Have been away since wednesday with my family, but I took the opportunity while I was away to read "Designing from both sides of the Screen" from cover to cover. It's a really excellent read. It not only contains invaluable usability principles but also goes into detail about how create usable programs by including usability in the production process from the word go. I'd really love to see how these methods could apply to open source software production. Maybe I'll do a college project about it some day.

In the book they use "Hubbub" as their running example of an application developed with usability in mind. It's an IM program focused around "awareness". It tries to simulate the interactions that you have with people when you are working close to them. eg. It tells you how actively people are using their pcs, if they are away or typing or just watching hubbub. I really want to see if there are any OSS IM clients with even a few of Hubbub's features. I'm gonna go and try a few out, and see how much info is avaliable on hubbub online.

Rythmbox made a release! It's pretty kincking, but still got some bugs to find. Lot's of people say it's working perfectly, go rb!

Should be getting my offer for CS in Trinity today or tomorrow :)

Got my exams results today. Got 410 out of 600 points which isn't bad concidering I missed about of half of the time I should have been in school preparing for exams. Computer Science in Trinity was 345 points last year so I should be grand. Will find out for sure on Monday.

Going away for the next few days. My family are on the other side of Ireland and I haven't seen them since the start of July :/

Blog is looking good, still need to:

• Make it export to advogato by adding a cron job to my sourceforge account to run Jdub's script.
• Finish writing the style sheet and making the blog entries themselves readable. Need to apply the stylesheets within the blog entries.
• Try and get a web based blogging interface going for when I'm out and about.
• Finish off the blogroll, Create an articles section to the site.
• Make my blog entries interesting enough, and do enough gnome work to be added to Planet Gnome.
• Test my page in IE and Opera.

I'm tempted to add a nice banner image, but the page is so fast and not bad looking so I think I won't.

Am reading "Designing from Both side of the Screen" atm so maybe I can apply some usability principles to the site. eg. It would be nice to have a way to got forward or back through the blogs without using the calendar. I might try the breadcrumbs plugin.

After an hour or two of fscking about with both blosxom and pyblosxom I finally managed to get pyblosxom up and running with all the plugins I wanted and I even used .htaccess to make it the index for the site.

Still need to make it looks better, and secure it a bit better. Would also like to be able to access the site with nautilus. Also need to make it send it's entries off to Advogato.

Exam results and getting rid of the cast on my wrist tomo. Gonna go sleep...

Havent gotten to doing much hacking since I got back on tuesday. Have mostly been trying to get my setup into some reasonable condition. Still need to get epiphany/mozilla and Gnomechat working and get my e-mail organised. Then I need to report some more bugs.

I've been hacking pyblosxom into shape since yesterday. Have created a half decent template. Still need to see about adding Jdub's Hacks, the w3c date plugin and all of my old diary entries from advogato. Then I need to add an articles section to the site. Or maybe I'll just add that to the blogroll.

Then I can start installing this onto sisob.tuxfamily.org...

Just arrived home from Spain. Very tired....

My usability books are here, will start reading them soon..

Just found out about google bombing.

Now just need to work out what to bomb. Maybe linux.com as number one when you search for microsoft. That could be fun.

Microsoft :)

Just got permission to change the default background in Gnome 2.5 which should be around the end of september. That along with more icon theme improvments and the improved background stuff will make 2.6 quite shiny.

Found out that I'm eligable for DSL - must get that organised over the next month

Create a wiki page for the gnome beautification non-project with ideas and todo list and related bugs using a whiteboard query.

Also create gnome-backgrounds module with a few default backgrounds for gnome 2.5 and then see about either getting dobey's xd2 background chooser committed or getting Luca's design implemented.

I've been reading the Gnome HIG from start to finish for the first time and have already filed to bugs. Must look at making the HIG easier to apply for hackers. Will talk to Luca about it. Maybe standard dialogs in libgnome and/or making glade3 produce HIG dialogs by default or improving the instructions in the HIG to make them more practical. Maybe we should add example glade files to the HIG.

Nautilus now has support for updating the disks list when /etc/fstab is changed but IMHO the new disks should also be mounted at this stage too. Not sure if this should be done in nautilus or Magicdev or Kudzu, but it has to be done somewhere to make PnP work nicely.

I wonder if OsX's dock is more usable than the window list in gnome, kde and windows. Must do some research sometime. Newbies really don't understand the window list. My dad has been using windows for 5 years and still doesn't use it.

OpenGroupware has yet to hit a lot of news sites yet. A heavy duty groupware server has now been open sourced. Very exciting, another piece of the puzzle....

Went into a little news stand thing in a Paris metro station and was delighted to see not one but two Linux magazines, and Ximian was briefly reviewed in one of them.

Was thinking it would rock to have jimmac's "origional" add a diary entry to the blog every time a new photo album is created.

- libgnomesu, remove the need to use su or sudo from a console or ever need to log in as root.
- Rhythmbox, stable basic functionality and an active community again.
- Menu Cleanup, the time is now - the panel menus need some love.
- Beautification: Work more with luca and Jimmac to beautify Gnome
- Background chooser - finalise and find someone to implement Luca's design for an improved background chooser. Should pick up backgrounds installed by redhat and Ximian
- gnome-backgrounds, start a new module for use with the background chooser. For 2.5 just some basic backgrounds to show off the new chooser.
- gconf-editor, needs searching and some improved usability.
- theme applet, needs error checking for installing themes. Maybe it should ask what type of theme is being installed. Also support for setting the default background and for art.gnome.org.
- Nautilus - make mime not suck
- System tools - usability testing
- giFToxic - Usability
- control center - reorganisation

There is a lot to be done and I definately won't get to all of it, but it's good to have goals :)

jdub: planet gnome rocks - why hasn't it be announced on footnotes?

Rhythmbox
Development is pretty much halted but it is usable for playing from the library. Walters has agreed to take over the project from Jorn but will not be hacking on it again for a while. Would be nice to have some sort of basic working version to go with Gnome 2.4

GiFToxic
There has been zero activity on the list recently but we did get it moved into gnome cvs and it's lined up for inclusion in gnome-network. I only have a modem connection so can't really help to much with this for the moment because I don't actually use P2P. Hopefully that will change in the future. Also giFToxic development is dependant on giFT maturing.

Libgnomesu
This new package is being developed as a way to run programs as root in gnome. Hopefully it will be accepted into gnome 2.5 and integrated into the panel and the nautilus and used by the gnome system tools. TODO: Test it when I get back and give usability feedback. Get it to a usability level that I can depreciate gnomesu in favor of it.

Website
Get some webspace and maybe a domain name and use jdub's modded blog portal ( http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/ ) and Jimmac's Origional ( http://jimmac.musichall.cz/original.php3 ) to make both a blog and a photo log.

Having fun bouncing around Paris. Found q net connection but it's really hard to type on this french keyboard. funrecords: please do put together a solid proposal for a document based interface model thingy; people will just get pissed off with the constant ranting the way they got pissed off at me, I'll review anything for you.... auspex: If you can get to everything on that list then Gnome is really going to get better over the next few months.

Last time I said I was taking a break from Open source I really didn't - I just couldn't stay away. But this time I'm going to another continent and I'm not bringing a laptop and will have limited net access. Gotta go un-subscribe from a few mailing lists. See you all on the 10th August :)

Ordered "Desiging from Both sides of the Screen" and "About Face 2.0" as recommended by Havoc and others. Will have them to read when I get back.

GLIS

Came across this, the "Gentoo Linux Install Script". It's an dialog based console install script for Gentoo that aims to both take the pain out of installing Gentoo as well as letting you do all of the configuration at the beginning of the install, so that you can then leave it to install unwatched. I downloaded it, gave it a quick looking over and e-mailed the author with some usability ideas. He was very open to input and said he will use my ideas when he gets to improving the UI.

I've been hoping for a way to make the gentoo install more sane. It's not likely to be as easy as Redhat(TM) for quite a while, if ever, but using glis would make it easy enough for any windows power user. I think that this is a great compromise between the gtk2 install of redhat(using X on the install cd creates problems) and the needlessly hard install that Gentoo has atm.

This fits in quite well with my plans for a gnome distro. I could make a custom stage 3[1] livecd with glis as the installer and you could be up and running with the gnome linux desktop in <30mins. Using gentoo has the benefit that I can create a default package selection but the user will have a massive collection of software at their findertips - so they will get both the sensible "Just Works" environment by default, but if they are that way enclined they can partake the massive collection of software avaliable. Also, from a development point of view - it's much easier to write ebuilds that to produce rpm, I just need to find out how I go about making a customised stage3 tarball.

[1]Stage3 is a tarball of enough binary packages needed to make up a full graphical system. It makes gentoo quicker to install but you loose out on some of the optomisations. But you can still recompile everything later _after_ you have a running system, so I think that stage3 install is the way to go.

Zynot

I think it's a pity that Zynot wont limit itself to embedded Linux and leave x86 to Gentoo. I have plans to do some work with the Zynot gnome/gpe developer, but I think that both he and I still think that Gentoo is where it is at for the desktop.

Distributed Usability Testing

This is something that I have been thinking about for quite a while. Usability testing costs money and Gnome is lucky enough to have sun investing in it's usability, but there is still a lot that can be done by us, the members of OSS projects.

I started thinking about distributed usability testing when my girlfriend started using my pc to check her e-mails. I was using Galeon as my browser at the time(epiphany now) and I filed 2 or 3 bug reports based on problems that she had. Issues that had not really occured to me but that made a lot of sense when she pointed them out.

So what is Distributed Usability Testing? it's testing carried out in a casual ongoing way. All of us have windows using friends and they are perfect to try out OSS software on. There are two way to do this IMHO:

1. If you have a friend/family memeber who understands how important OSS is to you and is willing to put up with doing some actual tasks then you can use them to perform an actual test, the way they are done in usability labs, except on a smaller scale. According to the statistics I think you need to have 5 or 6 people doing a usability test to find most of the problems. So if you can find 6 hackers/users with a friend who is willing to help then you have yourself a free usability test.

2. This way is more sneaky and less regemented. It involves doing usability tests on people who don't know they are being tested. They simplest example is the above story about my girlfriend: you just sit someone down infront of your opensource pc and let them try to use it. Make mental notes of the problems they encounter. Of course it is not always possible to bring people to you pc - so use a live cd like knopix. Tell them you want to show them Linux and see how well it works for them. I'm not suggesting you be blatently dishonest, a lot of the time you can just tell the person what you are doing. On the upside you are mixing Linux advogacy with Distributed Usability testing.

To fully capitalise on this Idea it would be necessary for some usability engineers (eg. the Gnome Usability Project) to make a guide to Distributed Usability testing and to regularly publish usability tests for use by the testers.

Another idea is to join forces with the soon to be created Gnome Marketing project and produce a Gnome Livecd suitable for increaing Gnome awareness as well as doing Distributed Usability testing. I'm going away tomo, but when I get back I may propose this mental idea to the Gnome Usability list.

Blogging

Must get a better blog going next year - one that I can e-mail to like Jeff's.

Fell off my bike comming down a hill yesterday morning and broke my right wrist. My god is it frustrating typing and using the mouse with my left hand. Am working on making sure this won't stop me getting to France.

Need help getting across spainCan anyone tell me how to get from Barcelona to Madrid? The renfe trains are all booked out when I need to go (1st or 2nd August) and plane is bloody expensive. If you have any ideas please mail me at sisobATeircomDOTnet

Just got back from Mayo(west of Ireland). Had a great week. Gnome has been doing pretty well since I've been gone :)

The gnome-themes-list has become really active since I posted to desktop-devel inviting people to discuss Beautifying Gnome. Jimmac and Tigert are involved as well as Luca and Lapo who are all producing great icons. Jimmac has added XD2 application icons as well as XD2 OpenOffice.org stock icons. I'm going to be going away in less than a week but as usual I've got the ball rolling and am not longer really needed..

I'm finished my exams - but not only that - I'm finished my sentence of 14 years in the 1st and 2nd level educations system. Off ot University next year Please-God.

Went out last night to celebrate and didn't get to sleep til 6am. Got up at 10am. There is stuff to be done in Gnome but I'm way too tired to do it. Trying to organise a weekend away with my friends, so Gnome will have to wait till next week.

GUADEC
Last night was the last night of the GUADEC and definatley the first time I've ever seen someone wearing a red hat while out on the town in Dublin. I was out with my girlfriend instead of the hackers, but I did see some of them pass by.

It's a funny old internet: Some people really appreciate the bits and pieces of stuff I do for Gnome, but I've found out recently that I piss off a good few of the Gnome hackers. The funny thing is that if I was them I'd annoy me too. The problem is that I've been posting up waffly threads on the desktop-devel and usability lists wayyyy too much.

The thing is: I'm generally a really impatient person, and I've been sick recently(not just a cold... , ie. I've been sick for the last year) and I've had loads of time on my hands, but I've also not had the energy to do any proper coding really. So I've been keeping myself sane by hacking on and playing with Gnome - which has lead to some useful stuff done by me, but also a lot of spam to the lists.

So what I'm going to do to hopefully sort this out is this: I'm going away til August anyway, and when I get back I'll start contributing more and talking less. In particular I will think things through and do some research on them before I post to the lists: I've been posting too many streams of conciousness type e-mails. I'll try and keep random stupid discussion on gnomesupport.org.

If you are one of the people who I've annoyed in the last while, please e-mail me with any constructive advice you can give me as to how to stop pissing people off. If your one of the people who likes me, e-mail me anyway, I need to be cheered up ;(

GUADEC
Was in at the Guadec yesterday and this morning. It's really weird seeing all these people who I've only ever talked to online. I'm way better at getting to know people online than I am in real life. A room full of strangers really intimidates me. AlanHorkan says I people are likely to cut me more slack once they've met me. Unfortunately I've got exams til wed morning so I'll only get the second half of wednesday at the conference. Hopeing to find Jdub and talk to him about his Gnome Marketing ideas..

God, I sould like a sap, nih..

Exams
Two more exams to go - must go study, goddamn

giFToxi
I got in touch with the giFT developers a while back and we've made a lot of usability and UI improvments. It now automatically starts the giFT deamon if one is already running. We have some good plans for the future, but development is on hold atm while we wait for it to get imported into gnome cvs.

Gnome Beautification
I've been working recently with Luca Ferretti and Jimmac to improve Gnome's default appearance and to improve the icon theme. More details here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-June/msg00042.html

XD2
XD2 Looks really sweet. I grabbed the ximain-artwork package and am now using the Industrial theme. Can't wait till I can get access to some bandwidth to download the rest of it. Still uses some gtk1 thought which is a pain. Can't wait to see all this stuff merged back into Gnome. In particular the big menus, network browsing, printer setup and enhanced control center.

Gnome 2.3.x
Am running this with Jhbuild. Still not stable enough to switch over too - panel has a bad crasher bug and the window list randomly becomes unusably tiny. Appart from that it's pretty sweet. Going to be ever sweeter if we can get some xd2 stuff in there.

Gnome Linux Desktop
I've had some more ideas for this - even a better name, and I have a very good idea of how it should work in my head, but unfortunatly it may be Gnome 2.6 until I am satisfied that gnome is "good enough". We still need some very basic things like a clipboard that keeps text even after an app has closed, and an internet dialer. Not to mention the fact that nautilus has still not replaced the command line for me. I still copy large amounts of files with cp because I don't trust nautilus and still have to use chmod from the command line. Don't get me wrong I love gnome - but I just don't think it's ready for the world of idiots out there.

Wrote this a while back about it: http://gnomesupport.org/wiki/index.php/GnomeLinuxDesktop?action=BackLinks

Life
In the middle of the most important exams of my life and I don't get the results til August, shouldn't writing this, should be studying...

Health
Not that this really belongs on Advogato, but I'm finished by chemotheraphy - hopefully forever. Am going away for a month and a half to recover and grow some hair :)

I Recently found out on the Gentoo Forums that it is now possible to connect to the Kazaa network from linux without using a wined kazaa lite. I don't really have a personal interest in this as I'm on a modem connection. But for a lot of people I know kazaa is that "one app" that stops them ditching windows. So that is what has gotten me really excited about this.

Here's the story: giFT was started as an open source kazaa client, but then kazaa changed the protocal in such a way that rendered giFT useless, so giFT decided to start their own, fully open, filesharing protocal/network; and so OpenFT was born. But more recently someone cracked the kazaa encryption and wrote a FastTrack(ie. kazaa) plugin for giFT. So now we have OpenFT and giFT-FastTrack, as well as the gnutella plugin that comes with giFT: Making giFT the gaim of file sharing. You can use multiple networks at the same time!

giFT runs on multiple platforms, and there are two gtk2 clients for it(as well as kde, OsX, windows and linux-console clients), the better of which seems to be giFToxic. Development seems to be pretty slow, but I've e-mailed the list and am trying to get them going a bit.

The issue that I have with giFT/giFToxic is that too much of the internal of the system of the system are exposed to the user. eg. You must drop to a console and start the giFT deamon before giFToxic will work, and before giFT will work you have to run a console based configuration script that asks you obscure questions about ports, ip address and how reqularly you want your share synced amound other inane questions.

So what I hope to do is:
* Write a gtk2 configuration wizard that will ask less than ten questions instead of 20 or 30.
* Modify giFToxic so that it will run giFT if it is not already running (already mostly written a patch for this)
* Modify giFToxic so that if it runs and giFT is not configured it will launch the aformentioned wizard
* Create a settings dialog to complement the wizard.
* Try to integrate giFToxic with gnome some more. Give it a launcher and an icon, and maybe a notification area applet.

The general idea is that you can then install giFT and giFToxic from source or RPM or whatever, then run giFToxic and it will configure giFT for you and you'll be ready to go without ever having to drop to the console.

I got mentioned twice in the comments here: http://www.gnomedesktop.com/article.php?sid=1099&mode=&order=0 I'm so proud :)

I've sent off some e-mails to people telling them about my planned break from open source. I think that I'll have wound down by mid next week. Need to start un-subscribing from mailing lists.... Also been doing some more thinking about a Gnome distribution. Made a list of Tasks that would be performed by the OS and apps that could be used to perform them. If i ever get it together it'll be 10 times easier to use than any distro today. Just wont be much of a hackers toy.

I'm planning a break from open source for a while. Shock horror!

There are two reasons really. One is that I have probably the most important exam of my life in June. It'll decide if I get in to do computer science in college in September. And I've missed more than half the time I was ment to be in school studying for them. So yeah, I really have to study over the next few months, otherwise I'll end up repeating , and won't get to do computers for another year, and my girlfriend will lynch me - all in all not a good thing.

The second reason is that opensource can be a bit like wet paint sometimes. When you watch it on a daily basis it can get frustrating. As hard as it is to tare myself away from it now, in a few months it'll soooooo much fun to play with all the new toys. New X server, new Kernel, Gnome 2.3, Redhat 8.1, Ximain2, Evolution2, Galeon2, Abiword2, Gaim2, Epiphany, Mozilla GRE(I hope), etc...

I'm also going to be away for July and August, so in terms of contributing to Open Source in any useful way it'll probably be September. But I'm going to make sure that I'm prepared. I'll have money for a new laptop and I'll be starting college and so will have unlimited high-speed internet access. Both of which I will hopefully use for my next project...

The Gnome Linux Desktop (Mini-Distribution)

Ok, so you take the latest Redhat and you remove KDE, all the servers, all the development packages, all the un-necessary console tools and you should have a X, Gnome and a base Linux system left over. This should all fit very easily on one CD. Then you apt-enable the cd and add the gnome apt frontend(and any other software/patches required to integrate apt really tightly with gnome) to the cd.

Then you remove the Redhatisms from the cd. Artwork, menus etc... Then you make a list of Tasks that you want the user to be able to acomplish with this desktop. You carefully research the avaliable options and choose the best package for the purpose and make sure that it is well integrated with the desktop and that the user will have no trouble working out how to acomplish that task.

I don't know why I'm speaking in the second person, I'll stop that now. Anyway I'd make sure to host it in a non-us country so that I can add mp3 and video support. I'd also be likely to merge in some patches to gnome to make it easier to use.

I'd try to always keep it to a single iso, and the installer would be anaconda with gnome artwork. But the great thing about it would be that it would be mirrored in an apt repository online which would have extra packages. This would also let people who already have redhat installed use apt to install any and all package off the net. I'd make sure to always maintain compatibility with the latest stable redhat release, the beauty of which is that I don't have to worry as much about security alerts.

I've been planning on starting a gnome based distro for ages, but linux and gnome have never been ready enough, but I think that in september enough of the pieces will have fallen into place to make a start. I really like the idea of a gnome based desktop distro that you can just throw onto a computer and it will be a production desktop out of the box. There are too may kitchen sink distros and all the desktop distros use KDE and try to clone windows.

If you're interested in this idea e-mail me real quick cus I wont be around on the net for much longer.

Rhythmbox is coming along well. Mark Humphreys and I got the help patch applied. The library is getting faster and soom new crack is being worked on.

Working on trying to get the metacity animation made optional for usibility reasons and to get it improved because minimise animations aren't so bad when they look good.

Havent got a huge amount of OpenSource work done, but i did buy a new bike* and get 80%+ in two school tests.

Rhythmbox: Been working with Mark Humphreys on putting together the rhythmbox documentation. Just need to get it committed.

Gnome: I did up a mock-up of a simple gnome irc client because x-chat is too complicated. Then I found gnomechat which has been dead since july. Great program - trying to find out if it's actually dead

Tried out Abiword 1.1 - man it's looking good, cant wait to try it out on redhat so i can use it's xft2 support. Tryied to get gnomeicu cvs running but couldnt. Gaim for gtk2 seems to be comming alon nicely but I've never been too fond of it.

GNU/Linux: Trying to get my hands on Redhat 8.0 but it's a right pain because of lisencing issues.

* Dual Suspension, alloy wheels, aluminium seat post, y frame, 21 gears, new easy to adjust v-breaks, aluminium gear and break handlebar mounts, high quality no-rust metal all round and a totally indestructable lock - mmmmmmmm

Have taken the plug off my PC and gotten my parents to hide it for me until the weekend - i have ZERO self dicipline and i really need to study. I'm limited to 1 hour a day online on my Dad's Windows box

Nautilus: Gave up - I really need to update to a 2.1 setup and I'm not bothered until it is in garnome or portage.

Rhythmbox: Should be getting bugzilla priveleges soon, Oliver is going to apply my changes to the site tomorrow, released my developement snapshot to the developement list.

Fun: Organising a monty python night with alcohol :)

my bike got stolen today, cycling is the only excercise i get :(

Rhythmbox: I've put together a really nice tarball but Jorn is away, so I can't release it, unless Oliver thinks he wouldn't mind but that is unlikely :(

GNOME Have updated eel, libgnomeui, gnome-desktop and am now installing CVS Nautilus.

Another horrible day at "school" learing things totally irrelevent to my life, like the Irish language....

Rhythmbox
I sent a message to the rhythmbox mailing list suggesting that we make a devlopement snapshot or even a release.

I'm syncing the rhythmbox.org website from CVS and now that I have write access I'm going to add a few bits of info to the install guide a developement pages. And with Oliver's permission I'm hoping to improve index.html

Avagato
I'm really starting to enjoy this site. Was politely asked to remove the mad CSS from my diary entrys by Zach because it was making the Recent Entries page look crap, so I'm trying this entry with nothing but P, BR and B tags. I have to admit that this 14px font is makeing me nauscious ;)

GNOME
Am getting CVS Nautilus to try out the new sidebar - i've wanted a working sidebar for soooo long.

Advogato blog started I've been thinking about starting a web log for a while now, and this site just makes it sooo easy. I can't say I am a fan of the very simple layout of this page though, so I've added to css to help contrast these diary entries and the 'about me' bit above. If I get time I may see if the boys and girls behind this site are interested in injecting a bit of CSS(no bloody graphics please) to bring the site into the 21st century. The fonts are too big, not a very nice face, there is not enought visual distinction between the sections of his page.

My thoughts are perpetually aimed at the future so each entry is more likely to be about tomorrow that today. Also, I send all day at school and only get online at 9pm at night, so I'll probably end up recording yesterdays instead of todays aswell.

OpenOffice.org
Been in touch with Claudio Ferreira of www.openoffice.org.br. He e-mailed me on Sept 13 and is interested in working on OpenOffice.org icon themes and other "beautifications". I'm going to start hacking OpenOffice.org again in October once I have Redhat 8.0 and can see how they have done integrating and beautifying OpenOffice.org. I imagine that the major needs would be a finished gnome icon set and a quickstarter for Gnome2.

* Todo: See about getting in touch with Nestor Dv again(he origionaly started the Gnome OpenOffice.org Theme idea)
* Keep up to date with how Ximian's work on OpenOffice.org (the guy working on it has a weblog)
* See if it is possibe to sync OpenOffice.org widget color with gtk instead of Qt(the default)
* See about making an easy way to commuicate if the interest is big enough to start a "project" - only major problem is that i would prob be the lead but everyone else speaks spanish or portugeese as their first language.

Rhythmbox
I've been helping Oliver out a little with the website - fine tuning the css and adding some content. I now have write access to the site :)

* Todo: Do some more fine tuning and comit changes after checking with Oliver.

Linux
There are loads of new Gnome2-enabled distros comming out :)

* Todo: Order Redhat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 from www.linuxemporium.co.uk as soon as they are taking pre-orders.
* Install Redhat 8.0 as a Demo of Gnome 2.x and Gnome Multimedia meta-project on the laptop to show ppl the awsome power of linux.