Quick poll:

1) Are you working on a skin for the GUI Olympics?

2) If so, which areas? WindowBlinds, IconPackager, Winamp?

All contestants who win a gold, silver, or bronze also get the following:

• Object Desktop (or extension to access)
• Galactic Civilizations
• T-shirt (either a GUI Olympics one, a WinCustomize one, a Microsoft one, or a Stardock one

Additional Prize Codes:
[RXT] = ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
[AW] = All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro
[TV] = TV Wonder Pro Remote Control Edition
[M] = Microangelo icon studio
[XBOX] = Xbox
[WA] = Winamp Pro
[DVD] Video/Music CDs or DVDs (to be determined)
 

Note: No duplicate prizes for winners (i.e. if you won every event, all 3 places, you wouldn't get 48 T-shirts). If winner wins events with multiple graphics cards, player can choose which one they want.

Blogs occasionally seem to have a Europe vs. United States mentality. I've seen it since the beginning of blogging. Why is that? Why is so much scorn reserved for Americans from Europeans? Why is such contempt shown for Europeans? I think I have the answer: Drastically different philosophies on life.

Europeans are focused on fairness. Americans are focused on freedom.  Europeans look at Americans as a bunch of uncultured barbarians running amok in their country and worse, through the world spreading their vulgar culture around. Americans see Europeans as a bunch of sissies whose people meekly except regulations and massive taxation in an effort to make life more "fair" for everyone.  The American response would typically be "Hey, life ain't fair!" to which the European might answer "But it should be!" And so it goes from there.

But because so many Europeans like individual Americans (and vice versa) the argument usually gets shifted to the "administrations" of the various countries.  The typical American is a nice guy right? It's not his fault that the United States is full of gun toting, capital punishment supporting, SUV driving, CO2 producing zealots. What do you expect with Bush in charge? And "Old Europe" is a mess not because of the typical Belgian or German or Frenchman, it's cynical and corrupt politicians like Chirac or Schroeder that make it seem so crummy to us.

What both fail to realize that in a democracy, the people get what they want. Sometimes it takes awhile but eventually their cultures will get a government that represents them. Some people are aghast that the United States has capital punishment. But an overwhelming majority of Americans supports capital punishment. So we elect leaders who support it. Both Kerry and Bush support capital punishment. They have to. They wouldn't get elected otherwise. But why do Americans support capital punishment? Because we're a bunch of "Cowboys"? No. It's because we believe in having a great deal of freedom in our lives but we also believe that freedom comes with a price -- personal responsibility.

Great freedom requiring personal responsibility is one of the cornerstones of American culture. And it is a relatively foreign concept to Europeans (not personal responsibility but the relationship between the two).  We pretty much allow people to do what they want here.  You can own a gun with few exceptions. There are few regulations in being an entrepreneur.  But at the same time, there are few regulations to keep a company from simply bombing on its own.  People in the United States aren't taxed very much relatively speaking. They're free to make decisions on how they want to spend the money they earn. But on the other side of the coin, they also are free to make poor choices and end up in the gutter.

I don't mean this as a criticism of Europe but Europeans have never had the kinds of freedoms Americans have. Even today. It was, after all, a big reason why so many Europeans came to the United States in the first place. The US government is formed on the basis of the federal government essentially providing a handful of essential services. It's actually the weakest central government in the industrialized world in terms of its domestic power. But Europeans have not demanded the kinds of freedoms Americans want. A European might correctly point out that too much freedom leads to chaos and anarchy. And that Europeans have chosen to pull back a bit from the brink that Americans seem so readily to jump over in order to try to create a more just society.

Remember, the French revolution cry was not freedom or death as it was in the United States. It was split amongst 3 principles: liberty, equality, fraternity. Much of "old Europe" could be described in this way. The government exists to help make things more fair -- more equal. It's not fair for some people to be incredibly rich while others are incredibly poor. A European would look at the gap between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans as evidence that the American system isn't working. An American would look at the same evidence and point out that it is working as designed. The only concern Americans would have is if the rich got rich from cheating the system in some way. Americans, generally, do not envy the rich because they believe they have a shot at being one of them if they play their cards right. And even if they don't, odds are they'll end up doing pretty well.

The descendants of Europe who live in the United States have a significantly better standard of living than anywhere else in the world. And the American system works so well that descendents from Africa have the highest standard of living of any people with African heritage in the world -- despite having been slaves only a bit over a century ago. But there's a catch (isn't there always?) The poorest Americans live pretty darn poorly compared to people in similar situations in Europe. If life were an obstacle course where 90% of the people were able to compete it and 10% didn't, the 90% in the US are rewarded far more than the 90% in Europe. But at the same time, the 10% who can't do it suffer more in the US than they do in Europe. So which path do you take?

As an American, I've been instilled with its cultural values. So I prefer freedom to fairness. I have sympathy for those who haven't been able to make the cut in American society but I also don't want to see our freedoms further eroded in order to prop them up. I don't like the way things are in "old Europe". My views aren't shared by all Americans. But they are shared by most Americans. And vice versa in Europe. And the result of democracy in action (or representative government if you're anal retentive) is that the system is set up to reflect our values -- just like the French and Germans and Belgians and so on have governments that reflect theirs. And that's a good thing.

I must admit, I am starting to use Mozilla's "Firefox" more and more. Particularly when blogging. The reason is that I can hold down the Ctrl key when I click on a link and it'll open that link in its own tab. So what I'll do is go onto the newest articles tab and start Ctrl-clicking on all the articles I might be interested in. By the time I've read one, they're all there waiting to go.

Microsoft really has gotten amazingly complacent in the browser wars. Internet Explorer, over time, gets to feel slow and flakey the more I use it. And I say that as someone who always used IE. I never preferred Netscape, for instance. I started with IE 3 and never looked back -- until now.  Meanwhile, Internet Explorer seems so full of various browser "helper" objects that I can feel it slowing down everything. And IE doesn't seem to have an easy way to manage those "helper" objects (there are free downloads that will do it but even they don't always provide that much information).

The one thing I do miss about IE so far are the ActiveX controls. My access on JoeUser.com gives me a WYSIWYG editor instead of the standard text. But with Firefox I get the standard one which means I have to do it the old fashioned way (i.e. like everyone elese does <g>).

If you haven't tried Firefox, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. It's free and easy to use.

As Bakerstreet recently wrote, a website like JoeUser.com represents an evolutionary step in blogging. The idea is for people to be able to have their own blogs about whatever they want.

But where JoeUser.com differs is that we want to create a system in which people who write blogs have a chance of having their works get more exposure than they would elsewhere. Hence, the point system. People come to JoeUser.com, they then are presented with top articles of the day, newest articles, top articles of the past month, top blog sites of the past month and articles that have recently gotten comments on them. And on top of that, articles of INTEREST appear in full on the home page.

As you can imagine, we are always skirting the fine line between wanting to let people do whatever they want on their own blogs without it conflicting with the rights of other users.

So we do have some new features to that end that are out or will be out soon:

• Black Listing. You can now prevent specific users from being able to comment on your articles. If there is someone who annoys the heck out of you, then you can keep them from responding to any of your articles. You black list someone by clicking on their name and pressingthe black list button. You unblacklist someone by going to the settings for your blog in "My account".
• Null Articles. Admins of the site will be able to set certain articles as not being able to amass points. We don't want to censor anyone's articles. But at the same time, we've seen cases where a company will have an article to let others respond and communicate with it manage to get so many points that it shows up in the top 10 lists. That's not real fair to others. The other area, which will surely annoy some people, is that we will probably start penalizing the points of articles that are not really that person's articles. That is, people who repost other people's articles from other sites with excessive quoting. There is a fine line between quoting another article as part of YOUR article and simply reposting someone else's material in an attempt to get attention to your blog.  The quoted material shouldn't be why people are reading your blog. YOUR writings or observations are why people should be reading your blog. Otherwise, eventually, the site would be overrun by people gaming the point system with tons of articles that are essentially excerpts from other sites.  People who write their own material are the ones that we want to see in the top lists.  We won't stop people from writing articles that are pushing the envelope on fair use of quoted material, but we won't let them use those articles to make their way into the top articles and blogs either.
• [Explicit Content] You can mark your article as having adult content so that younger readers won't be able to see it. The rules here would be much the same rules as TV or movies. Nudity, sexual content, etc. are things that don't belong on this site in a place where children may see it. Please make sure you use the adult content (99% of people here are adults so you're not really restricting yourself) checkbox.
• Kudos and Access. We now have the ability to raise people's access. But we don't currently display that information anywhere.  We will slowly be adding in more apparent access markers for people along with Kudo markers in people's blogs and in their profile to let people see what things they've accomplsiehd "Top bloggers", "1000 points", "100th article", and so forth. Just little ways of giving kudos to people who have achieved success.

So this is what's upcoming. We hope you like the enhancements.  The site will remain free but we do plan to start makign available extra features (backing up blogs to local disk, a blog navigator program, multiple blog sites and blog groups, net storage, etc.) soon for a small monthly fee as an option.

I really don't like NTFS that much. I use it typically but I must admit that I find myself moving more and more to FAT32. Which is really pathetic. I used to be one of those people who espoused NTFS (and I still do for SERVERS) because of the security features, the encryption, the per folder compression, the disaster recovery, etc.

But as time has gone on, I've come to realize that NTFS is just a pain in the ass if anything goes wrong with it. There are good recovery tools that deal okay with NTFS but there's nothing quite like just booting up with a CD and being able to use good old DOS to do what needs to be done in the event of a screwed up OS.  There is also the nagging feeling that NTFS just gets slower and slower as you use it. If you're a NTFS techie, you probably know what I mean -- the increasing boot times because of NTFS going to its various hidden system directories with names with $'s in them.  Slowly, but surely, the system will fill like the hard drive has to crunch for every little thing.

My main machine suffered a serious problem over the weekend. Not sure why or how. But it ended up me requiring to basically restart on it from scratch (that's not completely true, I could have spent more time tryiing to salvage my existing OS setup but I chose to start from scratch).  Basically what happened is that my hard drive got a few bad sectors on it. I'm not sure how. But it did. It probably had them for a long while. But I did a defrag on the system and apparently some data was put onto one of those bad sectors.  As a result, the system just wouldn't boot up right.  NTFS may be more resilient (in theory anyway, in practice I've not seen this) but even it apparently can't deal with a couple of bad sectors.  But when it came to recover, it was just a total pain because most utilities don't deal well with NTFS.  I ended up using a special recovery tool that did deal okay with NTFS and got my critical files off there.

But this time, when I started from scratch, I went to FAT32. The difference has been noticeable, particularly in boot up.  NTFS wastes less space on today's hard drives than FAT32 do to FAT32's clusters. But I don't really care. Performance matters and NTFS just doesn't seem to cut it when it comes to performance over time.

My main work machine remains NTFS since the security features on it are absolutely critical (I don't keep sensitive material on the laptop). But still, NTFS on Windows XP just doesn't seem that impressive. File systems, caching, and others features seemed to have stopped evolving whenthe OS/2 vs. NT wars ended. Which is a pity.

So here's to FAT32. An update of a fairly cheesy file system that still does the job.

Someone might ask, why have such a contest? Websites like WinCustomize.com, Winamp.com, deviantART, etc. already have large skin or icon libraries. So what's the point of a contest?

For one thing, contests such as this one offer a way for designers to innovate. According to a recent poll on WinCustomize.com, many skin authors are finding that the primary way they feel recognized for their efforts is in the form of download counts.  This has a side effect though, increasingly, skin authors find themselves creating things that are popular to the widest audience.

As skinning has gotten more popular, more and more visual style authors and Winamp skinners have found themselves making skins that conform to a fairly tame set of user desires in order to be "popular".

But here at the GUI Olympics, recognition is not given for just making a skin that has the most mass appeal. Innovation is rewarded as well. There are events for most creative (innovative) skin. The best power user skin. The best skin that fits to a particular theme.

There are many ways in which one might create a skin that fits to a theme or is creative that would not occur to most people. Mercury's classic "Floppy" skin is over 3 years old and shows off better than most skins what is possible to do with a WB visual style.  Sure, it won't get massive downloads but it is new and innovative too.

Certainly Doreen's TV from DavidK, also years old also demonstrated how different and cool skinning could get.

Skinning on Winamp has recently come into a new era with the release of Winamp 5 and its popularity. And the GUI Olympics, coming so soon after the release of Winamp 5 provides an opportunity for skinners to show off what they can do.

Such is the case with icons as well. It's always tempting to do yet another set of "Mac-like" icons but there are other ways of doing icons as Pixelpalooza's Mac icon contest showed.

And so here we are. As hundreds of designers from around the world prepare to put their skills to the test. To create skins and icons without having to worry about download counts. No worry about whether someone's going to say "Eh, I wouldn't use it.". Because here, the challenge is to put the skinner's skills to the test. To see what they can do when freed from all constraints.

It's going to be a blast!

Feedback on today's alpha build:

1) Default view should be the awareness view of the map

2) Whenever something improves awareness, a subtle and tasteful animation should appear (and very small) and then zip over to where the awareness field in the UI is so that players can see that stat.

3) When a media event shows up, the player merely needs to fly to that state. WHen they do, a dialog should show up "Do you want to appear on The Oreilly Factor?" (or whatever show it is). If it shows up in that state while they're in, dialog just appears.  They shoudl never have to click on the media event icon.

4) Media event should jiggle or something to get the player's attention.

5) Icons seem a little muddy in the default view. Remember, this is how people will be looking at the game most of the time.

6) Default view should try to fit as much of the US in the map as possible. In fact, I'd suggest having some parts actually show up off the screen. For instance, part of Alaska and Washington State should show up just off the screen (i.e. some parts) so that the map itself is as big as possible.

7) Icons should be animated at all times in subtle ways (flags gently waving, etc.), TV's gently glowing. Subtle, tasteful, but not static.

8) When you use up stamina, have some tiny stamina icon show up by the candidate and gently move off fading away.

9) If possible, try animating the background (again in a subtle way).

Yesterday TechTV's The Screen Saver's did a video review of DesktopX. Just in time we got a TechTV dock up on the site here (WinCustomize was on TV too!). The dock, btw, was created by Paul Boyer (Mormegil). I just uploaded it (and got credit on the show).

If you don't have DesktopX, you can download it at http://www.desktopx.net

Click the link below to download The Screensaver's dock.

Our software, DesktopX, was on TechTV's "The Screen Savers" yesterday.

The Screen Savers is one of the favorite shows here. Some of us subscribe to satellite just to get it in. But as happy as we were to be on there, not everything went according to plan.

You see, we knew back in late February that "In March" DesktopX was going to be on there. So we painstakingly put together this kit for them. A quick reviewer's guide. A print out of the full user manual. A CD with the latest version. And another CD of dozens of widgets that we put together. We even made a ScreenSaver's Widget:

That you can download here (you need DesktopX 2.1 installed to use it):

[Download...]

Anyway, we got the kit to them last Friday but what we didn't know is that by "having DesktopX on the show sometime in March" would mean literally March 1. So our kit, that took a good week to put together, made it there just too late.

So what really helped us? JOEUSER! Back in January in a fit of pique, I wrote an article about DesktopX and Konfabulator (a competing program on the Mac that has gotten immense publicity despite being a subset of DesktopX that came out 3 years after DesktopX first came out): http://draginol.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=4472

Somehow, at some point, the TechTV guys must have done a Google Search on "Konfabulator for Windows" and come across this article. I know because watching the episode they quoted the article several times and discussed the article. So a lot of the information that came out on the show came from the article which really helped explain what DesktopX in terms of Konfabulator (since they were already familiar with Konfabulator).

So in the end it wasn't our kit that helped us as much as it was having a blog on JoeUser that did!