'd like to save you a recruiting fee: Let me tell you more about why I'd be good for your company" are not the words of a man in the depths of depression!
Now it's not so much "I can", as it is "Holy shit, I fucking am!"
I've hinted at the social anxiety involved in my depression, but here's an appropriately ludicrous example: my teeth.
Until a few weeks ago, I had large, visible holes on two of my right teeth. I felt hideously self-conscious about them. So every time I'd smile, cue the internal monologue.
Have they noticed them, or are they just being polite? Maybe they hadn't seen me recently and just thought it was a piece of spinach. But if they saw me this week, then they'd know it wasn't spinach. But I can't do anything about it because I'm worried about going to the dentist, and I don't have enough money, and what else will need to be done? Why can't I pay for some stupid holes to be fixed? Why can't I provide for my family, and why can't I deal with this shit, and why am I so useless?
Immediate un-smile. That's a crazy negative feedback loop for a half-second smile.
But for $350 and an hour sitting down, now I just smile… and I've returned to the dentist since.
Not having much faith in the institution of marriage, it surprised me when I decided I wanted to make that commitment. The risk of my depression breaking things meant I had avoided all kinds of commitments over the years. So should it be a surprise that depression was a contributing factor to the end of our marriage?
I don't think it's particularly respectful to discuss the end of a marriage publicly, but there's two things to say which relate to my depression:
While I'm profoundly sad (and, frankly, embarrassed) about our marriage ending, the grief isn't all-consuming. It almost was, but my own changes have given me room and strength for compartmentalisation. I can weather grief and sadness without depression. That's a new thing. It's pretty amazing, all things considered.
If you see me, and I appear happier than you've seen for some time, it's because of what I've found, not what I've lost. Please don't confuse the high of rediscovering my strength for the faux freedom offered by the end of a relationship. It would not offer due respect to either situation.
Though I've been planning and writing this post in my head for a while, one of the reasons I chose to post it today is R U OK? Day: "It's so simple. In the time it takes to have a coffee, you can start a conversation that could change a life."
Asking is a big deal, even if you don't get an entirely truthful answer. Merely having the concern and taking the time to reach out might be significant and helpful in itself.
I'll try to answer any questions in the comments.
]]>Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality.
As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he's reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life's élan.
Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.
The most terrifying fact of the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick, Playboy Interview with Eric Nordern, September 1968
]]>Although it's a rough time in many ways, and both of us will greatly appreciate the support and company of our friends as a result, there are some silver linings.
One is that Pia and I are still great friends, and unless we royally screw up this process, we have every opportunity to continue being the very best of friends. That's certainly what we're aiming for, anyway.
Another is that I'll be moving to Sydney relatively soon, and will have more opportunities to catch up with all my friends there. Yass has been wonderful, but a bit lonely at times. Pia is planning to stick around the Canberra area for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, we're doing okay. There's pain, of course, but not much weirdness. Time has and will heal those wounds. As Pia says, you can still invite us to the same parties.
]]>]]>At the beginning of any writing project is the agonizing period in which nebulous ideas dance before the mind's eye like memories of a dream, and vaporous vague shapes take on human form and begin to answer to their names.
Trying to will a world into existence. I circle around it, nibbling at the edges, writing notes about the social infrastructure and expounding to no one in particular about the themes of the thing.
Then slowly a change happens. Without warning, it becomes easier to write a scene than to write notes about the scene. I start sticking words in the mouths of characters who are still mannequins, forcing them to move and to walk. Slowly their movements become more human.
The curve inflects upward, the pace increases. The characters begin to say things in their own words. By the end of this period I'm writing ten pages a day. The last day becomes endless, often stretching round the clock to the following noon. The curve becomes almost vertical as the thing seems to come alive. I become a witness only, a court reporter getting it down as fast as I can.
The GNOME User Experience Hackfest of October 2008 spawned a science project to build a new user experience — GNOME Shell — and based on striking similarity in design, appears to have inspired Canonical's private work on a "messaging menu" stack for persistent notifications.
By early December, too late for the GNOME 2.26 module proposal period, a plan existed to ship the messaging menu in the next Ubuntu release. Both Mark Shuttleworth and Ted Gould subsequently blogged about the design, but no code existed in the public sphere.
January 5, 2009: Ted Gould writes about application indicators — a step beyond just having persistent notifications in the messaging menu:
One thing that kept bothering me in the GNOME UI Hackfest was how little data applications export out to the desktop. […]
What I'd like to put forward is the idea of little flags that applications can hold up to say what they're thinking or doing, which I'm going to call indicators. […]
First off I want to build something simple (start small, think big), the messaging indicator, which will mostly consist of a GNOME panel applet.
January 8, 2009: In a surprisingly highly-anticipated event at CES Las Vegas, Palm announces the Prē smartphone and its new mobile operating system, webOS. In later reviews, the notification system is widely praised as better than those found in Android and iOS.
February 18, 2009: That code exists for Canonical's fancy new messaging menu and notification concepts is first revealed with their upload to the "Jaunty Jackalope" development branch. Design and architecture specs for Notify OSD are published on the Ubuntu wiki.
February 21, 2009: Mark Shuttleworth announces that the new work is available in Ubuntu:
Together with notify-osd, we've uploaded a new panel indicator which is used to provide a way to respond to messaging events, such as email and IRC pings.
A commenter asks, "Will canonical/ubuntu help on the new gnome-shell proyect [sic]?"
Yes, we helped by sending most of our user experience team to the user experience sprints, and have folks at the UI hackfests. We're working on notifications in a way that will fit with both GNOME and KDE, and will contribute that at freedesktop.org. And we're working on the panel and other pieces. We'll package up the new gnome-shell in due course, but will wait to see what the best defaults for Ubuntu are.
Later in the comments, Mark points out that, "There will be a lot of new work coming from this team, though, and the best place to get it will be Ubuntu ;-)"
March 2, 2009: The GNOME 2.28 development series and module proposal period begin. Neither notify-osd or libindicate/indicator-applet are proposed for inclusion.
March 10, 2009: Mark Shuttleworth files a wishlist bug on Empathy to suggest it use Ubuntu's new persistent notifications. Empathy developer Dafydd Harries replies:
I don't know what a "messaging indicator" is. Is there any documentation on what libnotify does and how to use it? A quick search doesn't turn up anything useful.
Mark helpfully ropes in Ted Gould to answer any questions:
libindicate (not libnotify) is a library for indicators, and the messaging indicator is the first of those. Ted Gould would be the best person to speak with. He says there's some documentation in the package in 9.04, not much more to go on, sorry.
Sjoerd Simons tries to be encouraging under the circumstances:
We're always happy to try and improve empathy's user experience. The information you've given is a bit limited though. […]
Maybe you or Ted could explain how libindicate/indicators would improve things for Empathy? Screenshots/documentations/mockups/examples are appreciated, patches even more so
Also is libindicate something more gnome applications might start using in the near future? Or would it be an external dependency for gnome just for empathy's benefit?
To which Ted replies with some links and documentation, but the bug chatter ends.
March 18, 2009: GNOME 2.26 is released.
March 31, 2009: A design specification for the messaging menu is published on the Ubuntu wiki.
April 2, 2009: Without a lot of forward movement since July (GUADEC) or October (Boston Summit and UX Hackfest), the release team decide to shake things up with a wide-ranging proposed plan for GNOME 3.0, written in release manager Vincent Untz's signature franglish:
So let's go to the core topic and discuss what the GNOME 3.0 effort should be. We propose the following list of areas to focus our efforts on:
As already mentioned, this is an ambitious plan and it will only be realized if everybody comes out and helps.
In terms of schedule, the release team are bullish but realistic:
Of course, we should be prepared to consider the fact that GNOME 2.30 might not be good enough for us to call it 3.0. […] That being said, we want the community to try as hard as possible to make GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0 a success.
There is an immense amount of discussion, as you'd expect for a significant, project-wide release, revamp and rejuvenation plan.
April 5, 2009: Almost one month after Mark Shuttleworth suggested Empathy support Ubuntu's new persistent notifications, James Westby provides a patch. Some less-than-diplomatic complaints are raised about the platform-specific nature of libindicate –it's not even based on a freedesktop.org specification yet!
Xavier Claessens (not generally known for subtlety or a calm demeanour) asks:
Is there a discussion somewhere to propose libindicate as external dep of GNOME 2.28? I think it's the very first step, I don't think it's wise to accept such patch before getting feedback from the GNOME community.
Ted Gould corrects Xav's mistake, knowing full well that optional dependencies are fine:
My understanding of the GNOME release process is that the release team prefers to see a library used as a configure time option of several projects before accepting it as a dependency. This removes the "I built a library that sounds good but no one really uses" problem of adding libraries to the platform. For instance, libnotify has been used by many programs before it was a blessed dependency for 2.26.
After some reasonable chatter about the design motivation for Ubuntu's messaging menu, persistent notifications, and applicable freedesktop.org specs, the discussion trails off.
April 15, 2009: Jon McCann's first post to the GNOME Shell mailing list. Bryan Clark joins the list and offers some suggestions, including:
You probably don't want me trying to arrange this stuff for you, but I'd recommend gathering the existing docs and blog posts you have into something more consumable.
Jon McCann replies, "I'm a bit out of the loop too but here's some background." It is his first post to the mailing list, and based on the responses from active contributors, Jon's ideas about GNOME Shell are pretty firmly stuck in October 2008.
April 17, 2009: Mark Shuttleworth blogs about "meta-cycles" across FLOSS projects, clearly aware of the significant — and potentially risky — plans for GNOME 3.0 and the continuing work on GNOME Shell:
On the other side of the fence, GNOME is now more aware of the limitations of indefinite regular releases. I'm very excited by the zest and spirit with which the "user experience MATTERS" campaign is being taken up in Gnome, there's a real desire to deliver breakthrough changes. This kicked off at the excellent Gnome usability summit last year, which I enjoyed and which quite a few of the Canonical usability and design folks participated in, and the fruits of that are shaping up in things like the new Activities shell.
But it's become clear that a change like this represents a definitive break with the past, and might take more than a single six month release to achieve. And most important of all, that this is an opportunity to make other, significant, distinctive changes. A break with the past. A big bold move. And so there's been a series of conversations about how to […] break with the tradition of incremental change, in order to make this vision possible.
April 22, 2009: Canonical's Ayatana project is announced as an umbrella for the DX team's various projects, beginning with notify-osd and indicator-applet. The desktop experience and design teams have grown since they were announced in mid-to-late 2008.
April 23, 2009: Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Canonical's fancy new notifications (notify-osd) and the messaging menu (libindicate/indicator-applet) as features worthy of mention in the official press release.
May 18, 2009: The GNOME 2.28 module proposal period closes. Despite being shipped in Ubuntu 9.04 a month earlier, neither notify-osd or libindicate/indicator-applet were proposed for inclusion.
Late May, 2009: Jon McCann moves from internal projects to Owen Taylor's section of the Red Hat desktop team — the group assigned in 2008 to work on the results of the UX Hackfest, which became GNOME Shell.
May 25-29, 2009: Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona. The desktop team discuss the plan for GNOME 3.0 in Karmic Koala:
Ubuntu is a GNOME based distribution, having the new versions and components available early will benefit the distribution, users and GNOME.
Users will want to try the new GNOME components and be able to test GNOME3, it will be easy to do so from Ubuntu.
May 25, 2009: Ted Gould submits a talk about the messaging menu for presentation at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
June 15, 2009: Jon McCann blogs about pulling together the design work already done on GNOME Shell, and encourages participation in daily IRC discussions about the design.
July 3-11, 2009: Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
Ted Gould presents messaging menus.
Jon McCann publishes the GNOME Shell design bible, expanding on design concepts first introduced at the UX Hackfest in 2008.
Owen Taylor presents the latest work on GNOME Shell, including an entirely new design for notifications. While the central location for notifications, and separation between system indicators and notifications from 2008 still exists…
This is not an area that is variously called the Notification Area or System Tray and should not be used by applications (foreground or background) to indicate their status.
… the drop-down panel menu "stack" is replaced with an idea clearly inspired by Palm's webOS: the message tray.
GNOME Shell appears to be coming together well, so the Release Team recommit to the goal of shipping it with GNOME 3.0… if it's accepted for inclusion, that is! The team plans to conduct a review, prior to the next release cycle, to decide whether the project is ready to ship 3.0 in March 2010.
August 8, 2009: KDE hackers begin work on a KNotificationItem-based spec for status icons, hoping to encourage a more flexible cross-desktop replacement for the old-school XEmbed-based "system tray" icons used by GNOME and KDE:
This is a draft standard for the management of visual items, usually icons used for reporting the status of an application to the user or provide a quick access to common actions performed by that application. It is intended to be complementary but not directly related with the Freedesktop's Desktop Notifications specification and is aimed as a replacement to the Freedestop Systemtray specification.
August 10, 2009: The GNOME 2.30 development series and module proposal period begin. libindicate/indicator-applet are again not proposed for inclusion in this series.
August 22, 2009: indicator-applet is split into three: libindicate, libindicator and indicator-applet. The libindicate client library still uses a custom DBus protocol to talk to the indicator host user interface, despite using the org.freedesktop.indicator namespace.
(The org.freedesktop.indicator namespace has never been mentioned on a freedesktop.org mailing list, let alone the XDG specification collaboration list. libindicate has been raised once, in May 2010, in a completely different context.)
September 5, 2009: The KNotificationItem specification is first raised on the XDG list:
In the past few months in KDE we worked on a new way to represent the systemtray icons to overcome the following limitations…
September 23, 2009: Aurélien Gâteau raises his work on Ayatana notifications for Plasma on KDE's Plasma development mailing list:
I would like to present to you some work I have been doing for Canonical regarding notifications in Plasma.
Before going further, let me state that my goal with this mail is not to get this work incorporated upstream, as I understand the Plasma project have a different position than Canonical on the subject of notifications. I decided to write this mail because I believe it is more correct to let you know about it in a more "personal" way rather than you discovering it in a blog post or a Kubuntu review.
A lengthy discussion follows, during which some familiar concerns are raised. From the pen of Aaron Seigo:
it has been made very clear that Canonical is intent on following through on these ideas as they are. it is an insular project without outside participation, which is something they are perfectly free to engage in and i fully support their right to do so.
now, whether anyone else outside of Canonical thinks it is better or worse seems to really not matter. any discussion on it is therefore a waste of time. and i'd prefer not to waste our time on this list.
… to which Celeste Lyn Paul replies:
Canonical did a really bad job involving upstreams in the design process and are now trying to make up for it by keeping upstreams aware of what is going on. It may be too little too late, but if we (KDE) can at least humor them, then they will be more willing to listen how they can make their software work better with KDE (even if it doesn't follow what KDE wants to do) instead of just forcing Kubuntu to ship whatever they produce.
September 24, 2009: GNOME 2.28 ships.
October 13-15, 2009: Canonical developers quietly begin early development on a replacement for libindicate called… libappindicator. A "quicklauncher" prototype is blessed as the starting point for a new project called… Unity.
October 29, 2009: Ubuntu 9.10 ships with the libindicate-based messaging menu and "me" menu, which replaces the old FUSA applet.
November 3, 2009: The release team gathers feedback from teams throughout the community to determine if GNOME 3.0 should ship in March 2010, as planned, or be delayed until September 2010.
At this point, we've reached the beginning of the libappindicator story, though as you can tell, there was quite a bit of history behind it! Aside from the occasional crucial event in the timeline, I will avoid repeating the details of that saga in this and future posts.
December 17, 2009: Mark Shuttleworth announces that from March 2010, he will focus on "product design, partnerships and customers" and hand over the CEO's reins to long-time COO, Jane Silber.
I've become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I can't think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn't think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane.
Concerned that the transition might be misunderstood, I leave an encouraging comment on Mark's blog:
For those who don't know Jane — as she doesn't have the most public profile among the stars of Ubuntu and Canonical — be assured that she is all kinds of awesome, far beyond the capacity of English to describe. This is a fantastic transition for Canonical (it's great that Mark has someone so awesome to hand the reins to), which will in turn be fantastic for Ubuntu.
… and totally cool that Mark will have more time to focus on the stuff he finds fun and satisfying. Further arse-kicking will ensue.
Wonderful news all 'round, congratulations both!
Such… optimism.
Disclosure: I enjoyed working for Canonical from 2004-2006, and although I have occasionally been accused of shilling for Ubuntu since then, I suspect few at Canonical would regard me as their #1 fan at the moment. I haven't been involved in GNOME for quite some time, and generally try to avoid thinking about it very often.
]]>I was incredibly tempted to entitle this post, "Pushing your turds into GNOME's immaculate and exalted vessel", but thought it might be taken seriously. After all, everyone knows GNOME developers believe they're inviolably perfect, right?
Software development is an immature branch of the discipline known as "change management". The weapons are different, but the war is the same: Improvement generally requires change, but change involves investment and risk. So we invent convoluted schemes, tools and rituals to make change easy, but not dangerous.
FLOSS projects in particular must make change easy, because people are their most valuable resource, and change is the process through which new contributors become familiar with a project and subsequently — hopefully! — become involved.
It's pretty simple: Contributors are your participants. If there is nothing to contribute, you have no participants. If you have no participants, you barely even have a project, let alone co-development! For FLOSS projects, change has an incentive beyond improving the software.
Readability is the key to creating code that others will use. Because in the end? We can scale silicon, but carbon? People are much harder to scale.
— Brian Aker, Drizzle goes GA, From "What If", to "What has"
By small, I don't mean insignificant. A one-line patch can fix a crasher, resolve a terribly hard-to-find heisenbug, or launch a project-wide flame-war over its correctness. By small I refer to the risk/reward ratio, which will affect how easy it is to make a decision — with both social and technical influence — about the change.
Bug fixes: In the olden days, new contributors would file a bug and attach their patch, or send a patch to the project mailing list. In modern times, a new contributor would raise a merge request in the code review system from their own distributed revision control branch. The maintainer usually has a straightforward decision as to whether the bug fix is correct and appropriate… or not.
(Despite using distributed revision control, GNOME still mostly lives in the olden days, so patches are sometimes left to rot without review.)
Features: A larger change, adding functionality or behaviour. Most of the time these are best discussed with the project maintainer before starting work, as they're likely to have a good idea about how they'd prefer it to be implemented, or may not want the feature at all.
In GNOME, the maintainer of a module is almost always the "architect" or "manager" of that code, and is responsible for making these decisions. If the maintainer is sceptical of your feature, then you'll have to do some convincing. Co-development is as much a social endeavour as it is technical!
Settings: What if you want the software to behave one way, but your friend wants it to behave differently? Surely that's reason enough to add a switch to choose between them? After all, software can do anything, and computers should adapt to our needs, right?
Most GNOME developers will look at this problem differently. You may occasionally hear the phrase "options are bad", but that's shorthand for a deeper philosophy: What if we could make that problem simply disappear, rendering the choice itself meaningless?
Switches like this increase the complexity of the code and the "surface area" of software machinery exposed to users. If we, as software developers (and UX designers), think a bit harder about the problem before foisting it on users, perhaps we can solve it… and if we get it wrong, it's easy to fix.
That's why "adding an option" involves more friction in the GNOME community that you are likely to find elsewhere. Of course, some developers hate that approach. Some users hate that approach. But others find it truly inspiring.
Applications or utilities: If you want to contribute an entirely new piece of software to GNOME, it must go through the Release Team's module proposal process. As long as you meet the long list of conventions and standards upheld by the GNOME community, and your software is relevant, you're pretty likely to get in. As of GNOME 3.0, it's even easier, because the Release Team has split out recommended applications from the core components of the desktop user experience — panels, window manager, file manager, etc.
Cross-module changes: Sometimes you can't surface a feature within the scope of a single module, so you have to convince a number of maintainers to not only accept the feature, but if required, agree on a way of sharing necessary information between their modules, and accepting the maintenance load of making sure cross-module integration continues to work.
A good example of this kind of change is the list of folders that are remembered and shown throughout your GNOME experience — in the "Places" menu in the panel, the sidebar of the file manager, in standard file dialogues, etc.
New APIs: Providing a new capability throughout GNOME, and perhaps to third party developers, usually means adding a function to an existing platform library, or for more involved capabilities, you might even need to write your own shared library and convince developers to use it.
Lots of mistakes can be made when it comes to APIs and shared libraries, and because the GNOME community wishes to provide a consistent, reliable platform, it is an area that involves a lot of rules and policies. Number one on that list is the commitment to API/ABI compatibility throughout GTK+ and GNOME's major version releases. GTK+ 3.x involves the first significant, platform-wide API/ABI break in 8 years!
New APIs will often be adopted as copy'n'paste code from incubator modules like libegg. So rather than make new library developers worry about API/ABI compatibility during development, users of the new API can just copy the code. Once everyone's happy, it can be deployed into an existing platform library (such as GTK+), or a new shared library.
Proposing a new shared library can be arduous. For the last 8 years, developers have been naturally wary of expanding the (sprawling) surface area of the developer platform, so your library would have to be incredibly convincing to begin with… even then, perhaps the new API would make more sense in an existing platform library.
Plus, it won't land in the API/ABI stable developer platform or external dependency list straight away: That's a very serious commitment. The community will need a chance to get comfy with the new API before taking any marriage vows!
User experience changes: Making GNOME itself — the fundamental user experience of the product — look or work differently can be the most challenging proposal of all.
On one hand, it's an intensely social process, because you'll probably find yourself trying to convince the entire project to accept your change. On the other hand, it is a technical issue, but very different to fixing a bug or adopting a library: Now you're invoking huge questions about user experience, acceptance testing, user stories, who GNOME is for… if you don't have the technical skills to make good decisions on all of those fronts, you're in for a rough ride.
You just thought it might be nice to have two panels instead of one. Then everyone got all existential. Welcome to GNOME.
All of that sounds terribly difficult. "Why can't GNOME be more like the Linux kernel?"
They're not really that different. Two big ones: Linux ships as a single tarball, GNOME's user interface has quite a different audience profile.
Linux still has plenty of components and subsystems, maintained by different people. A hardware driver might be a nicely contained chunk of work, but if you want to change the SCSI subsystem, you'll have to convince a few people along the way. Want to make a big change? Ask for advice (a "Request For Comments") before carpet-bombing lkml with your patch-set. Thoroughly unsurprising stuff for large-scale co-development.
Believe it or not, kernel maintainers are getting the "options are bad" religion. Yes, even in the kernel, settings and magic numbers can increase complexity of code and the "surface area" of software machinery for users — systems administrators — to deal with. Years after calling my friends and I "interface nazis", Linus questions whether or not big chunks of the Linux kernel can "just work".
You'll definitely hear some developers whine that Linux doesn't have stable internal APIs (one clear advantage to working in a flexible, monolithic codebase), but don't get caught breaking the userland API/ABI…!
"We're not so different, you and I."
Every now and then, and quite a bit over the last week, someone will offer up the prize furphy that "GNOME does not have technical leadership". This is poppycock, pure and simple.
It might not be immediately obvious. It might not be particularly efficient. It might not be convenient. But you know it exists… if only because trying to sneak past it will cause all hell to break loose.
What is it? A meritocracy, where legitimacy and influence is derived from contribution.
Training and growing technical leaders in GNOME is not unlike other open, meritocratic, co-developing FLOSS projects.
You send a little patch, perhaps to fix a bug, and the maintainer accepts and commits the change. Encouraged, you fix more bugs, implement some minor features and send a patch for each change.
Eventually, you send enough good stuff that the maintainer wants you to commit directly (the lazy maintainer principle in action). You request an account, and the maintainer backs you up. Now you can commit to all the things!
Your changes still have to be accepted by the maintainer, but now she can ask you to commit directly instead of sending patches or merge requests.
(You submit a few changes elsewhere, and the other maintainers trust you that little bit more, because you already have an account on the GNOME revision control platform!)
After a while, the maintainer sees that you have a good understanding of the code, and in a moment of brilliant laziness says, "Hey, you don't need me to review your changes now, I trust you." Of course, you still talk about more controversial or difficult changes prior to committing.
Eventually you work well enough as a team, you're blessed as a co-maintainer, and five minutes later the original maintainer announces she's travelling around the world on a donkey. So now it's up to you, co-maintainer for five whole minutes. Time to find some more contributors…
If there were an Arthurian round table of technical leadership in GNOME, it would be the motley group of developers who maintain all the modules in the various release sets: The Maintainers (it's not a band).
But there are a few round tables — maintainers of the developer platform, the core user experience, the language bindings, etc. Each has more sway in certain decisions: Should libfoo be in the platform? Should gnome-baz be integrated into the default desktop UX? These are project-wide decisions for which maintainers often wield increased influence.
Day-to-day, a maintainer's influence is generally limited to their own software module, defining the vision and architectural approach, deciding which patches to accept, etc.
Founded in 2000, the GNOME Foundation was designed to serve the project by doing all the boring things — keep money, manage relationships, etc. It was also granted the task of defining GNOME as a product, largely because there were arguments about it at the time, and the big companies joining the community desired… clarity and stability.
Today, the democratically elected directors of the GNOME Foundation essentially form a community council. The power to "set the technical direction" was delegated to a newly-defined Release Team in 2001. But if you want to "deal with GNOME", you speak to the Foundation. If there is a disagreement in the community, you go to the Foundation Board for mediation.
The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors is still called upon when big problems need solving, but does not play a role in the day-to-day technical decisions of the project.
The Release Team maintains GNOME's six-month time-based release process, and is responsible for defining the product in a broad sense, and ensuring that it continues to meet community-defined maintenance policies (stuff like API/ABI compatibility, where work is done, etc).
Like the maintainers of individual modules, it is not a democratically elected group. If a member should leave, the team will choose a successor — amusingly, this has often been done by following the advice of the departing member!
It may not be a democratically representative group, but because the Release Team is delegated by the GNOME Foundation to serve the project — not the other way around! –the developer community could easily overturn a bad decision by the Release Team. If the situation warranted it, the community could even ask the GNOME Foundation to replace the Release Team!
I can't quite imagine that ever happening though, because members of the Release Team know that they serve the desires of the community, and practically every decision is made on the basis that it properly represents those desires.
Sometimes the GNOME community has found itself unable to make a particular decision at all. This is less of a reflection of GNOME's decision-making capacity in general — or lack of technical leadership to do so — than it is of the impossible decisions themselves.
For instance, despite the many years of flame-wars and criticism, there has never been a clear answer about Mono. The GNOME community doesn't "support" it, but in large part, doesn't want to shun it, either.
That was an impossible decision because it meant telling members of the community — friends! brothers and sisters in freedom! — that they were not wanted. For all the legal and technical arguments in the world, the haters never understood this simple problem.
Mono is still a special case. It's still in limbo. Some decisions are impossible to make.
How does the decision to take on a huge new release effort happen in a community that supposedly "has no technical leadership"?
What happens after that decision is made is an entirely different question — a whole community of individuals contributes a huge amount of work! — but what about the decision to make it happen in the first place?
A meritocratic project doesn't make a decision like that at the drop of a hat. It would require lots of agitation and convincing, plenty of groundwork, heaps of preparation.
Remember, the GNOME community had been talking about GNOME 3.0 as a concept since at least 2005!
I believe we can credit much of that agitation, groundwork and preparation to the sheer dedication of a single person. It was, without a doubt, an incredible expression of open, meritocratic, technical leadership. It moved the needle.
He began, like everyone, without any involvement in GNOME at all. Today, he is what I would describe as the architect and father of GNOME 3.0.
He would ever so predictably deflect that praise on to the entire community who rallied around him.
Thank you, Vincent Untz.
Disclosure: I enjoyed working for Canonical from 2004-2006, and although I have occasionally been accused of shilling for Ubuntu since then, I suspect few at Canonical would regard me as their #1 fan at the moment. I haven't been involved in GNOME for quite some time, and generally try to avoid thinking about it very often.
]]>Every now and then, the inexorable passage of time is rudely interrupted, and the natural path of history is changed before our very eyes. It is incredibly rare, I grant you, and most often involves a weapon of some description, but it happens.
In our story, that "moment" is the week starting Monday October 6, 2008.
Those of you who invest in the stock market will probably double-take, and believe I'm referring to Black Week, the stock market crash of 2008. Thankfully, no.
By curious coincidence, one of the most defining weeks in the entire history of GNOME — and a turning point for Canonical's relationship with the project — happened to take place during a week-long stock market catastrophe.
But there's a little prehistory to cover before we get there…
May 30, 2005: My presentation about GNOME 3.0 at GUADEC, now infamous for the attempt to recast growing discussion about GNOME 3.0 as Project Topaz — Three Point Zero — in order to avoid thinking in terms of version numbers, and… 10×10.
December 23, 2006: Conversation about GNOME 3.0 continues, to the point that a clarification is required: "There are no plans for a GNOME 3.0 release at this time."
January 15-20, 2007: linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney. The hottest piece of hardware at the conference is the OLPC XO. The Collabora guys run full-screen video chats between their OLPCs and laptops! The conference bag, designed in late 2006, is smaller than a laptop bag, but — just quietly — the perfect fit for a 12″ laptop.
June 7, 2007: Clearly inspired by the low-cost OLPC, ASUS announces the EeePC 701 at COMPUTEX. It is immediately blessed as "revolutionary". It ships in October 2007 and as every other vendor follows, the EeePC defines the "netbook" market. All 800 lca2007 attendees look at their conference bag with fresh eyes… and fetch their credit cards.
April 15, 2008: Having facilitated a successful GTK+ hackfest, the GNOME Foundation Board decides this is a highly productive use of funds, and asks for more hackfest ideas.
June 3, 2008: Nine months after the EeePC ships, Canonical announces the Ubuntu Netbook Remix user interface and custom distribution for OEMs. Mark Shuttleworth writes about the release and says, "directly or indirectly Canonical will help to bring that innovation to KDE and GNOME and hence to the wider Linux ecosystem."
Permit me, for a moment, to effusively praise UNR. Although the design was not wildly different to other netbook user interfaces shipping at the time, the simple composition and execution were brilliant.
One standard GNOME Panel at the top of the screen. In the top left corner, a button to hide everything and show the full-screen launcher. Next to it was a window switching applet which made your windows look and work like tabs. Application windows were automagically maximised. Very little vertical space wasted.
From a GNOME perspective, the UI changes were tightly contained: Two new panel applets, a full-screen launcher, and a little daemon to do the windows maximisation.
I absolutely loved it back then (the screenshot below is from July 2008), and I still use some components of UNR on my laptops to this day!
Sadly, UNR was also Canonical's first major upstream collaboration blunder.
None of the UNR components were proposed for inclusion in GNOME. No Canonical developer approached the GNOME community to say, "Hey, we built this cool netbook stuff, maybe it could form the basis of a new UI profile for GNOME!"
The UNR UX was built by Canonical in private, largely because it was commissioned by a third party. Most Open Source communities prefer that feature design be done "out in the open". Bit of a problem there, but not insurmountable.
GNOME developers have a long history of dealing with corporate contributors and commercial realities such as this, so a quick explanation of the situation and a plan to transition to a community-developed model would most likely sort things out.
After all, the individual UNR components were small, simple, tightly defined and easily consumable. They weren't libraries, they didn't require API changes. Put together with standard GNOME components, they redefined the user experience… and beautifully so!
None of it happened.
June 11, 2008: Greg Kroah-Hartman gives a Google TechTalk during which he claims that "Canonical does not give back to the community".
Late June, 2008: The "Desktop Experience" team is created within Canonical, with Ted Gould and Mirco Mueller as the first members. The changes are more official as of July 3.
July 7-12, 2008: GUADEC in Istanbul, Turkey. Federico Mena-Quintero introduces Document-centric GNOME to much excitement and interest. A seed is planted for the future…
Recognising the growing desire to renew the GNOME developer platform by accepting the first API/ABI break in 6 years, and to encourage long term planning for future changes, the release team announce that the regular March 2010 release would simply be blessed as GNOME 3.0. The news is famously revealed as GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0.
Vincent Untz, Federico Mena-Quintero and Owen Taylor approach the Foundation Board to suggest hosting a GNOME user experience hackfest.
July 30, 2008: Ted Gould blogs about putting a menu at the top right of the screen (replacing the big "off" button in Ubuntu's panel), with IM presence, user switching and session management items in it. Work on a modified fast-user-switch-applet (FUSA) had already started privately in early July.
August 27, 2008: The modified FUSA package arrives in the Ubuntu development release, Intrepid.
September 10, 2008: Mark Shuttleworth announces the formation of the Canonical design and user experience team, saying:
We focus most of our effort on integration. Our competitors turn that into "Canonical doesn't contribute" but it's more accurate to say we measure our contribution in the effectiveness with which we get the latest stable work of upstream, with security maintenance, to the widest possible audience for testing and love. To my mind, that's a huge contribution.
Increasingly, though, Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can't imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality.
Mark's post does not go unnoticed. Although the GNOME community is understandably wary, it is widely regarded as an indication that Canonical would build their capacity to contribute upstream, particularly due to the reference to Greg K-H's criticism that "Canonical doesn't contribute". The GNOME dudes employed by Canonical are as excited by the prospect as everyone else.
The very first commenter asks if Canonical would learn from the mistakes of the past, and opt to work closely with upstream projects. Mark responds, concluding with:
One can't be an effective core contributor in hundreds of projects, so in a real sense it is "us and upstream", as you describe it. The question is whether we can build a productive relationship, not whether we can be totally absorbed.
The commenter is… not totally convinced by Mark's answer. He gets no response.
September 17, 2008: Greg Kroah-Hartman launches what can only be described as an ambush on Canonical during his keynote at the Linux Plumbers Conference. An entire hour is dedicated to support his conclusion that:
Canonical does not contribute to Linux plumbing. Companies who rely on Linux must contribute, or they are at the whim of others. Developers who are not allowed to contribute to Linux should change jobs.
This time, Matt Zimmerman replies, noting that while Ubuntu has lots of users, it simply does not have a lot of developers working on the kernel, let alone contributing upstream! He concludes:
To present his commentary in this way is indefensible. LPC is promoted as a productive community event aimed at solving problems, and Greg has used his voice as a speaker to promote a much less honorable agenda.
(My view: Greg was wrong to present his concerns the way he did. His expectations were incredibly high for a four-year-old company with no kernel engineers. Yes, it would have been nice if Canonical contributed more, but if they don't have the capacity to do so? One aspect of Greg's criticism that was 100% spot-on was his implied concern about the free-rider problem.)
Update: So if you think these posts are just about me being anti-Canonical, know that in this section, I have been too fair… worse, I ought to know that Canonical had kernel engineers in 2008, because it did before I left in mid-2006! Thanks to Greg K-H for pulling me up in the comments.
That said, the kernel engineers were doing pretty much the same what Canonical was doing with GNOME prior to the DX team: Pulling together a kernel for each release, fixing bugs, minor integration work, etc. Greg's expectation that Canonical contribute by way of major module maintenance and new code does not align with the company strategy, for better or worse.
September 18, 2008: Ted Gould blogs about the ongoing modified FUSA work in Right side status.
September 24, 2008: GNOME 2.24 ships. The new development series and module proposal period begins. Even though there are some technical barriers to contributing the modified FUSA directly, no attempt is made to bring those changes to the GNOME community in any form.
Had Canonical's FUSA work been done upstream from the beginning, Ubuntu may not have had to swallow the GDM version skew it required. Ubuntu didn't adopt the "new" GDM until Ubuntu 9.10.
(I half remember other issues delaying adoption of the new GDM as well, perhaps things like LTSP, but couldn't find any documentation to jog my memory.)
October 1, 2008: Based on the announcement of the Canonical Desktop Experience Team, Vincent Untz reaches out to Mark Shuttleworth to invite Canonical to participate directly in GNOME 3.0 development.
October 6-10, 2008: A small group of GNOME technical and design leaders meet prior to the annual Boston Summit, to fundamentally re-imagine the GNOME user experience. It is arranged and led by Owen Taylor, Federico Mena-Quintero and Vincent Untz.
Key GNOME designers and developers are invited, including volunteers and employees of most contributing organisations. A couple of people decide to invite themselves. There is only one non-designer, non-developer, non-GNOME-participant, company CEO present.
I will point out the peculiar circumstance of Red Hat's desktop team. They just wound up the failed Online Desktop initiative. Remember Mugshot and Big Board?
They were Red Hat designed and developed projects, with some intent to be relevant to GNOME, but… even documented and developed on GNOME infrastructure, they… well, just weren't.
By October 2008, the Red Hat desktop team had realised that their approach to planting the seeds of open innovation was not working. Closed ideation and design didn't lead to community adoption. Such an ambitious project needed broad buy-in from the beginning.
Besides, GNOME clearly needed love, and was particularly receptive thanks to Vincent Untz's leadership on GNOME 3.0. The Red Hat desktop team decided to refocus, spend time on GNOME itself, and hopefully by doing so, encourage other stakeholders.
Everyone has ideas. No one arrives with a fully conceived plan, intending to impose their singular vision on GNOME. The open, group-defined agenda doesn't suit such a dastardly plan, anyway.
The first two days are dedicated to "idea generation", general discussion, and mind-expanding presentations. The rest of the week is dedicated to polishing the ideas, and turning them into something useful to GNOME. Vincent Untz writes on the final day:
So, since Wednesday, we're working on the three topics that emerged during the first day: desktop shell, access to documents, and adding effects/animation to the desktop experience.
The output is fantastic. Each group produces a wiki page describing their discussions, all of which are detailed, thoughtful, and met with excitement:
It is understood that Red Hat will contribute developers to the effort. Other stakeholder companies are encouraged to invest resources.
Neil Patel posts mockups of the desktop shell to the wiki page which describes the design.
Vincent Untz reports at length on the desktop shell sessions, saying:
I'm convinced that we should start prototyping those ideas so we can play with them, and see what feels good and what feels wrong. It will need testing. We will make errors. And maybe it's a dead-end. But many people really liked this and I believe we reached consensus during the hackfest that we wanted to see this in action.
Federico Mena-Quintero writes about the file management sessions, concluding with a note that Seif Lotfy had been working on a journal in Mayanna, a maintained fork of the abandoned Gimmie project… "Seif and I have been talking about how to proceed." By the end of October, the GNOME Journal project is born. Today it is known as Zeitgeist.
Jon McCann is excited about the outcome, and gives credit to Ted Gould and "the Ubuntu folks" for ideas such as showing presence, user switching and session termination actions in a panel menu (the modified FUSA applet work). He posts some of the sketches he drew during the hackfest.
Mark Shuttleworth writes, "The GNOME user experience hackfest in Boston was a great way to spend the worst week in Wall St history!"
Though there wasn't a lot of hacking, there was a LOT of discussion, and we covered a lot of ground. There were at least 7 Canonical folks there, so it was a bit of a mini-sprint and a nice opportunity to meet the team at the same time. We had great participation from a number of organisations and free spirits, there's a widespread desire to see GNOME stay on the forefront of usability.
He concludes by emphasising the file management discussions, "At the end of the day, bling is less transformational than a fundamental shift in content management. Kudos to the folks who are driving this!"
October 29, 2008: Early private development begins on libindicate, a client library and applet for displaying persistent notifications in the form of a menu. No freedesktop.org specification exists for doing this in a cross-desktop manner.
October 30, 2008: On the cusp of the Ubuntu 8.10 release, Mark Shuttleworth blogs about user switching, presence and session termination in the new FUSA menu. He says:
This work was discussed at UDS in Prague with a number of members of the GNOME community. I was also very glad to see that there's a lot of support for a tighter, simpler panel at the GNOME hackfest, an idea that we've championed.
In Jaunty, we'll likely do some more work on the GNOME panel, building on the GNOME user experience discussions. There was a lot of discussion about locking down the panel more tightly, which we may pursue.
Ubuntu 8.10 ships later that day. At the time of release, both the System menu and FUSA menu display the session termination items. Had this work been done upstream…
October 31, 2008: Owen Taylor tells desktop-devel-list that the first code for the new "gnome-shell" has landed in Subversion:
OK, a little bit of code for gnome-shell now has hit SVN. It doesn't do anything that interesting yet …. it's just about caught up to gnome-0.9 or so: a gray rectangle with a clock.
The new project has a wiki page, IRC channel, mailing list and code repo. It's a thing!
November 10, 2008: A DBus protocol is conceived for communication between the libindicate client library and the applet which displays the menus. It is not based on a freedesktop.org specification.
November 20, 2008: Private development begins on Notify OSD (codename: alsdorf), a replacement for notification-daemon which displays notification "bubbles" based on an unpublished Canonical design specification.
November 24, 2008: The GNOME 2.26 module proposal period closes.
December 5, 2008: Early private development begins on what will ultimately become the messaging and "me" menus, based on libindicate.
December 8-12, 2008: Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View. The notification changes are discussed simply as a matter of integrating the DX team's work. KDE doesn't support the (Galago!) freedesktop.org notification spec, which will require more work.
December 11, 2008: Ted Gould writes about showing persistent notifications, without the clutter of notification icons. It is written in the form of an introduction to a new idea:
I think that a reasonable approach is to consolidate them into what I'm coining as a "messaging indicator." The goal of the messaging indicator is provide a simple and clean way for messaging apps to provide the notification to the user that other people are trying to talk them while not having to put something in the notification area.
Here we're seeing a IM message coming in. The notification disappears into the messaging icon and the message can be found underneath that icon. Nothing complex, but it allows the user to know that all of their messages are a single tidy place and there is only one graphic required on the panel for all messaging.
Sounds… familiar.
December 22, 2008: Mark Shuttleworth shares a flash demo of "proposals Canonical's user experience design and desktop experience engineering teams" introduced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit: Notifications, indicators and alerts, saying:
Experiments are just that – experiments. They may succeed and they may fail. We should judge them carefully, after we have data. We are putting new ideas into the free desktop without ego.
The best ideas, and the best code, will ultimately form part of the digital free software commons and be shared by GNOME, KDE and every distribution.
So, for those folks who were upset that we might ship something other than a GNOME or KDE default, I would ask for your patience and support – we want to contribute new ideas and new code, and that means having some delta which can be used as a basis for discussions about the future direction of upstream.
None of this work is ever contributed upstream.
Since at least July 2010, Mark has made a number of claims about the User Experience Hackfest. They are all roughly of this form:
We had described the work we wanted to do (cleaning up the panel, turning panel icons into menus) to the Gnome Shell designers at the 2008 UX hackfest. McCann denies knowledge today, but it was a clear decision on our part to talk about this work with him at the time, it was reported to me that the conversation had happened, and that we'd received the assurance that such work would be "a valued contribution to the shell".
My answer to this is very simple: It doesn't matter in the slightest whether or not this discussion happened. As Mark has said while making similar accusations: "code talks".
Lots of people come to FLOSS projects and excitedly promise to work on something. The promise is irrelevant. Good communication? Sure. But ultimately, what really matters is whether or not they deliver. I know this intimately because I have been on the giving and receiving end of it.
Only three Canonical-related modules have ever been proposed for inclusion in a GNOME release: evolution-couchdb (for 2.30), simple-scan (3.0) and libappindicator (3.0). Only one of those was related to panel menus — the libappindicator client library, proposed in February 2010, 16 months after Mark's "commitment" — and it didn't even include the relevant user interface components!
Each of the chunks of work we've taken on: notifications, indicators, the menus, and all the rest, could be valuable to GNOME and has been done with the intent that it be useful to GNOME. Our feeling is that base politics are playing a bigger role in the final decisions than they should, and we're disgusted that that be the case.
Base politics? Disgusted? None of these things, in a useful form, were ever proposed for inclusion in GNOME. The facts simply do not support Mark's extraordinary accusations.
Disclosure: I enjoyed working for Canonical from 2004-2006, and although I have occasionally been accused of shilling for Ubuntu since then, I suspect few at Canonical would regard me as their #1 fan at the moment. I haven't been involved in GNOME for quite some time, and generally try to avoid thinking about it very often.