Some people can be so right: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-googley.html
Designers can learn a lot from the simple rules mentioned in the article. I strongly believe that a lot of website die because there are little really good designers.
I’ve been looking for an alternative to the gnome menu for a while now. I think I’ve found it: Ubuntu System Panel. It does take a bit of commandline to install, but just follow the procedure described under the Installation menu.
The panel gives you the stuff that I liked in Vista. There is a box where you can filter your applications. I’ve tried to use gnome-do for this, but I prefer a more visual way of working.
A great tool!
There has been a lot of talk lately about enterprise 2.0 in our company. It’s supposed to be the enterprise version of web 2.0, so: online collaboration, distributed content generation, distributed responsibilities, … This comes down to: wiki, blogging, but also a change in the company organisation.
I think that real enterprise 2.0 doesn’t have anything to do with technology, since all the technology was already there and it was already used. Enterprise 2.0 is about a change in mindset. Knowledge sharing has always been one of the major issues in enterprises. Componence (the company I work for) is not an enterprise, but we do work on 7 locations over the whole world. This means that our problem with knowledge sharing is in a way representative for larger companies.
Contact between employees is mostly through Skype. I’ve never been in a company where they are so happy when you have 15 skype chats open; this means you’re working hard. Chats, conference calls, video conferencing, mail, it all works, but the knowledge that is exchanged doesn’t stick. It’s lost after the conversation is over. Two or three people have learned something and then we go into the regular creating of presentations, text documents, mindmaps, etc.
But real knowledge should be shared with other people, discussed, enriched and USED! Wiki and blog give the company a way to do that. But then the employees still have to understand what they are doing. Don’t blog because your boss tells you to, don’t post something on wiki because it’s good for your bonus. It’s change in working: the knowledge in your head is worth nothing until you do something with it! Share the knowledge, actively join the discussion with other people in your company (our outside).
Me personally, I don’t have enough time to do all that shit… Ehm… Ah….
It’s going to be a long way before this Enterprise 2.0 thing will really work.
I tried Mepis, OpenSuse and Swiftfox today.
Mepis promised good hardware support, so I thought that might be good for my sony laptop which still isn’t working fully. Sadly Mepis did not even understand it was running on a sony. Overall pretty crap.
OpenSuse was even more interesting. The live CD didn’t boot. It seems there are problems with IDE DVD players. Come on! It does look nice in Virtual Box, but I don’t want to install it without seeing if it supports my hardware. Overall disappointing.
Swiftfox is great! It’s a version of Firefox that is compiler for your processor. It’s faster then Firefox and I have the feeling that it’s more stable.
Small stuff:
Small things can make life more beautiful 
Why is AWN such a crap product. It looks beautiful, but it crashes, the UI is hopeless and some stuff just doesn’t work. I really don’t understand why it seems to be so complicated to create a dock for linux that just works. Is that really so hard to do?
A dock should work like AWN, but then not show the stuff that AWN shows when you startup. The notification area should look a bit better then it does now. The hide/show should work, can somebody think what should happen when you open a menu or popup (the terminal popup is great) and the dock hides? Should the dock even hide then? It should be possible to put the dock on the upper, left and right part of the screen.
All pretty basic stuff, but it seems our coding friends out there can’t get it done. I hope they will at some point, because the Gnome panel is worthless and it’s time for something new. Until then I’ll have to live with AWN.
I replaced the default intel 810 driver with the experimental mode setting driver. This made my external monitor work.
Section "device" #
Identifier "device1"
Boardname "Intel 945"
Busid "PCI:0:2:0"
# Driver "i810"
Driver "intel"
Screen 0
Vendorname "Intel"
EndSection
The graphical tools to set the graphics card, monitors and resolution are still crappy. I guess this is related to the intel board because it never worked correct. The strange thing is: I know it can work. I’ve changed my xorg.conf in Gutsy and I could get it to work as it should. But it looks like the graphical configuration is still complicated in X 
I installed Hardy (8.04) on my laptop because Gutsy did not run very nice out of the box and I was too lazy to make it work smoothly. So I went for the beta version. So far it runs ok. There are glitches, but it’s stable and it looks good.
I run it on a sony vaio TZ21MN, the smallest of the TZ series.
What works:
Still strugling with:
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