1. Being first with the news
2. Carrying exclusive news
3. Offering unique analysis and opinions

However, recently a lot of the group blogs are carrying content that I just skim over. There are the occasional ones that I click through, bookmark, comment or blog about it, but over time their percentage has dipped down. In fact, they have forced me away from the whole river-way of reading blogs.

So, I am going to change my reading pattern. I am going to unsubscribe from the group blogs that carry the first 2 USPs. Instead, I will rely on the individual bloggers I follow to direct me to the interesting news, events and topics. I might get the news a bit late, but I will get it with their opinion, which I value a lot, and they have not missed yet. I avoid the memes, they seem to carry more trendy content than what interests me.

The individual bloggers are more significant than the group blogs for what I am trying to do with this blog. I will try to monitor this over time and if successful, it will save me a lot of time and effort. And I hope that I will get space to subscribe more to individual bloggers.

By usage I believe that code folding is primarily for reading the code, not for writing it. The programmer writing the code should not worry about which parts of the code should fold and which should not. Leave it to the reader. It is not a function of the data, it is a function of the view. So I prefer not to pollute the code with folding directives and such. Folding has not helped me in organization of the code either.

If there is a lot of boilerplate code, I would prefer that it is in fact NOT folded exclusively. It can lead to a good starting point for refactoring the code. It can be valuable if it is assisted with multiple, handy ways of navigating the code.

Of course these are my preferences, and that is how it should be. Editors should allow programmers to use their own way of folding code and viewing it. If folding gets enforced, it sure is going to irk some programmers.

This is good news, definitely for those who are interested in using Flash more extensively. However, this might start a trend which starts seeing Flash as a one-size-fits-all tool. Also, people still need the plugins to access the content, and all platforms are not getting equal love from its creator.

This development takes it one step higher, but it is still away from being a native of the Web. I hope that other search engines too adopt this new way of indexing flash content.

It sounds attractive and liberating initially, but it will have its own problems. You could guess the web site address by visiting the popular .com, .org or .net domain names. Guessing might not work any more. The only way to get it would be to use search engines to look for them, hoping that they have not been dropped from the index.

It will be interesting to see the new subdomain organization here. I hope we do not start seeing company.apple.

I also believe that a lot of confusion exists because of the other part of the URL - www. Many, including yours truly, believe that www is no more required. http://ifacethoughts.net/ is enough, http://www.ifacethoughts.net/ adds cruft and creates confusion. This is not only with web sites - I have seen email addresses given me with someone@www.example.com. I know a lot of web sites where the developers have failed to handle redirection between these two. I hope this will be addressed some day at a higher level.

Coming back to the new possibilities in the TLDs, this might actually start another industry, unless ICANN restricts. People might buy the more global domain names like .products, .mumbai or .blog and make them popular enough for people to get subdomains there.

Interesting developments, it will keep us busy for sometime.

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats which both humans and machines can read. Microformats were recognized and adopted by certain popular tools and that has made them more popular than the competition. However, this news is going to cause a bit of ripples in the community.

I too was warned of this when I had microformatted this blog. Apparently it is a commonly discussed issue. BBC had, in fact, asked for help regarding this. So they did give it a fair bit of chance. Unfortunately, as John Resig says, RDFa has not made many headways (still a candidate recommendation), and the jargon seems to be killing its popularity.

I think it is time for the microformats community to take this up and solve this issue once and for all. There have been too many complaints about this, and affecting accessibility should be considered as a show-stopper. I hope this news will trigger a solution to this problem.

This is big news, from multiple aspects. Symbian is already the dominant OS in the mobile market. Opening it up will lure in a lot of developers and businesses to perhaps adopt it in new ways.

Having said this, being a favorite in open source needs more than just the license. It will be interesting to see how the community is built around it and how is it treated. That will be the key in retaining the dominance in the mobile market against Linux.

Either way, it is a good news for the users. We now get more transparency and say into products that we already use. It also opens doors for more potential in future.

I believe ODF winning has no value if the document users cannot reap the benefits of interoperability. It is not about a war between ODF and OOXML, neither is it about war between companies. It might be so for the corporate giants. For us, the users, it is about which of these makes our life easier. Which of these will give us freedom of using the products of our choice, which of these will let us access the documents whenever we want, and which of these will free us from the clutches of vendor lock-ins. Today the answer is ODF, and I believe it would have helped if all this effort had gone into improving it instead of creating a competitor.

It is commendable that Microsoft has committed to embracing ODF. Unfortunately all the talk is still at the technical level, not about benefits for the users. Finally, it is not about ODF or OOXML winning, it is about the user’s win!

GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. We shouldn’t feel bad; Windows Vista made the same mistake. Nobody cares about Vista, because XP allows users to accomplish all the same goals. Even if Vista didn’t have a bunch of regressions, nobody would really care about it.

I do not agree with everything in there, but Havoc gets the reason right.

I might have a bigger problem though, with the computer-is-a-desktop paradigm. I think our computers have to grow beyond it. We do so many things with it that a desktop is an insufficient and inefficient abstraction.

XFCE has already made me adopt new ways. I now minimize the applications I am running on the desktop. The application launch icons are pretty useless, as I mostly use shortcuts to launch those. In contrast to the current trend in desktop environments, XFCE helps me think about it.

Another aspect I am going to experiment with is whether it would be better to make the desktop task-oriented instead of application-oriented. It is a nascent thought, so some of you might find it completely frivolous. I have observed that people use computers to do tasks and modelling the desktop based on this might be more cognitive to use.

I also think that we can do more in the communication space between the desktop and the applications.

I have tried various desktop environments, but the current trend seems to be tilted more towards the eye-candy. One interesting project is Mezzo, but I think we really need to think beyond the desktop for new developments.