Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Mon, 01 Mar 2004
pyblosxom metaweblog
I've put up a new version of the xmlrpc plugin for the metaweblog API. The file has changed names, and a number of improvements have been made. Thanks to Michele Campeotto who is responsible for some of the changes

This version relies on the pyblosxom CVS HEAD, so you might have some work to do to get everything working.

[23:49] | [computers/internet/weblogs/pyblosxom] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
It happened to me too
Lots of people are referencing ESR's tale of woe regarding the CUPS UI. I had a very similar experience with CUPS. I was trying to get my HP LaserJet 2100DTN to print in duplex mode. It was decidedly non-trivial to figure out what needed to be done to get it to work. It was so arcane that I even had to write it down.

Maybe it'll make the next edition of my Macintosh Tips and Trick page. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that little fact. This happened on Mac OS X, which is supposed to the shining example of how to take open source software and make it usable. The fact the even Apple's reknowned engineering team had trouble making this easy signals a real problem. Most of the open source community has less experience making things easy than the folks at Apple.

I can't count the number of hours that I've wasted over arcane setups for applications on either Windows or Linux/UNIX. I've lost count of the number of my friends who think that they are stupid because they can't get a computer to work properly. It's a disgrace. Computer software may have saved people an enormous amount of work and unleashed a tremendous amount of productivity, but its also been responsible for wasting an incredible amount of people's time on problems that should never have been there in the first place. If the "open source community" really wants to make an impact, then we are going to need to learn how to make software easy to use. This is true for every interface in software, user interfaces, and programming API's. Life is too short to waste time on stuff like this.

[23:38] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 5 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post


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Ted Leung FOAF Explorer

I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
The opinions expressed here are entirely my own, not those of my employer.

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