This Saturday, apart from being my birthday, is also an international day of action on climate change. There will be, amongst many other things, a demo in central London, which quite a few of my friends from a variety of different backgrounds are going to. There's more info on the demo and the campaign against climate change more generally on the website of the Campaign Against Climate Change.

The government here in the UK is now committed to some sort of climate change bill this parliament, thanks in no small part to the dedication of groups like Friends of the Earth, though as described, amongst other places, in George Monbiot's book Heat, most scientists appear to agree that far far more than what is currently on the table will be required in order to avoid starvation, suffering and migration on a scale never before seen in human history.

The government is also unfortunately, in my view, engaged in the diversionary tactic of passing the responsibility of action required back onto us. Of course it is vital that we all begin to understand our role in building a different kind of society, with an economy which is not reliant on high levels of carbon emission, and the government has an important role to play in this. However, though I hope to be proved wrong, it seems that initiatives like their television advertisements and "carbon footprint calculator" are droplets of change when compared with the carbon legacy ocean created by airport expansions, road building and support for expansions in fossil fuel extraction and new coal-powered electricity generation.

Incidentally, I just calculated my carbon footprint (to whatever accuracy can be determined in five minutes by a small flash animation with rather limited questions and answers). Apparently 9.84 tonnes of carbon are emitted each year in my name. Anyone know what 9.84 tonnes of carbon looks like? Sure sounds like a lot of pencils... Calculate yours here.

Stephen Fry - recently self-outed techie - has posted a rather excellent bit of text on world-wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee this weekend. Erm, I think this used to be called his "Guardian column" or something like that ;-) But anyway, whether you read it in the Guardian or on his blog, it's well worth reading if you're not familiar with this rather inspirational pioneer.

I did find it rather funny though that Fry points out that the omnipresent acronym for World Wide Web, WWW, is significantly (3 times) more syllables than its expansion. Perhaps this is one of the first acronyms designed purely for ease of use on computers (especially since it's the same key three times), rather than to save time in speech...

I wrote a month ago a little about my experiences with GNOME and KDE, the two most popular desktops for Linux-based systems, and, being a long-time KDE user, decided to spend a month using GNOME. A month later, I will now relate my experience and opinions.

So... has a month using Ubuntu's default choice of desktop environment convinced me of the wisdom of switching more permanently? Have I been shown the error of my kways? In summary: No. For me personally, the difference between the two desktops is still stark, and GNOME has very little to offer anyone used to the functionality and configurability of KDE. Plus, in other places, I found that it just didn't work.

Firstly though, some positives. GNOME's default look has certainly been well polished. Its use of shadows, and choice of fonts are well made. The integration of compiz enables a fun and useful three-dimensional desktop, with very few glitches given how new the software is. Plus, it's easy to use (if a little confusing to configure). "GNOME looks better" is often the first comment people make when they realise that I'm a KDE user. They've perhaps installed KDE and played with it for a bit, but never long enough to want to customise its looks very much. And let's be honest, the default look of KDE (even the pre-release KDE 4) really sucks.

Ubuntu's default GNOME look.

Ubuntu's default KDE look.

However, we are urged not to judge a book by its cover, and this is no exception. Firstly, because KDE's look and feel is so highly configurable when compared to GNOME (my KDE desktop is altered almost beyond recognition from the default), but also because looks aren't everything.

As ever, it's functionality that really counts. Now, GNOME's feature-set is fairly standard, and what it does do, it does relatively well (for the most part). It has a web-browser (either Epihany, or else Firefox fits in well), which does what it says on the tin, it has an email and calendar program (Evolution), a movie player (Totem), music player (Rhythmbox) and a file browser (Nautilus), all of which do what you would expect, but there are very few added extras. This was my initial opinion upon first using the system, and it came to be backed up over time.

For example, take Totem, the movie player. Upon firing it up, you have three buttons, play/pause fast-forward and rewind, plus the usual menus to load files and discs, and the beginnings of some playlist support (though the way this worked really wasn't obvious to me, and there's no "add to queue" option in any other application). So far so okay, but there's strangely no stop button, and the position of the seek bar doesn't seem to particularly relate to the current position in the movie, especially when used with the mouse-wheel, which sends the film backwards then forwards somewhat in an oscillating motion. Okay, so there's a couple of bugs, but that's okay, I'm sure they'll be ironed out.

I've alluded to the main annoyance I found with Epiphany and Nautius already, a real lack of context-sensitive options for files and links. Why the default option for mp3 files is "open in movie player" I don't know, but for files to be opened in either Totem or Rhythymbox there is no "add to playlist" option. While I can live without this for films, it's fairly useful for building music playlists.

Another program of which I've become a heavy user of over the last couple of years is yakuake, a terminal emulator which sits just off screen, ready to slide onto the screen at the touch of a button (rather like the one first used in Quake and still in many games). Doing without this has been the most clumsyfying part of the last month; I just don't like having to alt-tab through dozens of windows to find a terminal. And yes, I tried tilda, but it didn't really cut it.

Okay, so I'm going to stop picking at small annoyances now (which to be honest can be overcome), and deal with some more fundamental issues for me. These issues can be largely summed up as a lack of integration and configurability. Integration, something which KDE does so very well, is just not there in GNOME. Okay, so all the programs use the same "open file" dialogue, but there is a general lack of awareness between programs, exemplified by the lack of "add to queue" option already discussed. I dislike using Firefox under KDE since it is not part of the integrated desktop, and hence its context-sensitive options must all be separately configured by hand. Konqueror behaves much better, knowing how to deal with items from local directories, ftp servers or websites. Epiphany falls down here however, providing usually only a simple "open link" option, which behaves like a poor cousin of Firefox's.

The lack of configurability of menu options doesn't make it any easier. Take Evolution, GNOME's flagship email and calendar program. As with most GNOME apps, it does what it says on the tin, but no more. In KDE, one consistent feature is that you can right click on a menu bar and configure which buttons it has. I find this most useful in KMail, where I replace the single "reply" button with three: "reply to author", "reply to all" and "reply to mailing list". All three have very different but highly useful functionality. I could not find a single way to achieve this in Evolution. The most it allows me to configure the menu is to decide whether I want text next to the icon or not. Evolution's threading support also lacks features to the extent that it makes a large folder of threaded messages difficult to handle, but I won't get back into small grievances...

This post was not intended as a blow-by-blow review of GNOME or KDE, and as such I will not cover every feature and gripe I have with each. There are enough websites around which do that already. Instead, I hoped to simply point out a few of the possibilities which are available, but which GNOME's lack of extended functionality prevents users from perhaps even realising exist. GNOME works, don't get me wrong. But Windows XP also works, as do Windows 98 and AmigaOS. When moving from Windows to Linux for the first time, it suddenly seemed that my computer would behave how I wanted it to, rather than me having to conform to the paradigm provided by its user interface. The feeling has been comparable but contrary this last month. KDE certainly gives the user more control over their interactions with their computer than GNOME does, and has more functionality. I believe that GNOME's restrictive "user friendly" design approach is bad for the cause of free software, which should encourage people to think about and use their computer in new and imaginative ways (such as IMAP resources for contacts, session management and consistency between handling of files wherever they are based), rather chaining them to what the designers think they want. Open, extensible and configurable functionality is the only way for this to be an option for the vast majority who are not prepared or able to dive into the code themselves.

Like many, I've recently become quite a frequent player of Facebook's scrabble game, Scrabulous. However, I have discovered something rather odd with its dictionary. Specifically, it told me that:

English IS a valid word.
Welsh IS a valid word.
Scottish IS NOT a valid word.

Hmm.... okay. Perhaps it's to do with the fact that English and Welsh are also languages. Let's try some more.

French IS a valid word.
Belgian IS NOT a valid word.
German IS a valid word.
Italian IS NOT a valid word.

Okay, not the language thing.

What about words, which apart from being nationalities, are also part of a noun, like "French letter", "Welsh cake"? So what about "Spanish omelette", "Swiss cheese", "Danish bacon", "Irish stew"? I've no idea how many of these are actually in the dictionary (whichever dictionary).

Here's what Scrabulous says:

Spanish IS NOT a valid word.
Swiss IS a valid word.
Danish IS a valid word.
Irish IS NOT a valid word.

Here are some more:

Greek IS a valid word.
Egyptian IS a valid word.
Indian IS NOT a valid word.
Mexican IS NOT a valid word.
Australian IS NOT a valid word.
Afghan IS a valid word.
British IS NOT a valid word.

Hang on... "Afghan Hounds" but no "British Bulldog"?

I don't have a full copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but can anyone shed any light on this?

As any regular reader of this blog will know, I'm an every day KDE user. After a history of using SuSE and Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice for the past year or so has been Kubuntu, the KDE flavour of Ubuntu. Well, after a few discussions at this month's Birmingham Linux User Group meeting, which coincided with the new release of the Ubuntu family, the Gutsy Gibbon, and having spent quite a bit of the evening strongly advocating KDE, I've now decided to give GNOME a try.

For those not up on the particulars of modern Linux-based desktops, GNOME and KDE represent two quite different approaches to a fully fledged desktop system. The UNIX world has always been modular, and though the graphical windowing system itself is provided by X Windows, much of the look and feel is provided by the particular window manager or desktop environment you choose. The two most fully featured and mature desktop environments are KDE and GNOME.

A bit of history is probably in order here. Many people moving over to GNU/Linux based systems spend a while wondering why there are several different options, and why the community doesn't just pool its effort into one really good system. There are many reasons why that doesn't always happen in open source development, but the KDE/GNOME case is particularly interesting.

KDE was begun by Matthias Ettrich in 1996, in an attempt to create a consistent and easy to use desktop environment for UNIX systems. It was immediately a very popular project and gained developers fast, the software progressing quickly. However, many in the free software world (including myself) had concerns about KDE, since it was based on the proprietary QT widget libraries, owned and developed by the Norwegian company Trolltech. Of course, the GPL does not allow free software to be linked with proprietary software, and hence the GNU project could not support KDE. Debian subsequently dropped the system from its distribution.

A number of responses came about from this move. Listed in no particular order, the first was an attempt to create an alternative, free version of QT, called Harmony. Secondly, many keen KDE people created the KDE Free QT movement, an attempt to persuade Trolltech to relicense QT under a free licence, and subsequently to guarantee its availability should Trolltech disappear or abandon QT. Thirdly, the GNOME project was founded; an attempt to create an alternative desktop environment from scratch, free from any involvement with proprietary code or reliance on commercial developers.

Those who know where I stand on free software would expect that I would have been a supporter of GNOME from the start, and back then they'd have been right. I was doing my undergraduate degree at the time, and the university computers included both GNOME and KDE. So, I used this early version of GNOME for a while on both them any my own PC.

GNOME has always felt different to use than KDE; a bit like the difference between AmigaOS and Windows 3.0, both of which I'd been used to switching between previously, so after a year or so of using KDE, GNOME took a bit of getting used to. My initial reactions were quite positive; it looked good and was quite fast, though much of its functionality appeared to exist in framework documents rather than the software I could see on my screen. Still, it allowed me to achieve a consistent look to the desktop (something previously lacking on Linux really) and the look was highly configurable. It looked better than KDE.

However, over the next couple of years, to me, GNOME stagnated. KDE, on the other hand, came on leaps and bounds. KDE's file manager (kfm back then) and subsequently its lightweight web browser (konqueror) appeared technically superior to Netscape Navigator, which the GNOME systems hadn't been able to supplant. But by far the best feature of KDE back then was the interoperability of the applications. Items could be dragged and dropped between virtually any application, and they would know what to do with them. Even the early implementations of what is now known as 'kparts' technology allowed programs to be run inside others when Microsoft Office was still struggling to achieve this properly.

Then in 2000, the freedom issue seemed to disappear. Trolltech released QT under the GPL, resolving the issues about distributing modified code, which their own QPL created. By this point, an agreement was also firmly in place with KDE to ensure that if Trolltech folded or abandoned QT, then the code would be released under a BSD style licence.

By this time, both GNOME and KDE were progressing very quickly, though KDE remained consistently a year or two ahead of GNOME in terms of features and stability. Since the new millennium, both systems have been very usable, though each retaining a distinct look and feel. At this point I was already very comfortable with KDE and its ever expanding suite of programs. I found GNOME a bit like KDE before I'd upgraded it. Added to that, GNOME lacked (perhaps still does) a uniform way of doing various tasks (such as right clicking on a menu bar to configure it). Its file dialogs were chunky, and it just didn't have as many features as KDE. I stuck with KDE.

The choice of desktop system by the main Linux distributions at this time was fairly evenly split. Many had no obvious bias, whilst Redhat used GNOME, SuSE favoured KDE, and both contributed heavily towards the development of their respective desktops. Debian now included KDE again, and a host of other systems lay on each side.

Then, in 2003 Novell bought SuSE, and subsequently also brought in GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza and his company Ximian, who were responsible for a large chunk of GNOME development. It was no great surprise, therefore, when Novell's SUSE (note the large 'U') announced that GNOME would be the preferred desktop for their Linux distributions, with which they hoped to compete with Redhat in the enterprise market. Luckily, SUSE still do contribute towards KDE, though the announcement did send ripples across the KDE world. Controversially, Miguel has now led the charge on Microsoft compatibility through the Mono project, and despite the guy having done great work on pushing open file formats in recent years, I've heard frequent criticisms of his style of "starting" projects, only to leave others to pick up the pieces and make the thing work.

Arguably the most popular desktop Linux-based system today is Ubuntu, itself a remodelling of that stalwart of the Linux world, Debian (rather excellently named after its founders, Deb and Ian). Ubuntu however, was also firmly behind GNOME, and despite the fact that KDE and XFCE based flavours of the distribution were later released, the lion's share of development and use remains focussed on GNOME. With all this extra focus, surely GNOME has now caught up.

Given the number of distributions now preferring GNOME, its no surprise that its user share has also increased. A hunch tells me that more people at my Linux User Group use GNOME than KDE, and this month we were treated to a demo of GNOME-based Ubuntu's latest features. It looked good. Ubuntu, being primarily developed for GNOME, tends to be slightly quicker off the mark with new functionality for the GNOME flavour than the KDE one, but how much? So, as someone who has now used KDE since version 1.0, and only dabbled with GNOME occasionally, perhaps it is time for me to take a closer look.

So, my "project", if you will, is to spend a month using GNOME rather than KDE on my home PC. I've installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon from a fresh install, and there isn't a KDE application in sight. I'm going to attempt to get to know the GNOME way of doing things. I aim to compare GNOME and its applications' approach with the good KDE functionality I know I like. I also hope to discover some new stuff too.

In a month's time, I will write about my experiences, and whether it's tempted me to make a more permanent switch.

After all, KDE and GNOME (contrary to many mailing list debates) are not enemies, just rival siblings, willing each other to do well. And it's good to get to know your friends better, right?

Having just read Pete's Ashton's post on Feedburner, I have just finished converting this site over to use Feedburner to generate its RSS feed, rather than using the built-in Drupal one.

The main reason for this, it has to be said, is so that I can have a look at lots of juicy stats about how many people subscribe to my feed, where they are, and how they read my posts. I've been going on a bit of a stat frenzy lately, with the addition of the little map thingy on the bottom of the left panel of the main page, pin-pointing out my readers' locations. It's all just fun really, and this is a totally pointless post, other than to say that thanks to Dave Reid's module and a bit of php hacking myself, if you subscribe to my site's feed, you should notice no difference at all. If you do have any problems, then please drop a comment to this post and let me know the problem!

Why are feeds "burnt" anyway?

Today, 21st September, is International Park(ing) Day. I just came across this, thanks to TreeHugger's post. The motivation behind the day, which originated two years ago in San Fransisco, California, is that so much of our cities' space is given over to vehicles, so why not, for a day, reclaim a bit as a public park. The idea is therefore pretty simple: find a parking spot, and turn it into a park for a day.

I didn't search for long, but the only example of the day being observed here in the UK was in Manchester last year. It'll be good to see if this grows this year. One in Birmingham would be great, and if I'd have found out about this earlier, I might have been quite up for helping to organise it.

This reminds me of a Reclaim the Streets style party which we held in Leicester a few years back, occupying part of Evington Road and moving in with barbeques and music. That day was a huge success; over a hundred people surprised themselves by joining in, bringing food, music and sofas out onto the street. It was actually kind of weird to see everyday people just stopping and chatting, having a free bite to eat, meeting new people and going away saying what a good idea it was. One local shoe shop owner even spontaneously suggested that we hooked up a sound system to his electricity supply to keep the thing going rather than use a generator.

Anyway, I'm all for the kind of thing that keeps public spaces for people. So, if anyone knows of a local effort or feels like doing this next year, let me know!

(Photo copyright Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Thanks Scott!)