Documentation! Documentation! Documentation!

I maintain a few how to guides and general documentation documents for a number of projects and communities, both open and proprietory, and I've come to a single conclusion; documentation sucks. The average user will not read, will not search and will not put one iota of effort into acheiving what they want, if they cannot work out how to do something within a reasonable amount of time. As cynical as it sounds, it's true.

So what can be done about this sad fact? Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps we should make things easier for users. Projects linked with the Gnome project, and itself, are trying this and at times risk annoying the "power users", or advanced users, in doing so.

Unfortunately this isn't always an option for some goals, such as running servers. In this specific subset of documentation perhaps things shouldn't be made easy, to guard people against the dangers. My ex-gf's step parent installed XAMPP for Windows (or equivilent) and then left it after getting bored. This was running on the main household PC, with an unprotected (anonymous access permitted) FTP server. I never did anything about it, for various reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually running as a pubstro right now. So why is this relevant? Because people don't read warnings, in the same manner as they won't do much research on getting software running correctly.

Granted often we all make misguided mistakes on the way to acheiving almost Zen-like knowledge in the field we choose. More often-than-not these mistakes could be, and should be avoided where possible, and that lies with the people providing advice and documentation. Is it really fair that the documentation writers make that decision for other people though? Ethically I believe we should all have the freedom to all make our own choices. Practically this doesn't happen because the world and our knowledge is expanding we cannot possibly be informed enough to make all our own decisions. This is why the tertiary market exists.

The Fonz is the perfect Open Source analogy

No seriously, he is. Only cool things matter, to paraphrase Roy T. Fielding.

We work best as a collaboration when we give people the freedom to explore their own personal wild ideas (or even just reasonable ideas for which the solution has no clear timeline). If we artificially constrain the scope of what can be done based on the group's a priori perception, then we effectively go nowhere new (because collectives fear the new). The fact of the matter is that any one of us could, given adequate energy, rewrite the entire server in a couple months of focused time, and the only thing holding us back (aside from lack of said time) is the fear of acceptance at the end. We need to lose that fear.

This sums up how OS development should be. With the emergence of more and more technologies such as Compiz / Beryl, and the Apache "amsterdam" (or "D" or whatever it's going to be called), lowfat, where people are just doing stuff they want because they think it's cool, I can only hope we will only see more interesting things hit the world in the face, as the year progresses.

Celsius - "healthy" energy drinks for the geek

I spotted celsius earlier on digg, which actually looks quite interesting and I'd happily use it as a replacement for redbull or coffee, especially if it actually helps burn calories more efficiently and wake me up, even if it cost a little more.

It's a shame that it doesn't seem as if anyone is selling from the UK, European mainland yet.

GStreamer for Windows and MacOSx

I quite like the gstreamer project although previously was a little disappointed to see that it wasn't being actively ported to OS' other than Linux at the time. Granted I could've contributed, but I've not got a deep rooted love for multimedia hacking I'm afraid. However, Christian Schaller's latest entry shows that things are changing and the Songbird team are jumping on Gstreamer. This can only be a good thing in my opinion :)

Nice work to all involved!

A geeky valentines present

Aside from the obvious, I gave my girlfriend a Samsung YP-K3 MP3 player (2GB model) for this "special" day. There are several reasons I lumped for this particular model; including battery life, size and the fact that it uses OLEDs. It arrived a touch before 10am, next day - which is impressive as I wasn't expecting it until 1pm. Nice work Amazon.

As for the unit itself, I'm seriously impressed. Visually it's much nicer than an iPod Nano, and it feels a touch lighter. In the box, it visually looks stunning, like a tiny little monolith, coming in a 2 CD sized cardboard case with the words "for you" inside. Very apt for a valentines gift I thought. Once you get it out of the box though, it's a different story. The outside is a gloss finish, and after a long day, some how even the slightest finger mark makes it look like an angry 5 year old has gotten hold of it after a rather messy lunch time. On the plus side, it is easy to clean. On inspection it seems quite well built, but the lack of weight has me wondering whether I should've gone for the aluminium encased Samsung YP-Z5Q as the girlfriend tend to throw stuff into bag pockets. The little thing does generate a little bit of heat, primarily under the bottom end of the OLED screen, which is just about noticable against the skin, but isn't going to cook your leg whatsoever.

There are only two things that honestly disappointed me. One was the fact that they didn't bundle a power adapter. That would've totally screwed up the box design though, and the second is that the FM radio is a bit questionable. Now that could be because I'm sat next to a PC and the aerial for this unit must be pretty small. This can be forgiven in my eyes though - especially as I've used the FM radio in my iRiver about 5 times, if that.

The interface has been well thought out, although it's not quite as slick as the as the iPod interface, and I did discover that selecting an artist and then selecting shuffle will only shuffle through that artists songs. The same goes if you select an album. Whilst that is quite cool, it's not particularly obvious and took a second of being confused for me to work it out. Possibly not something you want to give your Nan then. There are only 2 visualisations on the K3, and both lag behind the actual audio output, which I suspect is due to a slightly underpowered processor. Nothing particularly unusual there for an MP3 player though. The ability to navigate seemlessly was nice as well. The settings menu is pretty minimal, and the fact that the resume setting disables or enables pause to replace stop is an interesting touch. I'm not sure if I like it yet. The final cool thing, which is new to me personally, is that when you disconnect the headphones the song gets paused and the player will then power off after a configurable amount of time.

Overall I absolutely love this device and can't bear to part with it. It's even made me realise that I don't need to carry around my entire music collection - which was becoming somewhat tricky as it now exceeds the storage of my iRiver H320. Samsung are definately on a winning streak, and could be in danger of silently taking over the world. They take the best bits from all the available competitors items, and do them well, and then throw in something cool. In this instance its the OLEDs. In the instance of their TFTs it's their amazing clarity and value, which carries across to their larger cousins, the LCD TV.

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