Look at this picture. It’s a screenshot from apple’s AppleTV. Look at it carefully and hard to find something wrong with it. You see, the reality is that a UI can tell you a lot about how a company thinks, especially a company that invests a lot in UI design.

What bothers me in that UI is that the “My Movies” menu item is the very last on the video menu. It’s placed by Apple even below the “Trailers”, which are nothing but ads. This shows me how little Apple respects the filmmaking artists in general. If you don’t endorse, via the UI even, the personal video items that folks do at home, you will eventually get users who will pay less attention to the filmmaking art in general: either via not becoming the future Spielbergs, or even via stop buying as many movies as they do now via the iTunes Store.

And that would be the epitome of the read-only culture, as Stanford professor Larry Lessig calls it. Users who are passive in front of iTunes’ offerings, instead of being endorsed to shoot their own videos too. And Apple does this damage without any help from the MPAA/RIAA front, it has just fell on its own pit, without realizing it. This very small detail, shows to me, that Apple is not more modern or forward thinking than MPAA/RIAA themselves (at least when it comes to the AppleTV department), because they can’t see the big picture either. They are in this only for their little store in the corner, without realizing that when time will be 7 PM the market will be empty of shoppers.

The sad part is that this is the same company that also develops iMovie, FCE and FCP.

I wrote Gnomefiles.org back in 2004. It still is the only GTK-only software repository out there that’s still maintained. It works pretty well, and it’s full-featured-enough to get it going. Originally, Gnomefiles would do an average of 25,000 pageviews per day. Then, sometime in 2006 things got slowed down and today it doesn’t average more than 12,000 pageviews per day (June stats). It’s on the track for a slow death.

Sure, you could blame the fact that package managers work better these days, or that Ubuntu is the clear winner, or that GTK+ app development is pretty sterile these days, or that the site hasn’t changed visually or whatever. But honestly, none of these reasons is strong enough to bring the site to its knees rather than flourish it through the years.

The real problem is with the GNOME project not embracing Gnomefiles. Their web team promised me back in 2006 that if I do some changes to Gnomefiles they will add the feed to most pages of Gnome.org (a special feed that I made just for them that doesn’t contain non-Free apps). I did all the changes they asked that were logical to implement without spending months of redesigning and breaking stuff, but after 2+ years, no cake. Quim Gill has emailed me since then to say that he doesn’t know anymore what’s going on with that new version of Gnome.org site and why Gnomefiles is still not better promoted. The only link Gnomefiles gets from Gnome.org is hidden away. We are lucky if we get 20 referrals from there daily. Not only that, but the blurb when they link to us wrongly says for 3 years now that “we do not clearly identify free and non-free apps”, which is wrong, because that’s one of the things I changed when asked to by the Gnome guys in that mailing list 2 years go (e.g. in this example, it is well-described that’s not Free).

The GTK+ community is small, and if the big guy doesn’t embrace you, you’re eventually dead. This is not a community that’s as big as Apple’s, neither we are VersionTracker. Gnomefiles is grass roots, it’s small, but it works and it needs the support of Gnome.org. There is nothing more I can do to make Gnomefiles more popular with the users (no Mr developer, there won’t be any DOAP support but that’s hardly the problem here because the problem is more regular users, not necessarily more developers).

I have put a feed at OSNews, I maintain over 260 apps all by myself (out of 2010 apps listed there), but all this is not enough without the main project site also helping out with more prominent links to the site. And no, I don’t collect money from the ads, Gnomefiles belongs to David Adams’ OSNews LLC which pays for the server costs, I always did Gnomefiles for the love of it.

I believe that Gnomefiles offers a unique service to the Gnome/GTK+ community, but I need support from Gnome.org too. I am not willing to see the site die a slow death; that’s not why I wrote it. I prefer to completely pull the plug, or at least never update it ever again and become irrelevant even faster, rather than to see it towards such a fate.

* There’s a chance that we might move back to Europe for a year. It’s going to suck if this is going to happen. Moving between continents is not that easy.

* I just watched this. 20 whole minutes for an eye and lip job. What a freaking waste of time. If make-up takes you more than 3 minutes per day (e.g. a lip gloss, a quick shadow and eyeliner spread just to tone a bit your natural characteristics), then you are a living as a slave of mother nature: you slut out to get more guys — even if you don’t realize it. No, stupid, it’s not just about “looking pretty”. You want to look pretty in order to get more guys. You know it deep inside. Honestly, I never, ever, understood the point behind spending hours in front of a mirror, or spreading brown paste onto your face. That’s some stupid shit, right there. Same goes for expensive jewelry.

* Last Friday’s ‘Battlestar Galactica’ episode was the first episode I enjoyed since season 2. So far, like season 3, season 4 has been really sucky, slow, and full of spiritual gibberish that made no sense whatsoever.

* Magic Bullet Looks for Vegas is now out. The new version is a bit faster and adds more looks and control over the way you can grade, plus a “blur the background” template that I actually used in two shots of my HIJK video (I was a beta tester for Vegas’ version of MB Looks so I had access to it some months ago). Overall, this is a software package that deserves the money it costs. Color grading is not something you should be forgetting on your work.

* I recently started writing some music CD reviews for The OWL Magazine. I am only reviewing local bands, so through this opportunity I got to know the Dangermaker. Amazing band! One of the top-5 indie bands in the whole of the Bay Area (which has over 350 rock bands). Go to their site to download four of their songs for free.

* I decided to not buy the Sony DVP-FX820 external monitor for now, but to use the Linux-based Pontis PMP that I had in my closet for 3 years. Apparently, it has an AV-in, so I could use that for focusing and framing with the 35mm adapter. The good thing about this device is that it’s light and easily rotateable, although its 3.5″ QVGA screen and battery life are not ideal. I wish my Archos had on-board AV-in, that would have kicked ass, as the Archos has a much better resolution, 16:9 screen, and battery life.

* I have found over 10 bugs on Windows Live Mail in the month I am using it. I hate its guts.

I found this on YouTube today, about the city I am living in, Foster City.

The creator of the video also says in the comments that: “the reason this series of videos was posted because i discovered a large community of reptilians in the foster city area… including several on the police force in foster city.”

Yeah, I guess there are a lot of Mexicans in the police force over here. I am an alien too. I am from Greece.

Jeez.

Dr Michio Kaku Ph.D, astrophysicist and theoretical physicist, professor in the City University of New York, book author and science TV personality, on several cool topics. If you are available for 15 minutes today, watch the following:

* Michio Kaku on the future of civilization, explaining the different Types of it and why we are currently living in the most important part of the human history. Kaku is explaining in terms of economy, technology and sociology the steps we will take to become a Type I civilization (aka “New World Order”) and how people who oppose this are simply “terrorists living in fear unable to embrace change”. Must see.

* Michio Kaku on aliens and physics, explaining how limited SETI is, and how limited we are as a species to be remotely interesting to aliens that pass by. Kaku, like most modern scientists, obviously believes in the existance of intelligent life elsewhere, and he thinks that it’s possible that we have been visited, it’s just that we are too stupid to even take notice that we have.

* Michio Kaku on String Theory, explaining how the string theory might be “our” only way out of a dying universe in a few billion or trillion years.

* Michio Kaku on the possibility of Time Travel, and why there are no time paradoxes (e.g. killing your mother before she gives birth to you) as the harmony of the multiverse will create an alternative timeline in order to cater for the paradox.

* Michio Kaku on Artificial Intelligence being 100 years off as of yet and people who say otherwise are just way too optimistic. I fully agree with him on his opinion, and it’s something that I have discussed before.

* A nice idea for a bigger screen for camcorders is to use a Nokia N800 or preferably, a Nokia N810. With the well-understood USB-master hack you can connect a USB TV card to it, and then connect your camcorder’s composite-out cable to that TV-card. Then, you can utilize either the already ported MPlayer application, or you can port XawTV or equivalent such TV-oriented X11/GTK+ application. The only stinky point is to find which supported USB TV card model to buy and to then sit down and port its already existing x86 Linux driver to the ARM platform.

* I updated to AVG Free Edition 8.0 anti-virus the other day, and it made my Trillian super slow. When I click to a contact to open a chat window, it takes up to 10 seconds to open. I had to exclude Trillian from the AVG resident shield to get back the speed I had before. The previous version of AVG didn’t have this problem and it really bothers me when software becomes slower and buggier as time goes.

* Sharon Stone said that the Chinese earthquake was “karma” for the Chinese treating the Tibetans bad. I guess no one told her that many of the people in that area were Tibetans. For a woman with Mensa IQ over 140, I sure did expect more.

* This one is for the laughs. I remember the wars we had in the Gnome community about 4-5 years ago about the “spatial” Nautilus. The Red Hat masterminds behind the spatial crap were keeping their stronghold and they were not easy to back down. They didn’t want to listen to the community. And now, after Red Hat is nowhere to be found in serious Gnome development, not only the spatial stuff are turned off by default, but we have tab navigation and actual full MDI tabs. How times are changing, huh?

* I watched “The Andromeda Strain” on A&E last night. It was a very good sci-fi mini-series, originally written by book author Michael Crichton.

* I don’t know what the hell is wrong with youtube for 3-4 weeks now. 2/3s of the videos I watch don’t load fast enough, so I get start/stop on these videos all the time, making them unwatchable. No other video service has this problem. Might be a Comcast throttling problem again specifically for youtube, or youtube running out of bandwidth?

* Americans are among the peoples who would kiss in mouth for casual greeting kissing. E.g. a mother kissing her son coming back from school. It puts me off seriously. Cheek kissing is barely acceptable in my opinion, but mouth kissing among family members yucks me. I know that this is just a getting-used to thing, just a peculiarity of a different culture like the ones you find on any culture, but it still yucks me (sorry my American friends, I just can’t stand potential herpes-spread).

* My brother saw the video I shot for the HIJK the other day and he couldn’t believe it. He kept saying “how did you do that?”. I guess I am not the average Greek middle-aged wife with 3 kids and no interests. He could also not believe that the band doesn’t have a contract. He kept saying “but the song is good, like the ones we listen to the radio, how is it possible to not have a contract?”. You see, in Greece, if you are 1/10 as good as any random indie US band, you get a contract. Music is that bad there (sorry my Greek friends, I just can’t stand Greek music).

* One of my favorite rock tracks of all time, Ranting of Eva’s “Bright Side”, is now available for a free download. You will need a myspace account to get it. Trust me, that nostalgic tune is the shit.

* Got a new mp3 player for an upcoming review, a Sandisk e280R 8GB. Looks good so far.

* Birthday tomorrow. I will be 35. I feel old. Think that we go to the same sushi restaurant for lunch every Saturday. This is the epitome of being old: repetition and habits. Love it though. I think I need to start playing Bingo.

Stormrider challenges me with the following survey:

* How many years do you use a computer for?
About 16.

* Are you a newbie, casual user, power user, master, umber, jedi?
Power.

* What’s your main computer?
A Dell Hyperthreaded 3.06 Ghz P4.

* Do you put together your own PCs?
I used to, but I don’t bother anymore. I buy them ready.

* Have you ever broken a computer because of your anger?
Naah.

* What browser are you using?
Firefox on the PC, Safari on the Mac.

* What media player are you using?
WinAMP and iTunes.

* What mail client are you using?
The shit called Windows Live Mail.

* What IM client are you using?
Trillian and Adium.

* Do you run add-ons?
No.

* What anti-virus do you run?
AVG Free Edition.

* Favorite software
Outlook Express is not the most secure software, but it’s solid as a rock.

* Favorite software house:
Google

* Most hated software house:
Electronic Arts

* Favorite hardware company:
Apple

* Most hated hardware company:
Anything cheapo Asian, including HTC.

* Favorite geek PC usage:
None anymore.

* Dream-machine?
The fastest PC you can find to edit AVCHD in real time.

* Was your first video you saw on a PC porn?
Nope.

* Do you modify other people’s PCs when you use them?
Ah yeah, I need to “fix” things.

* Anything embarrassing in your Trash Bin?
Not much.

* Do you spend useless time opening/closing windows in your OS?
Naah…

Stormrider posted a very interesting and as always, right-in-the-mark blog post.

If you want to see what’s wrong with many Greek people today, you simply have to look at one person, who happens to be a good representative of the bunch: Mikis Theodorakis. He is an internationally known composer, and a politician. Even if you might never heard his name, you probably have heard his music somewhere.

And you don’t have to know him to judge him. You just need to read his — pretty objectively written — Wikipedia page (towards the bottom).

Let me vomit now.