[plug] Linux desktop cameo on Today Tonight (tonight)

[Peter Wright]

Hi all,

I thought some or all of you might well be interested to know that there
should be a Linux desktop playing a supporting role in a story on Today
Tonight on channel 7 this evening (Mon 26th Feb).

My girlfriend Jodie started up a Yahoo! club which deals with size
discrimination issues (mainly oriented towards women) last year, and she
has recently been getting a bit of publicity in the local media - had an
article on her and the club in the West Australian a little while ago and
now the story on Today Tonight.

Largely because the TT people wanted to be able to take a few shots of her
sitting at a machine and accessing the club site, the interview(s) ended up
being done in my bedroom with my main desktop machine, chef. I hid away in
my machine room with cartman and stan and jimbo and barbrady and kenny[1]
while this was going on, so I don't know how many or what kind of shots
they did, nor do I have any idea exactly how much footage of the machine is
likely to make it into the story, but there should be at the very least a
few seconds.

The desktop she was using was KDE 2.1[2], using the Netscape 6.01 browser.
The browser window was maximised to cover all the display except the KDE
panel, but said panel was set to "large" size, so it should still be pretty
visible. Especially as it's on a 21" monitor. Mwahahaha.

Knowing Today Tonight's usual audience *roll of eyes*, I'm guessing maybe
90% of people watching the story will just think, "wow, a computer" - maybe
8% will think "hey, that doesn't look like Internet Explorer!" - and
perhaps one or two percent will realise that it's not Windows[3]. But hey.
I was getting sick of Internet/web-related stories on TV always showing IE
shots. A bit of variety is good.

I think the show starts at 6:30pm, so those of you going to the PLUG
meeting tonight[4] might still have time to have a look. If you do, make
sure you say hello to chef.


Pete.

[1] Guess the naming scheme, kiddies!

[2] Okay, I would have preferred to use a windowmanager/desktop that looked
more different to Windows, but as the browser window was going to be
maximised in any case, there didn't seem much point.

[3] And depending on the camera angle, some observational types may well
think "holy cr*p, what a tiny keyboard!" :)

[4] I swear, one of these days I'll go to a meeting. One day....  ;]
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

--
So when I saw the post to comp.editors, I rushed over to the FTP site to
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		[Jason Spence, compiling Vim 5.0]