First of all are all standards bad and the answer is a big no. Doing
things in a centralized fashion is great for things like the dbus and gstreamer but what about for things
like OOXML
that was made an iso standard even though there is no completely
standard compliment implementation not even from Microsoft themselves.
Standards can be great but it really depends on who makes them.

Application developers who make services for the desktop like Zeitgeist
and Tracker innovate. They dont need to worry about communication
because they use the dbus to pass info and have a well documented way of
formatting the info passed. So innovative projects use standards but the
programs shouldnt push things like how Microsoft pushed OOXML, they
change things release on release and try to keep things stable and well
documented but it doesnt stop the innovation.

So the problem with standardization in software projects is exactly what
happened to OOXML. A bunch of people sat around a table and wrote a
document that was rejected as a standard then they made some changes and
it was accepted (quite ridiculously). While they should have been
already developing it (maybe not releasing it but working on it) because
developing it works out the kinks. There is lots of pages to the
standard but some of it will never see the light of day and why because
it wasnt developed in the correct manner. They should have developed the
standard in house then presented it as a standard.

How can you expect anyone else to develop a standards compliant
application if the developers of the standard cant even do it? How do
you expect to develop a standard without testing it? Whats wrong with
innovation as a means to develop a future standard?

You develop standards through innovation not by committee.

Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool. Not only is it nice and interesting(kinda like my blog ) but it gives a nice view on things. The two guys have a good back and forth and the show in general has a good feeling and a nice tone. Plus its short enough to keep my attention which is very limited but long enough to take a dump while its on. Whats also great is the talk that gos on in the comments. People air their views and its nice to see such friendly conversation going on.The show rocks go on and listen

Zeitgeist, ive blogged a lot about zeitgeist so ill just post a few links to what I said previously. They also had a new release (along with gnome activity journal) so id like to congratulate them on that.
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/15/debunking-the-gnome-3-myths/
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/10/gnome-activity-journal/

Gnome Do or well Docky, I love Docky its nice to look at. It does the window management which I like. Plus you can store application shortcuts in it for added ease of use. Gnome Do is cool too, I love the plugin system and the way applications are easy to open. Its one of those things that shortens the time to get things done.

Tracker, I love tracker too. The way it gets all the files, emails, everything. The thing that always made me love it was it isnt slow. It has so many things to look through and it still isnt slow. Id love for it to be included by default again in ubuntu. For Gnome 3 if we had Zeitgeist and tracker included we would be able to get a lot of info and have a complete use history for each file (with zeitgeist) and have the metadata and cool stuff that tracker has. Exciting stuff (well for me who is interested in somewhat boring stuff)

Vala, my first programming language is Java. Then I went on and learned VB and assembly as part of my college course. Then I learned python and a few other languages(most of the main ones). The problem was that im most familiar with Java and im getting better at the others but I still wanted to find an alternative. So then I gave Vala a try and its really fast and all the Gnome stuff (GTK…etc) have bindings for it so I love it.

Quickly, Python-Snippets, Acire and Lernid. All of these projects are awesome in their own way. Quickly makes it easy to do the hard stuff in programming, starting, packaging and distributing and lets you get down to the fun bit making a project do awesome things. Python-Snippets and Acire help you do the programming. The snippets show you what to do and you can copy them into your own projects. It contains code from the simple to slightly more advanced stuff. The whole point is learning. Acire is the viewer for the Snippets and allows you to view the code but also execute it too which is cool.
Lernid is a project to make it easy to contribute to IRC events like ubuntu open wee, ubuntu user days, bug jams..etc. It has some awesome features other than simply viewing the IRC event you can also view information posted by the event host, which is really cool.

Ok so I talked a lot there so ill just give a quick list of some more cool stuff I like. Liferea, Gwibber and Inkscape check all those out too.