Harsh truth?

This a cite from a /.

"The fact that its a crappy feature makes me think it must have originated with a developer.

Developers and User Interfaces don't tend to get along well; you need to go out on the street and grab a couple of people wearing matching outfits and get them to draw your UI on a napkin or something."

Of course it is more funny then true, isn't it?

This was comment to story about Pidgin being forked because of developers didn't wanted to bend to user needs. It was all about flexibility of the Pidgin. The controversial feature wasn't allowed to be turned off.

By the way, do you imagine Apple's designers bending to users' needs?

Enabling software assembling

Some time ago I wandered through Google results pages seeking for 'better sourceforge' (well, actually I was looking for 'sourceforge sucks'). I knew about Google open source hosting, JavaForge, Launchpad and several others, but I was looking for more mostly of curiosity. It was worthwhile - I've found Assembla. Nice place with very good free offering: they are giving 500MB for you space which might include wiki, svn, mercurial or git repository, assembla's or trac issue tracking software and some other useful tools enabling you to exchange ideas, knowledge and code easily. 

I like Assembla's team aim for introducing new and constantly improving tools (when I've stumbled at Assembla for the first time they offered only svn hosting, now there are mercurial and git to choose) and they constantly improve their own Tickets issue tracker. 

Assembla isn't a charity driven venture (but it is ad free site, not counting their offerings of course) - they have commercial hosting and service offering as well. If you want you can also write up nice profile; list all your skills and achievements and whatnot - Assembla enables staff or job finding also. 

Hopefully you will find Assembla useful. I have to say that I was surprised that there are so many people providing hosting for open source projects. I was even more surprised to see that one company from Poland was offering it. It is good to see that open source is getting support from all over the world :).  

Pulp entertainment with a smell of Java

For some time I've been visiting one website to kill some time. I'd like to share with you my impressions about Milpa.

It is a logic game. Quite addictive, not only for me - after the game you can see your placing on the high score list. I guess scores are kept for one day. When my play is weak I get to around 1000, so there is quite a lot of people playing Milpa everyday. No wonder! Art is nice and simple, so are sounds and animation. Game play is equally good.

If you tried the game you should probably know it is a Java applet. Of course I am not the first who wanted to share his experience about Milpa. Very addictive browser game is a better title for writing about it, that's for sure. One thing that struck me when I read linked web log entry was that its author thought it was Flash game. And not even one mention it loads too long, or puts browser into freeze.

Author of the game, David Brackeen created pulpcore open source framework, which Milpa is founded on. Pulpcore news feed indicates there are some people involved in making it better. Maybe you'll find it worthwhile to check it?

Cheers and don't give the skull a chance to eat your vegetables ;)!