This blog entry had tons of sarcasm prior to posting, but I edited it all out. I’m not a complete monster, you know.

So, I was googling for something today and stumbled upon a 3 weeks old (that is, nobody cares about it anymore) interview with Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

As a person currently employed in marketing, I certainly know how important it is to focus on good things that your company does when you are spreading PR with a big shovel. It’s more or less OK to make controversial statements, if you can keep the game on, but telling outright lies? No, I don’t think so.

Here is an interesting excerpt:

“The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design,” Silber stops, perhaps to reconsider the boldness of what she is about to say. “If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research. It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there. I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects. That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area, even if it’s not our code and our design.”

Can you see what’s wrong with it? Let’s chop it up into smaller bits.

The fact that GNOME and other projects now value design

*sigh* She just had to say that, yeah?

If you go back three years ago nobody was talking about design

Dear Ms. Silber, I suggest you go five years ago, or even more, and discover Tango project. In 2007 I did an interview with them for GNOME Journal. It is real, and there is proof.

Probably you would  also like to find out that Ascender Corp. was comissioned by Redhat to create Liberation fonts and delivered them in early 2007. That  was just how many years prior to Ubuntu font family?

nobody was doing user research

How about Sun having done a usability study of GNOME in 2001, several years before Canonical was even conceived?

I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.

That, at least, is true.

That is something that we feel good about; you can attribute that to our leadership in that area,

And this is what it was all about: leadership.

I don’t believe that anyone who’s been with the company since 2004 could possibly not know all of that. So what was that? Canonical claims to have invented design and user research in free software? When did they start acting in the worst traditions of Microsoft et al.?

Over the last year my interview-taking activity considerably accelerated. I’ve had some wins and some fails, but I think I’m getting the hang of this. Hence I’d like to share some simple techniques and basic principles of doing interviews that don’t suck.

1. Ask sensible questions. Even if you absolutely adore the person you are interviewing, resist the urge to find out what color or book or sex position is his/her favorite. Even celebrities find this stupid and annoying. Your keywords here are: insightful, thought-provoking. Your job is to publish an interview that people will like to get back to after a while to check for presented facts or opinions. You can’t do that without the next principle, which is….

2. Research, research, research. Read as much as possible to understand the person’s background, how the story you are covering evolved, what other influential people ever said (especially opponents). It gives you a 360° view on the subject and helps asking questions that are interesting. It also shows the interviewed person that you did your homework, so the person will be more inclined to be most outspoken with you. Which is what you are looking for.

3. Pick one main theme and build the interview around it. Find a trending topic, one big reason to interview the person. Make sure the person has a hands-on knowledge on this topic.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask controversial questions. I’ll tell you that: it’s bloody annoying to read interviews where both sides readily agree on everything so much that they nearly box tonsils. Leave that crap for teenage magazines. The person you are interviewing doesn’t have to be right (for a given value of right), but if his/her reply wasn’t interesting, you failed.

5. If you have additional questions, just ask. Because you never know. During one of the interviews I recently did, I asked a quite innocent question just to clarify some stuff I heard, and the answer revealed some particularly interesting facts. Asking additional questions is a must to make sure that the person gets to the point and actually answers your question. Otherwise your readers will get bored and leave unsatisfied.

6. Don’t start the interview with the “introduce yourself” nonsense. Just write a one or two paragraphs long profile text as an introduction. I broke that rule when interviewing David Revoy right after the release of Sintel. Sure, I got away with that, but  it’s only because the rest of the text was interesting.

7. Make sure the interview has a well articulated end. Personally, I bloody hate the “thank you for answering my questions, %username%, I absolutely love you! — why, thank you for asking me those, and what a nice hair style you have!”. Yuk! Get the person to say something emotionally about the main topic of the interview so that it would somehow sum up what he/she thinks. Do it surreptitiously, if you can.

8. Edit the text. Unless you are asking some really technical questions that demand long replies just to explain a concept (and there are ways to deal with that, too), your reader shouldn’t bang the head against a wall of text. The interview also shouldn’t contain paragraphs full of ums, ers, and suchlike just because you think it’s cool to keep the conversation style. The difficult part is keeping original tone while editing, and there is no simple advice here other than “understand your conversation partners”. It takes time to learn this through trial and error.

9. Feel free to reorder questions/answers. If you have a long, long conversation (especially face to face), the interview will divert from the topic as many times as it can. Some interesting details related to previously asked questions might float up as well. The net outcome should be a text where conversation flows from A to B, and questions are logically connected. And read again the Tip #7.

10. Done editing? Send the final text for approval. What I’ve found out is that fairly often people have some last minute edits to what they said, especially when interviews take days or weeks (yes, it does happen). And if you do some serious editing, they really want having a look at the result before it goes online.

TL;DR: research, be bold, edit away like there is no tomorrow. And treat your job seriously.

Oh, and you can troll me all you like for not following any of those principles

Everyone talks about DuckDuckGo these days: how it’s so unevil compared to Google and their new service agreement, how it doesn’t pass your search quieres to those sneeky webmasters etc.

But what about the traffic quality? I’ve just had a sneeky look at my GA account for pesky data on evil Libre Graphics World. So far for April the average numbers are:

Visits per page: 3,25
Duration of visits: 00:04:59
Bounce rate: 59,32%

What are its neighbors for the same period in terms of traffic quality?

Bottom line: DuckDuckGo doesn’t provide what I would qualify as astonishing performance (after all, I know that LGW has some on-page issues that contribute to it). Even so, DDG is almost like a friendly website with related content and overlapping audience. And that’s with me being a lazy arse and not really doing much SEO on LGW, if any at all.

One of the most important things for any project is the way they are defined. Even though people like things to be familiar, they don’t necessarily need that. Just for the heck of it, I remember once reading someone stating (a quote from memory): “I didn’t know I needed GNOME Shell an iPod until I got one”.

So, in software development you don’t actually need “vector graphics editor like Illustrator, but gratis” or “instant messenger like Miranda IM, but for Linux”. Yes, people ask for those every frigging day. What happens however, is when you define the project that way, you start meeting requests to make 100% copy of UI or features or both.

And this is when things go terribly wrong.

Since you don’t have the resources of a big company, your copy is never better, and you end up with software that sucks, and users who absolutely hate it. And they never ever forgive you attempts to make something original, because it’s not how you positioned your project. So you become a grumpy overworked monster who is never happy.

I think Sven had more or less that idea in mind regarding GIMP and Photoshop when he wrote: “We need to define our goals but we should by all means avoid to define our goals in terms of competitors.”. And the final product vision, as you can see, honors that view.

But when you fail to understand that you need to make your software appealing on its own, all you can do is define your own project via disadvantages of other projects (imaginary and obsolete at that, too).

So whoever is reading this and thinking about starting his/her own project, if you expect this project to take off, think about how you present it.

• Are you solving an issue bigger than “Oh noez, they killed Amarok with this new UI, we need a new player”?
• Can you explain the point of your software in one short phrase?
• Are you able to talk to your potential users in the language they understand?

It’s really important to pick the right words and explain the core idea without abusing buzzwords. I, for one, was particularly stubborn when it came to Novacut first, partially because they did not immediately deliver a definition that was understandable (and partially because I’m just very stubborn on my own). But after I listened to them long enough, things began to make sense. I am now confident that what Jason, Tara et al. are trying to achieve is a serious project.

Also, think of the technical side. Will your software blend into the mix? Does it have an architecture that’s not like a fractal sandwich? What does it take to install and try it?

At this point you might discover yourself balancing between software development, project management, QA, marketing, PR and copywriting. And it’s good. It means your brain is actually trying to work. It means you are discovering new angles to look at things from.

This also means that the existing intro text at inkscape.org is going away any time now. In a manner of speaking, Inkscape is much like Adobe Illustrator or Corel DRAW. But that’s not the point, you see

To be honest (as if sometimes I am not), the title is an utter and deliberate trolling, but this, people, can make any real contributor’s blood boil:

http://www.unixmen.com/why-inkscape-is-way-ahead-of-adobe-illustrator/

There are some pretty basic rules of good copywriting, and one of them is: the title is a promise that the body text should keep. Proprietary folks can hire decent copywriters, which is why any power AI user would expect a more or less detailed comparison of features or, at the very least, a half-hearted attempt at PR with some factual info. What we get instead is a freetard bullshit.

You see, anyone who ever used both AI and Inkscape, and I mean really used, knows where both of them fail, badly fail. But the guy wants Inkscape to be better so much that he doesn’t even bother coming up with some sensible arguments.

So here is a plea. If you are thinking about covering some free application, pretty please do your research and come up with argumentation that isn’t flawed. Otherwise people who actually know right from wrong will just think that you are a clueless moron.

And bloody well post some pictures as a proof. If you can’t do real stuff, but do loud claims and draw stupid conclusions publicly, GTFO. Seriously. Because you are not helping. Alternatively, study copywriting and excel at it.

Someone just started an awesome thread at linux.org.ru where he shared his experience of sending his GNOME3 driven Linux system to the future by means of… force-changing the current date. I thought I’d translate and share it Everything below is a translation.

I read an [old] article on habrahabr.ru about how Windows 7 worked after a bug in BIOS that sent the guy’s system 14.000 years forward. That got me interested — how would my favourite system [Linux] work in such a case? So I opened clock configuration tool in GNOME and started adding years.

1. Max possible date turned out to be 258337. Looks like that’s when the world ends.
2. Gnome Shell clock stopped working (showing up on the panel) after the first 10K years leap. Anyone cares to report?
3. Linux thinks that once in 20K years you still should change your password. After each time leap I had to ‘sudo passwd’ for the user, otherwise the GUI for changing date/time in GNOME couldn’t get superuser privilegies.
4. Of course, everything related to HTTPS stopped working, because all certificates expired.
5. LibreOffice Calc couldn’t calculate the current date, outputting “Error: 511” instead of the value in a cell. And after the first 10K years jump it couldn’t really load the user’s profile.
6. Google Chrome simply refused opening my Gmail account because of the expired certificate and didn’t even suggest to “Continue anyway” . Epiphany, however, worked just fine in both 10.000 and 260.000 years and only warned about insecure connection in the address bar. Google Chrome also failed to load the user’s profile (history, bookmarks etc.) in 200.000 years.
7. VirtualBox freezed when starting a virtual machine and in general started very slowly. Which is why I couldn’t figure out what Windows would really do in the future.
8. GNOME’s screenshot utility suggested “Screenshot-(null)” name instead of the usual “Screenshot-$DateTime”.
9. The rest of the system worked surprisingly fine (which is more than what could be said about Windows 7 from the habrahabr.ru article). Nautilus, Pidgin, Epiphany, console tools: all of them managed to display and use six figure dates.
10. Google promised 10^308 Mbyte free space for GMail.

To sum it up: Linux is ready fo the future apart from LibreOffice, some proprietary tools and the Gnome Shell clock.

After going back to the present the system experienced a kernel panic. It’s the first time I ever saw how all four CPU cores went out one by one on Linux, btw, and the disc activity stopped only after the last one. After that I rebooted from a flash drive, ran fsck, booted the system. So far it works just fine.

So you want to write an article. But what if people actually try reading it? What if they (oh, the blasphemy!) understand a good part of it?

No way Jose! You didn’t spend hours doing a research for everyone to understand it. If you made an effort, people’ve got to show some respect! The’ve got to spend as much time on reading it as your spent on writing it. Or else they are cheating.

Tired of people cheating on you, my fellow blogger? I’ll show you the way forward. Then left, right, left, left again, forward, right, upside-down, inside-out, left… Nearly there!

The Core Concept

Forget it. You are a man of ideas, are you not? Put as many ideas in your text as you can think of. Don’t separate them. Instead, let them tie in crazy knots like a headphone wire in your pocket.

This is your ideal text visualized:

The Navigation

Huh? Navigation is for sissy girls. You write stuff only for the deserving who are tough enough to dig through ten layers of crap. In other words:

• Never use headings. Train of thought may do Brownian movements, but that’s no reason for stopping.
• Use inline lists. Because the colon was invented for a reason, dontcherknow.
• Put as many hyperlinks in your text as you can think of. Take that, Wikipedia!

The Text

• Write long, very long paragraphs. People’ve got to see you put some work into it!
• Right after those very long paragraphs use very short ones, no less that a single sentence. After all, you are not a monster.
• Nevertheless, most of the content should be made up of sentences with no less than 3 levels of nested complexity. Solve the puzzle, sukkas!

Illustrations

Eeeek! That’s abomination unto machismo. Make it a wall of text. No treacherous image should sneak in! Guard the perimeter!

On a second thought, you can get some extra points for making people go through illustrations with gritted teeth. Just use a really psychodelic color palette for all the diagrams and never ever put a legend on.

Tables

Yeah, baby. This is where you can go nuts. People may think you wear underpants on your head, but I say use long tables!

In fact, make all of your text a table. And put some nested tables in. I mean, aren’t all geniuses crazy? That must be it!

Conclusions

If you follow these simple instructions, few people will read more than 1/10 of your article. This is how your gain a true following of the like-minded! And with luck everyone will just skip your text! How cool is that?!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: uh, oh, this sukka broke every rule he listed. Does the bugger ever follow his own advices?

And that’s my point exactly: never follow your own advices. This will only make it more interesting!