On Ubuntu 9.10 I did the following:

1. Opened http://localhost:631/ in Firefox (not Chrome — this didn’t work for some reason)
2. Clicked “Adding Printers and Classes”
3. Clicked “Add Printer”
4. Entered my regular username and password when prompted
5. On the “Add Printer” page, selected “LPD/LPR Host or Printer” and clicked “Continue”
6. In the “Connection” field, entered “lpd://USERNAME@isis.byu.edu/CampusBW” where USERNAME is my Route Y login (NetID)
7. Clicked “Continue”
8. Entered a name of “CampusBW” and an appropriate description and location, then clicked “Continue” again
9. From the list next to “Make:” I chose “Generic” and clicked “Continue”
10. From the list next to “Model:” I chose “Generic Postscript Printer (en)” and clicked “Add Printer”
11. I don’t know if this is strictly necessary, but I clicked the “Query Printer for Default Options” button on the next page. It may or may not have actually worked.
12. Last of all, under the “Maintenance” dropdown I chose “Print Test Page”. Then when I swiped my card at the Pharos kiosk, the test page showed up, ready to print.

I hope somebody out there in the vast recesses of the Internet finds this information somehow useful.

Then cleaning inspections come along, or maybe just a random cleaning urge. That’s when it’s time to collect the garbage — to deallocate the space taken up by stale old useless objects in order to make room for new useless objects! So I go through the heap, one object at a time, and when I come upon something that isn’t being used any more, I either shred it, recycle it, or trash it. Thus the garbage is collected, the heap size is decreased, and I can happily continue allocating space for random stuff with abandon.

The main problem with this system is that I always have a huge heap of stuff on the floor, and I have to spend time sorting through it every once in a while. But boy it’s easy to use!

More conscientious people probably manage space manually, thus keeping their heap size down (to the point of nonexistence, even) and avoiding the need to do periodic garbage collection. The danger there is the memory leak — if no system of periodic garbage collection exists, allocated space will just go on being used even if it’s forgotten about.

But my metaphor is now way overextended. Ah, but we did just pass our inspection. Go GCMM!

I know, I know, all of those years living in delusion. But get up off the floor, it’s not that bad. You see, what a computer can’t do tells us at least as much about the computer as what it can do. Actually, to be more exact, what a computer can’t do is the exact opposite (the complement) of what a computer can do, so the two things delineate the same boundary. By knowing the limitations on a computer’s power, I feel like I know much more about it than if you gave me a list of 100 things the computer actually can do.

For example, an extremely simple type of computer called a finite state automaton^W can be devised to do things like recognize all sequences of letters that end with the letter ‘z’, or that have five ‘a’s in a row. But, strangely, a finite state machine (that’s another name for finite state automaton) cannot do something so simple as telling you whether that sequence of letters has the same number of ‘a’s and ‘b’s in it. Weird.

For each more sophisticated type of computer, there is a well-defined limit to its ability to solve problems. Usually this is demonstrated using a fancy proof called a lemma. These lemmata^W are learned and utilized by computer science students the world over. An interesting question resulting from this observation is whether the human mind has a similar limit. In other words, is there a problem that a human being, using reason alone, could not solve even with unlimited amounts of time and an infinite ability to remember things (and an infinite desire to just sit there crunching numbers)?

I’ve been discussing what’s known as computation theory. A related field, known as computational complexity theory^W, has similar implications. Rather than focusing on what a computer could theoretically compute with infinite time and memory, complexity theory focuses on how much time it takes to solve different problems. It turns out that many problems fall into a few basic classes, namely Polynomial (P), Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP), and NP Complete (NP-Complete). (For WAY more than you ever wanted to know about this topic, check out Stanford’s Complexity Garden and “Petting Zoo“.)

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if human rationality, as its own special type of computer, runs into similar limits of complexity and computability. In “So Open It’s Closed” we ran into the difficulty of proving that genocide is bad, and yet the vast majority of human beings (myself definitely included) would agree that it is. What would happen if everybody took that lack of proof to heart and just went about rampaging and slaughtering the ethnic group that most recently got on their nerves?

I consider this wall — against which human rationality can pound its head forever but never demonstrate anything — to be good evidence that our rationality is bounded. Not just in the sense of making expedient assumptions about things in order to save time and energy, but rather in the sense of what we can figure out over the long haul if we really put our minds to it. There’s a limit. We can see beyond it to a wider world around us, but we can’t quite escape from our complexity class^W prison, so most people just make long-term assumptions, assumptions which are vital to the development of both individuals and civilizations.

Revealed religions claim a source of knowledge — a means of proof — other than human rationality. Western philosophy and folk argument frequently make claims that cannot be substantiated rationally, and yet are still believed in. Ultimately, whether people like it our not, beliefs in something nobody can prove keep us from destroying each other!

Belief people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” would have steered humanity around such profound disasters as the Holocaust, Stalin’s Gulag death camps, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the needless slaughter of European conquest in the Americas, etc. I see this as a support of the validity of those who teach such morals, especially Christ and the prophets, and a support of the necessity of seeking out “[our] Creator” in order to reach beyond the limits of our own rationality.

There’s much to see, and I hope to see it. No finite state machine ever aspired so.

This release seems like a much more subtle event than the bold release of 1.0, for example. This is because when you open up the new version of the browser, all you notice (at first) is that some of the menus are rearranged, and the preferences window is horizontal instead of vertical. However, the things you don’t notice are more significant. Try, for example, integrated SVG support. Or XForms. Or the fast forward and back navigation. Or perhaps the expanded accessibility features. We shouldn’t fail to mention the new automatic updates, closing the only real gap between the security capabilities of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

One feature I’m not sure about is the “Clear Private Data” tools. This allows the user to clear all data such as browsing history, cookies, etc. that leave a trace of what they have been up to. This has some definite benefits, such as making it safer to use public kiosk computers. It just might also enable easier unauthorized or otherwise unwanted use.

And those are my thoughts.

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

And another appreciated insight:

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

I don’t agree 100% with the ideas in this article, but thought it was interesting to see another recommendation to Firefox-ify OpenOffice.

1. While each individual OO.o application should be pared down and allowed to have “extensions” like Firefox does, the applications should be kept together as a complete suite. Otherwise, individual applications could lose steam/critical mass;
2. OpenOffice should be ported to a standard toolkit such as GTK+ so it doesn’t look so ugly! That is to say, so that it has an interface that really blends with the rest of the desktop rather than using GUI hacks to almost blend in.

First off, does it even use a standard GUI toolkit? No. Why not? Because it’s legacy software: OO.o has a long history, dating back to its StarOffice days before coming under the auspices of Sun Microsystems. First order of business: move over to Qt or Gtk, both of which are ported onto every significant platform OO.o would want to be involved in.

Second: it’s huge and slow. The “Options” window is cluttered worse the the KDE Control Center (and that says quite a bit). Some of the components depend on Java. The “Draw” program can’t even import SVG files and never prints correctly. Because it doesn’t use a standard toolkit, it has issues with some Unicode characters, even when using a font that supports those characters. Usability and UI design also seem to be a low priority for the project (I know it’s not, but it appears so).

So what do I recommend? Since the likelihood of OpenOffice ever actually being ported to a standard GUI toolkit is essentially zero, I recommend that development effort be focused on bringing apps such as Gnumeric and Abiword up to speed with the featurefulness of OO.o.

My dream recommendation, given any amount of resources being made available, is that OO.o be ported to Gtk. Then, it would be restructured to be the Firefox of office software – a lean core functionality and a flexible “Extensions” mechanism. This would hopefully lower the barrier-to-entry for programmers sufficiently as to encourage wide participation by people interested in improving the office suite. The lean core could then be focused on and maintained more effectively than the massive bulk of the do-it-all office program.

Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you’ve ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you’ll experience with Plasma. And that’s a promise.

Personally, I’m way excited about this. You know how you can use “Extensions” to add to or modify the functionality of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser? Well, one component of the Plasma project is to allow that sort of functionality, for your desktop. Apparently this function is already available in Mac OS X’s latest incarnation.