Freedom, with their exception.

Going to be a few minutes of downtime today as I update my server to Ubuntu 9.10 LTS.

I’ve been hard at work on my new ZoneMinder skin, and I feel it is time to make an update. I’ll be posting the details over on the ZoneMinder Forum.

Quick FYI:

I am setting up mythtv on a freebsd 8.0 jail on a headless server. After an hour of banging my head against the wall, I was able to, on my ubuntu desktop, get mythtv-setup to work with X11 forwarding over SSH by using ssh mythuser@mythbox -XY mythtv-setup by following
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2006-August/128176.html

ZoneMinder (ZM) has a boat load of features, and almost all of them are very useful. Then you have the frontend, where you actually interface with ZoneMinder, and you are able to do a hundred different things at once. I used to think that this was great, up until I sold my first ZoneMinder solution to a client. Sure, the cost was less, and the features plenty, but he was overwhelmed. Between designing filters (searching), viewing events (alarms) and exporting videos, he didn’t know up from down.

So I set out to design a new skin for ZoneMinder, one that is end-user friendly, easy to use and modern. Before long, I had something usable, something great. So I showed it to a friend and he was as equally overwhelmed. He recommended that I read Rework. I took his advice. Rework has a little something for everyone, or a lot for that certain someone. For me, I got the most out of the “Progress” chapter: Ignore the details early on, Be a curator and Focus on what won’t change. Sure, ZoneMinder has a lot of fancy features, but how many of them are need? How many of them are even used? The answer is “very few”, especially for something that is being design for end-users. Give them what they need (what they use), and that is it.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

So I’ve been stripping my new skin, making it easy to use by taking away, not adding, features. I’ve been ignoring the smaller details until the core of the product is finished, and I have been focusing on what an end-user will actually use – not what I think they might make use of. And I’m making something great.

[root@nsm ~]# rpm
RPM version 4.4.2.3
Copyright (C) 1998-2002 - Red Hat, Inc.
This program may be freely redistributed under the terms of the GNU GPL