Slashdot Mirror

Nice to see that they mentioned dashboard in the article and at Foo Camp.

I think 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source (and Linux, in particular) thanks to the advances made in 2003. Linux is finally a term that is recognized by many businesses, and the concept of 'open source' is invading even the most stoic of companies. More developers than ever are joining the ranks (although many only because they're out of work, unfortunately), and there are lots of cool projects.

Mike Home, who works on Wine, posted a great summary of planned open source developments in 2004, mentioning Wine's continuing development (0.9 should be out in 2004), and planned leaps in KDE and GNOME. GNOME will finally get a full and stable version of Epiphany, too.

Development continues on Perl 6 and the Parrot virtual machine, and I am particularly interested in the development of Dashboard, a GNOME 'just in time' information manager project created by Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame.

Alan Cox should have his MBE this year, er, MBA, rather ;-) And perhaps he'll stop using Welsh only on his diary. And as discussed over at KernelTrap, Reiser4 may also be merged into 2.6, although this is not certain, and may be merged into 2.7 first for further testing.

So, what do YOU see happening in open source in 2004? Fill us in on what you plan to do, and why 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source, Linux, and all. What technologies are going to spring up this time around?

How about this GNOME project that relates all your messaging (and other) info into a consolidated dashboard? A better metaphor than a desktop, especially for mobile devices like "phones".

There's a project which is 'kinda' doing stuff like this. It was started by one of the GNOME/Ximian heavies, Nat Friedman. It's called Dashboard and development is currently going on at a frantic pace.

That has nothing to do with bad luck. It just means that Ximian and people such as Jeff Waugh do a good job in painting a picture.

E.g. Nat Friedman of Ximian told the public at the recent Linux Desktop Conference that the City of Largo had switched to Ximian, somewhat to the surprise of the people at Largo With little tricks like that they try to pretend that GNOME is much more popular than it in fact is.

Nat has a link to a book on his blog that explains such marketing tactics.

Fortunately, there are a few really interesting technologies that have received surprisingly little attention, but which I believe point the way toward Linux overtaking Microsoft, and perhaps even Apple on the desktop:

• Dashboard
  This is a wonderful idea where a "dashboard" essentially acts as a memory augmentation tool. It watches what you are doing and presents information it thinks might be relevant. For example, if you are chatting with someone on IRC, it will look for information about that person and present it to you (such as their name, homepage, recent blog entries etc). Applications can support it by sending it "clue packets" to alert it to what it might want to pay attention to.
• Zero Install
  This software essentially eliminates the process of information by mapping web-servers to the filesystem, and combining this with a fast local cache. If your software relies on another piece of software, it can just refer to its binary or libraries on this "web" filesystem, and the appropriate files will be downloaded transparently. The next time you need them, they will be cached. It is infinitely cooler than DEBs or RPMs, and very flexible indeed.
• Gnome Storage
  This project blurs the line between filesystems and databases, creating much more flexibility than is possible with more conventional filesystems. This is particularly powerful when combined with Zero Install. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with their WinFS that will be part of Longhorn.

Sun's new customers will be pressuring them to integrate technologies that avoid choices that fragment the platform. Revisions to GNOME and KDE that enforce a 3-tier model will allow them to constructively coexist under the same desktop. Samba, NFS, WebDAV, TCP/IP at the data layer, feeding to Java and GNU/Linux in the business layer, with and GNOME and KDE cooperating under a unified windowing system. That kind of integration might even forgo the "desktop" metaphor, perhaps in favor of something more integrated like a dashboard. Now's the chance to steal the momentum at the human/computer interface, and Linux developers worldwide are just the people to do it.

Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.

Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.

This gets me thinking about Nat Friedman's GNU-rope (Grope) project. I heard him talk at ALS back in '98 and then the project seemed to completely disappear. Searching on "gnu.rope" leads to a few mailing list postings asking "where'd it go", but no good information about the project.

The basic idea was to reorder the functions in an executable so that locality of reference was maximized and cache hits were increased. The result is less paging and better performance and memory usage.

The really interesting bit is that the optimization is based on the usage of the program being optimized-- that is to say that my Grope-optimized version of Mozilla might be different than yours based on my differences in usage (i.e. perhaps I browse with images turned off, etc).

The tie-in to the article here is that Nat's system, Grope, used simulated annealing to traverse the n-dimensional space of potential function arrangements and profiled the memory paging of the application as a fitness function of the new arrangement. It's not a GA-- but it's functionally similar.

So-- anybody know what happened to Grope? I'd imagine that a community would spring up around it fairly quickly given the relatively high number of "performance zealots" who are busy "tricking out" their Linux boxes by compiling everything from scratch (think Gentoo) optimized for their procesor. Now they can add the "spolier" or "racing stripe" of having exectuables specifically re-ordered for their personal usage patterns! *smirk*

This gets me thinking about Nat Friedman's GNU-rope (Grope) project. I heard him talk at ALS back in '98 and then the project seemed to completely disappear. Searching on "gnu.rope" leads to a few mailing list postings asking "where'd it go", but no good information about the project.

The basic idea was to reorder the functions in an executable so that locality of reference was maximized and cache hits were increased. The result is less paging and better performance and memory usage.

The really interesting bit is that the optimization is based on the usage of the program being optimized-- that is to say that my Grope-optimized version of Mozilla might be different than yours based on my differences in usage (i.e. perhaps I browse with images turned off, etc).

The tie-in to the article here is that Nat's system, Grope, used simulated annealing to traverse the n-dimensional space of potential function arrangements and profiled the memory paging of the application as a fitness function of the new arrangement. It's not a GA-- but it's functionally similar.

So-- anybody know what happened to Grope? I'd imagine that a community would spring up around it fairly quickly given the relatively high number of "performance zealots" who are busy "tricking out" their Linux boxes by compiling everything from scratch (think Gentoo) optimized for their procesor. Now they can add the "spolier" or "racing stripe" of having exectuables specifically re-ordered for their personal usage patterns! *smirk*

Called "Stuff I've Seen,' the research technology allows a user, from one place, to search and retrieve information from across applications, the Web and file types. Researchers also are working on contextualized search so that searches for relevant information take place automatically as a user is working on a document or creating an e-mail.

Doesn't this sound like Dashboard?

Ah, the sweet smell of innovation. It smells like... well, like the rotting flesh of last year's fresh project.

Since Novell purchased us 3 months ago, we have increased our investment in all of our products, using Novell's resources. And we've been aggressive about driving open source and Linux throughout the company.

Here's a little evidence, all postdating the acquisition by Novell:

- My notes on our new desktop development center in Bangalore
- An article from the Times of India about our new developers there
- The freshly-published (today!) Mono Roadmap showing where we're going with the development platform
- The first entry in our new Evolution blog, describing the plans for Evolution 2.0, to be released early next year
- The announcement and wiki for the Brooklyn GNOME developer's summit we are sponsoring this month
- The announcement that our Exchange connector now supports Exchange 2003

And this is really just the beginning. As you can imagine, most of the super exciting stuff we are doing is behind the scenes.

From time to time since we were acquired three months ago I've heard people say things like "Novell bought Ximian just for XYZ," where XYZ has been either: Mono, our Exchange 2000 connector, GNOME, Evolution, Red Carpet, "the name," ...

I think it should be clear that this is ridiculous.

Yes, we will still support KDE on SuSE. However, we hope to use this opportunity to provide Linux developers and ISVs with a single stable platform for desktop application development.

Yes, we will keep the desktop distro free. We will even make things more free than they have been.

We're only just getting started. Stay tuned.

and which team would that be? I know it's not this one. Start downloading your new wallpapers

and which team would that be? I know it's not this one. Start downloading your new wallpapers

article on new group in India
Nat's blog entry about his visit to India

Novell didn't spend $40 million on Ximian for Connector alone. And they aren't training 40 new developers to work on Open Office, Mozilla, GNOME, and Mono just so they have a client to connect to their server products.

.. we would all be running Dashboard and Storage.

Try Gnome Dashboard.

Dashboard was the in thing for a couple of weeks.
Where did all the excitement go?
Did people discover it was interesting but not actually particularly useful?

Can be found using Dashboard!

It's not the 3D representation that's important. The program shows relationships between the content of the files. It's a file manager that looks on the content of the files. So it's a file manager at a higher integration level.

It's not important, if future desktops will use 3D representation. The integration of the data matters. Dashboard might be a glimpse from the future. It gives you additional information to your current working task. E.g. when you are chatting it show you information associated to yout chatting partner.

This kind of integration between applications might be a key feature of future dektops.

So basically they're all just knock-offs of Konfabulator...

Here is a Gnome desktop widget that is actually quite a bit more interesting: Dashboard, software that gets fed "clues" from other applications, and searches some databases for related information.

Besides one screenshot in the link, which is going slow..

Here's one using sniffed rss traffic

and here's one with geo traffic.. (cool) There's a bit more info here

Exactly.

To the Mozilla Developers. Take this opportunity to be radical. Let's go back and view what the browser is and what it could be. I suggest that they take a look at things like:
DashBoard.
Haystack
and Echo.
Information begs to be consolidated and made useful. We can do more with the browser then just view static stateless pages.

Typo. That should be http://grope.nat.org/. net.org is the National Environmental Trust. nat.org is Nat Friedman's vanity domain. Of course, GNU Rope does not appear at either domain.

--Patrick

You might want to check out www.nat.org which contains nice updates on Nat's life.