The following was in the Vancouver Public Space Network newsletter today and I thought that I might share it here for those who might be interested. This segment touches on something I mentioned a while back called Ciclovía, an event in Bogotá, Columbia. Apparently, the brain behind that event and others like it down there is doing a talk here in Vancouver. Space is limited, so register now if you're interested:

We are now facing a “perfect storm” of increasing global warming and environmental degradation, growing traffic congestion, an obesity crisis and other public health concerns, soaring energy costs and slowing economic growth. It is time to go beyond baby steps and take some major leaps. We must re-position walking and cycling as key parts of the solution to these major challenges.

As Bogotá has shown, creating great public spaces for walking and cycling contributes enormously to creating healthier, happier, more thriving communities. Hear former Bogota Commissioner of Parks, Sport and Recreation share his experiences and his lessons for Vancouver. The evening is being co-sponsored by Translink, the SFU City Program, the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Public Space Network.

Event takes place Wednesday, August 20th at 7:00pm, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street. Admission is free but reservations are required.

• To register - 778-782-5100 or email cstudies at sfu dot ca
• For further information see vancouverpublicspace.ca.

I've been assigned to a junior-level programmer here at the office to teach her how to write code for the server I've been labouring on over the past six months. The system is my brainchild, my baby and it's with a mix of relief and aprehension that I'm taking on this new apprentice for this project.

And then I saw this at the top of her first class file:

<?php



	/**
	*
	*   Author: Coworker's Name (coworker@donatgroup.com)
	*  Licence: GPL-3 "Information wants to be free"

Granted, she forgot to capitalise "Free" but it's a pretty good start ;-)

Over the past few days, I've been trying to switch from KDE to Gnome. It's faster, Free-er and in many ways, prettier than KDE, so I thought that I'd give it a shot... but it's not going to happen and here's why:

1. Nautilus doesn't support bookmark folders. It's pretty impressive really, but when your filesystem browser is expected to be able to connect to local drives, network drives and remote drives over SFTP, assuming that a user is only going to have 6 or 7 bookmarks is unreasonable.
2. Terminal is lame. It may be more responsive than Konsole, but you can't move between tabs with the keys and wrap from the last to the first, and you can't paste from the highlight-copy clipboard with the keyboard while Konsole will let you use Ctrl+Shift+Ins for the highlight copy, and Shift+Ins for standard copy.
3. No suitable replacement for Kwallet. Gnome stores some of your passwords with its keyring manager, Firefox stores its own (unencrypted) and Thunderbird stores its own (encrypted). In KDE, I login, give my master password and my encrypted password db is available to all programs for which I need it.
4. No suitable replacement for Klipper. I got Glipper installed, but it's nowhere to be found.
5. No decent text editors / IDEs. I tried Gvim, GPHPEdit, and Bluefish and they all suck in comparison to Kate, KDE's simple text editor and we're not even trying to compare KDevelop here. The big killer for me: no predictive text handling.
6. Firefox may be more functional than Konqueror, it's still way ugly by comparison.

Frankly, I've found Gnome to be sorely lacking in what I would consider key areas. People want their passwords and things memorised and they want them accessible in one easy step. I have well over 100 filesystem bookmarks and I'm a programmer -- I need a good text editor. If I wanted a prettier Vim, I wouldn't be using a GUI.

Maybe I'll try again next year but until then, KDE, though it may be slow and bloated, at least does what I think a GUI should.