Christopher Hitchens is not just an author, he's also a journalist and speaker. His style is very characteristic for its intellectual depth and eloquent expressions. There is an interesting debate on Google Video among four critics of religion where he takes part.

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is one of the best books I've read about religion. It is also a rather deep book. Unlike Sam Harris, who apart from presenting examples also includes a lot of his own reasoning, Hitchen tries to present his arguments by finding quotes and references for everything. This might make the argument more convincing, but it also makes it a bit hard to follow with the flurry of examples he draws upon.

Hitchens makes many points in his book, but one of his central and probably most interesting arguments is that religion is man made. And from there on he finds it not excessively difficult to explain the many atrocities associated with religious groups over the centuries.

Today's example sponsored by gdm. Say that you have a certain session (gnome, kde, fluxbox, whatever) and you're experimenting with another one which isn't working quite smoothly yet. Then you'll be stuck going back and forth a few times. And you'll probably see this dialog:

The Ubuntu gdm theme is nice and clean and it's easy to figure out how to change the session. This dialog does the job without much ado. But then you find this:

After you've changed the session, assumed that the change succeeded, stopped thinking about it, and moved on to start the session by logging in, you get this idiotic dialog.

This is horrifying in several ways. First of all, the gdm login screen is completely clean of any dialogs, so there is no hint given that you should expect a popup. Secondly, once you've set everything using the secondary controls at the bottom of the screen, you just want to login and be on your way. When I'm in that mode, I've basically learnt to hit Enter as many times as it takes to get me through, so I'm very likely to accidentally accept the dialog since I don't know it's coming.

And finally, the question of whether to make the session the default one is completely cut out from the menu for changing the session, which shows a complete lack of consistency. Here I'm done doing something and later on I have to answer unexpected question about something I already finished.

Not to mention that the "unsafe" choice is selected by default, I might accidentally change my default session just by clicking Enter twice after putting in my password.

Worst of all, even when I know that the popup is coming, I absolutely do not want to have to answer it again and again just because someone couldn't figure out a better place to put that option. Make it a checkbox on the previous dialog, that's what everyone else does, why must you be so special?

I'll be nice and I'll just call this sloppiness.

EDIT: Bug filed.

UPDATE: Bug fixed in gdm 2.21.

Remember how Ubuntu came out of nowhere and just like that made everyone else feel like they're lagging behind? That's really what makes Ubuntu stand out, there is a real understanding of user needs in their leadership. The past couple of years they have empowered so many people who were interested in Linux but just didn't know how to get started or fix common annoyances (like lack of media codecs, say). And that policy hasn't gone unnoticed, I certainly feel like Fedora, for example, is doing a lot better job at embracing a wide audience than before Ubuntu ever came to light.

The latest in Ubuntu reiterates their ability to empower their users. If you're a Ubuntu user you probably know about something called 'Personal Package Archives' (ppa). It is currently the designated method of installing kde4, until it goes mainline. Well guess what, Launchpad now offers a ppa to every user! How's them apples.

This means you now get your own little apt repository you can use, and offer your packages through the same mechanism as any officially supported package, without resorting to .debs and custom "here's how you install it" instructions. Fabulous! :star:

Here's my shiny new PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~numerodix/+archive

For the time being I'll only be keeping undvd packages there.

Unfortunately, debian packaging is something of a cult and not the easiest thing to get involved with. They are nazi about following guidelines to-a-t and therefore wrapping up a .deb takes considerably more time than writing an .ebuild or building an .rpm. I appreciate the care that goes into it, but I wish they would find a more efficient mechanism for it. The debian/ directory should be more of an abstraction, not actually having to go and hand edit the files in there, that's silly.

User interfaces take a whole lot of effort to get right and that's the main reason I'm not particularly inclined to write gui apps. There are so many examples of bad user interface that I could spend my life writing about nothing else. Ui is hard mostly because what seems correct for one person gets forced on everyone to use. It's also because good ui takes good ideas and those are not as common as you might think. A lot of the bad ui we have to put up with comes from one group of people copying not so much the ideas but the results of another group without understanding them equally well or realizing them the same way. There's a lot of ranting in ui circles about how we're all using decade old paradigms in user interfaces, but where is the rich vein of fresh supplies?

Well, sometimes ideas do actually surface. Jensen Harris talks about the process of redesigning the gui for Ms Office. It's an insightful talk that approaches the problem of the well known gui (that has caused us all a lot of pain) with the appropriate humility towards the frustrated user. It also shows off some of the improvements (which are major!) that makes the 2007-series gui a lot more intuitive by making commands whose names we know appear visually and offer dynamic previews. Obviously, these ideas are specific to the domain of formatting and don't apply to any application, which happens to coincide with why they represent a big step forward: they enrich the experience in the domain they are for.

As you might expect, I'm not particularly interested in Office or any products coming out of Microsoft in general as they do not address my needs. But I sure do wish projects like OpenOffice (which, again, we're stuck with) would stop trying to clone the bad gui of old Microsoft products and do a little brainstorming themselves. Other examples that continue to live on in infamy include the gimp (how many thousands of dialogs have you clicked through today?), vlc (great technical performance, horrendous gui) and gvim (the gui offers next to nothing over the keyboard ui).

Skiing over Easter is something of a tradition and the Swedish resort Åre is the ideal place for it. It is not only the largest and most popular resort in Sweden, drawing in people from all over the country, you'll also spot skiers from Norway, Finland, Estonia, even Russia.

This year's trip was blessed with excellent weather, which always makes a big difference in the mountains. Here's a bunch of pictures from the resort (hosted on deviantart).

There's also a short clip of me skiing down the slopes (hosted on youtube).

Now that's a way to spend Easter! :star: