[Windicators] would follow the same styling as Ayatana indicators: Semantically colored: with red for critical problems, orange for alerts, green for positive status changes and blue for informative states that are not the default or usual state.

This came as a real surprise given that I had (and still have) never seen a blue or orange indicator icon.

The obvious and primary objection is that four colors in a palette to convey meaning is far too many. Shuttleworth even said as late as April 1 — just four weeks before Lucid’s release — “Personally, my expectation is that green vs orange/red is as far as we want to go.” Two colors is an absolute maximum here — one for negative messages about something being broken, the other merely to notify you of something — although even one should suffice: “Something has changed; requesting your attention.”

If “orange is for alerts” and “green is for positive status changes,” then why do new IM messages turn the messaging icon green? Isn’t that an alert? What is “positive” about getting a new message? What if it’s your boss firing you? Your boyfriend breaking up with you? A spambot?

If red is “for critical problems,” why does your sound indicator icon turn red when something’s trying to play while it’s muted? Is that really “critical”? Doesn’t that deserve something more accurately described as “an alert” (orange)?

Furthermore, if it’s up to the application developers to specify the “severity” of an alert — which is not even an accurate description of the purpose of these colors, as they’re not a spectrum of severity, but rather a whole handful of messages — will this not result in a great deal of inconsistency? If one application feels that its behavior is more important than that of other applications, it can choose to make its indicator icon red rather than green (or orange or blue) on an event. And, more fundamentally, you’re placing a burden on developers who wish to use indicator icons for alerts to choose from among four different states, rather than just coding for “Alter the color of my [w]indicator icon to whatever the user’s desktop theme calls for.”

It even appears as though this “spec” isn’t complete; Rhythmbox’s indicator icon is black when playing, gray when not playing (under the Radiance theme). What does gray mean? Before I started writing this blog post, in fact, I’d have guessed it meant that Rhythmbox was minimized, as I frequently see a gray icon when Rhythmbox is hidden. Turns out I was wrong, and that’s after using Lucid and Rhythmbox daily for three months.

The intent behind the specification is flawed for those and probably other reasons, and the execution is flawed as well. If you inspect the colors of the green and red indicator icon colors — I couldn’t manage to turn any of them blue or orange, so if you have, please leave a comment — you’ll see that green is #4dcb00 and red is #dc0000. I imagine we’ll never know why these colors were chosen, but something is revealed in the choice of that green in particular.

“Ubuntu Aubergine” has a hue (in RGB colorspace) of 328. Just opposite that on the color wheel — the most basic color complement pair you can find — is a color with a hue value of 81: a particular shade of green. And not the shade being used by indicator icons.

That’s right: even though the indicator icon color spec called for a shade of green, and even though there is a shade of green directly opposite Ubuntu Aubergine on the color wheel, Canonical’s designers chose an utterly arbitrary shade of green with a hue of 95.

Astonishingly, the original proposal for a green coloring of a new indicator message was closer to the Ubuntu Aubergine complement than the final implementation (with a hue of 72, just 9 degrees from the “correct” hue). It’s worth noting, of course, that Ubuntu Aubergine had not been formalized and documented at this point (nor had it been as of April 28.)

It’s also worth mentioning that a green hue of 104 is triadically complementary to the pair of colors of Ubuntu Orange and Ubuntu Aubergine. So either of these two greens — 81 and 104 — could work in theory. But neither was used.

Finding red and blue complements is a bit more difficult, making stronger the case for a single notification color. Although “blue” is a complement of “orange,” Ubuntu Orange isn’t quite “orange” enough to have a 180° blue complement. The best I could manage is a hue of 191, which is a triadic complement of Ubuntu Orange with a 42° differential (the same as that between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange). The “proper” red would be just between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange, or a hue of 351. The current red has a hue of 0 — i.e., pure red — which should come as no surprise. Red = red, right Canonical?

Still, I contend that one color should suffice, and in that case, Ubuntu Orange is probably the way to go, if the plan is to continue with an Ubuntu Aubergine desktop wallpaper and Ubuntu Orange highlights in the GTK theme.

The important point to take away from this is that the current colors are symptomatic of a lack of concern for fundamental design practices within the Canonical design community. The hues of green I’ve mentioned, for instance, may be indistinguishable to most users in practice (even to designers, given the size of the icons), but that I’ve so easily shown them not to be “correct” is alarming.

1. The Decemberists
2. Destroyer
3. Pants Yell!
4. Brian Eno
5. Belle and Sebastian
6. The Clientele
7. Electrelane
8. Pastels/Tenniscoats
9. Pale Saints
10. Broadcast and The Focus Group

I blame Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Songbird.

How is it that people are getting away with posting full, copyrighted movies on Google Video?

I knew going into this that printing in Linux is hard, and I couldn’t imagine that network printing in Linux would be any easier, but I figured it must be possible.

It’s pretty hard. My router (a Linksys WRT54G v5 [or 6?]) has this “SecureEasySetup™” thing that’s meant to make this kind of stuff just push-button easy. But for whatever reason, the printer can’t find and connect to our network. I hooked it up directly to the router, but nothing appears in the DHCP table in the Linksys admin panel.

I did, however, find out the MAC address of the printer by printing out its configuration report. So, if I finally hook up the WRT54GL that I got a couple months ago, I can install the DD-WRT firmware, and assign a static IP to that MAC address; at which point I can then log into the printer’s admin panel at its IP address, configure it to connect to our wireless network, and that should be that.

There is of course an easy install CD for Windows that will set this up for me relatively easily, but I know it can be done without resorting to that.

I know very little about JavaScript and XUL, but that is going to have to change. My goal is to complete the add-on described here, an Artist Web media view, or perhaps “Constellations.”

To make the task appear less daunting, I’ve broken it up into many milestones of marginal improvements. If I follow this timeline, the plugin will be usable and released to the public as Constellations v0.1 on July 27.

I’m going to create a separate blog to track my progress on this, for several reasons:

1. Threat of shame. If I emphasize publicly that I am going to do this, and I fail, I’ll be kind of embarrassed. Hopefully that will motivate me to actually complete the project.
2. Geeks love proving that they’re smarter than you. If I’m having a tough time with some relatively elementary code, maybe people will mock me in the form of writing the correct code themselves. I’m certain that what I’m attempting could be done in no time flat if I’d been formally educated in things like JavaScript. Maybe the biting sarcasm of people who need to demonstrate their intelligence will show me where I’m going wrong.
3. To encourage plagiarism. Look, I’ll admit that I’d be proud if the add-on that comes out of this bore my name. But ultimately, I don’t care. If somebody sees what I’m doing, likes it, wants it to be their own, and knows they can beat me to it, then great. At least we’ll have the add-on.

If you feel like mocking me or encouraging me you can email me at topdownjimmy@gmail.com, leave/follow comments on this post, or visit my dedicated Constellations blog to see where I’m taking this and how quickly I fail.

Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 will be released, as will Ubuntu 9.04, a long-term release that features a newer kernel — which I’ve read has solved a bug that causes BitTorrent activity to kill WLAN connections — as well as the Ext4 filesystem, which I understand nothing about other than that it is better than Ext3. I will also likely install the 64-bit distribution to take advantage of my new 4GB of RAM, and spring for a 1TB hard drive to complement these two OS upgrades.

WordPress 2.8 is also slated to be released, whose features include these three that I’m especially looking forward to:

• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S

• Getting increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu. Waiting for Jaunty to come out next month and hopefully fix my wifi problems with the new Linux kernel.
• Playing Zelda.
• Lamenting/celebrating the new Decemberists album.
• Playing with GNOME Do, Ubiquity, and about:tab.
• Taking photos.
• Watching Tim and Eric.
• Collecting all known online accounts and compiling them into KeePass.
• Wishing Virb were more popular.
• Entering Resounder into a WordPress design contest.
• Flipping out over the latest Destroyer news.

The corner store has had NES, Super Nintendo, and N64 systems and games in the window for several months now, if not longer. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t been sold, until I went in today to look at them and met the guy selling them. He refurbishes them and sells them for sixty bucks apiece. Games are five bucks each, or $20 for five. He’ll refurbish your own NES or other system, including a new pin connector, for twenty bucks. I love this guy. I have a retro Nintendo gaming shop in my neighborhood.

When I first started using this camera, I noticed that there was a little plastic slider on the back to expose one of two halves of a red plastic window, meant to display the counter printed on the back of the film. The choices were 12 and 16, the number of exposures desired. It appeared that the film I’d bought didn’t have counters for 12 exposures, so I just went with 16. Every photo in the first couple rolls I developed overlapped with its neighbors, and it took me until last week to even try to advance the film with the exposures set to 12. The counters I had assumed were not there, were there. So!, now I can take photos without overlap. Why I didn’t try this before is beyond me, and a little disappointing to be honest.

Anyway now I’ve figured it out and have got some 800 rolls, so I’ve been using it a lot.