Omens?

So, I had this dream that it was Sunday, and I was at denizsarikaya's place to celebrate nancyrihakova's 30-th Birhday, but it went on longer than expected, and I ended up falling asleep there. When I awoke it was Monday and the party was still going, but it had ... expanded somewhat. It seems it got moved to a convention center while I slept, so there were all of these long corridors and conference rooms addorned with streamers and balloons, and there were people EVERYWHERE. And then I got abducted by shapeshifting aliens, at least one of whom was disguised as a rather large iceberg lettuce. After that the dream became far more routine and normal, so I woke up.

Party Plans?

So, the big question is: when are people supposed to start heading over to Denzo's for this supposed celebration, and are there any paraphenalia that one should bring?

Yup.

From a User Interface perspective, I'm afraid I have to agree completely with this article on Why Linux has Failed and Why Linux Will Fail Again, except for the title. All of this man's complains are eminently fixable in Linux. Its even possible to fix them and STILL have a distro that a systems guru would be able to be happy with. I think the answer is to provide a For Your Convenience™ brand Drooling Moron's Linux™ (now with napkins!). It would have a whole set of wizards and smart configuration settings and would never ask any configuration quetions. The menus will be indexed by tasks, not by software, and they will do the maximum amount of hand-holding. (Note that this requires that the distro already be more sophisticated and more polished in UI than any I've yet come across.)  There WOULD (somewhere) be an 'I'm not a drooling moron' button, that should the user ever click it, he would go into mere-moron mode. There would be a few configuration options here, (colors, resolution, etc.) but not much else. There would also be a new button to click to advance to 'Naive User' mode (perhaps with a time limited skill-testing question). An actual systems guru would be able to find and click on all of the buttons to get himself into guru mode in less than 2 minutes, while we expect Joe Moron to never actually get out of drooling moron mode.

Then again, if we're even more subtle and slick, we could actually have each mode try to make the user think, just a bit, and see if we can't slowly educate them.

Sim Thoughts Come Full Circle.

I started out, months ago, thinking of writing a simulator that museums could use to allow vistiors to experience VR walkthroughs of reconstructions of ancient habitations and interact with the people living there. Then I got onto thinking of other archeo and paleo uses for this thing (with an interactive 'level' editor that was designed to work with real data, field researchers could try to reconstruct areas while they are still being excavated, and with support for non-human creatures, one could try to model dinosaur ecologies as well as mating and hunting behaviours). From there I progressed to the idea of a general purpose person-and-object simulation engine that could do a thousand things, and could be used as an open-source replacement for the Sims.

Just today I was watching a show on early firefighting equipment preserved in an american museum, and I found myself thinking "I wonder if you could get a museum to digitize artifacts and upload them as object templates for my simulator. That way historical reenactment folks would have materials to work with, and the museums could get free advertising."