Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 21 April 2002

# 2:15 PM

From Slashdot: Havoc Pennington (one of the core GNOME hackers) has written an essay on free software and user interfaces. Very interesting read.

If you hit some of the hyperlinks you eventually run into a bunch of people making the assertion that graphical user interfaces are always and intrinsically better than command line interfaces. These days, every time I run into this I want to confront the person making the assertion with Jo Walton, who is emphatically not a "power user" (whatever that means) and yet is much happier at the command line than in a GUI, simply because iconography doesn't work on her. Period. She cannot, for instance, read comic books, because they don't make any sense: in the same way that a text in Hebrew makes no sense to someone unfamiliar with the language. It seems unlikely to me that she is unique in this.

I agree with Havoc that excessive customizability is a bad thing in one user interface, overall. But I claim something else, which is that a computer ought to have completely different user interfaces which offer roughly equivalent functionality. Some people like the GUI, others the CLI, and yet a third group want to use each for the tasks it's good at. For evidence, I point at Mac OS X, which has got hard-core Mac junkies poking at the Unix layer and liking it, and hard-core Unix junkies poking at the friendly GUI and liking it.

# 12:40 PM

So as I'm getting out of the shower this morning, a big spider falls off the window ledge into the tub. I do not freak. I rather like spiders, come to that. It kept trying to climb back up and failing because everything was slippery and wet, so I did the only sensible thing: I laid strips of toilet paper down the wall and side of the tub to make a path with some traction. It caught on real fast, and is now happily back at its web in the window frame.

It only now occurs to me that I could have just taken a towel and dried off the wall and the side of the bathtub. Oh well, next time.

Brenda Clough's novella May Be Some Time is available online from Analog. It's about what might have happened to Titus Oates, who was on the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole, and whose body was never found. There's a spoilerful review at Infinity Plus.

# 3:30 AM

Blue poster-stickum works better than candle-mold putty for holding little obsidian pebbles down so I can grind designs into them. Now I just have to figure out what I'm doing wrong that causes the diamond grit to wear off the grinding bits. Not enough water, probably. Or it might be that a cheap $10 set of grinding bits is, well, a cheap $10 set of grinding bits (but you'd think they'd sell the good ones at a jeweler's supply...)