People Behind KDE: Celeste Lyn Paul

Today's People Behind KDE features the American lass who is forging the KDE 4 Human Interface Guidelines. Find out the advantage of a hobby against job, what is wrong with Fruit Salad plus the good fortune of one KDE convert as we interview Celeste Lyn Paul.

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Comments

by AC (not verified)

How can you say "Her looks is not relevant in any manner to the article."? The article _included_a_photo_of_her_. Commenting on this photo is commenting on part of the article. This is not a case of a purely technical article, and then someone 'dug up' a picture of her from elsewhere.

If you publish an article about yourself to the world, and you choose to include photos (not to mention setting a casual tone with a section for "personal questions"), then you are the one who has opened the discussion to your appearance.

People don't tend to comment on the boring and commonplace. She does stand out as attractive among the photos of KDE developers. It's really no different than if, say, one of the male KDE developers had blue hair, and someone said "Nice hair."

Just take it as a friendly comment directed at her and move on with your life. I'm sure she can handle being called cute. She's probably heard it a lot. She doesn't need a bunch of guys riding to her rescue on the dot. Having her play the damsel in distress in your imagination is far more sexist than the original comment ever was.

by AC (not verified)

I frankly don't give a damn fsck how she looks I care what she does. And, although I'm a GNOME and XP/Classic user, I'd say usability is very important in the *NIX DE community in general.

by Simon (not verified)

Well it's always nice to see these interviews to put faces to names and so on and have a bit more of an idea about the skills/qualifications etc of the people working on kde, so thanks for the interview.

Having had a brief look at Celeste's recent start menu usability paper I was pleased to see some graphs and so on of real users - I do feel sometimes that things are brought in supposedly in the name of usability but *not* backed up with hard figures like this (of course, studies might not give a true picture, but its better than one person dictating). I'd like to see this applied to for example, the decision to include text under icons in kde 4 and things like the proposed new SUSE start menu (I get the impression in the latter that a study is on-going, i hope we get to see the results).

Btw, I'm not necessarily saying any of these decisions are not good (and if they are bad not blaming Celeste for them as I don't know if she was involved) but (continue to) show us the figures and make usuability a science not an art. That way if a default doesn't suit me I know there *is* a good basis for it (and I can always change it for me, of course).

by R.James (not verified)

A little late, but just another poster that thinks she's cute. Can't say I read many of the dot articles (other than commit digests), but from reading planet I believe she's very talented at finding out what users want/expect.

Also, to those dorks who want mouse snapping to a button (or whatever the hell that annoying feature is), please consider that typically only those who want something changed will speak up. Those content / liking how something works don't tend to say much.

And this feature is available in KDE is it not? (not sure) Just enable it if you want it.

by Warmy (not verified)

The sexiest contributor to KDE is by any means of course Coolo!
No Paul, no Faure, no Rusin will ever met his appearance.

I have a photo of him when he had a beard on my bedside table... I cannot turn my eyes away.... oh Coolo... wait, what is this woman next to his cheek???

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

It's not at least surprising that there you can count the women involved in KDE on one hand, given the main topic of the majority of comments in here. Yes, Celeste is cute. No, you don't need to comment on that, and you should know by yourself that it's only counter-productive in any respect.

And now go and read Val Henson's "Encourage Women in Linux" howto at http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html

Bastards.

by R.James (not verified)

How exactly, is this counter-productive? This dot article is on an interview with Celeste... There is a -personal- questions section of the interview. Those comments (and mine) are vaguely inline with that section of the interview.

Now if this was an article/summary that was strictly on HIG (and it's not), then yes those comments are innapropriate. Furthermore, Celeste hasn't said yay or nay as to whether she cares about these kinds of comments.

BTW, I asked my gf if comments like this would freak her out. She said only comments along the lines of "will you marry me", "are you single", etc... The rest she had no problem with. Simple flattery--that's all.

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

Ok, this is the situation:
- Celeste has no problem with this kind of flattery (see her blog)
- Your girlfriend has no problem with this kind of flattery
- Many (not all) others do have a problem with this kind of flattery,
and are feeling very uneasy in such an environment.

Short pointer to the blog of a prominent female KDE contributor:
http://canllaith.org/?p=4
and she's just one example out of many.

The fact that not all women are being scared away by this kind of comments doesn't mean that you can generalize it to all of the other ones. I mean,
- there's no gains for you in any case
- few women feel better with a million "you're so cute" comments
- a lot of women don't like it.

What's so difficult about just letting it be?

by Antonio (not verified)

You did a pretty good job of pointing out an article that, you know, didn't mention what was done here as a `No'. The above was not a sexual advance, it was a simple compliment for goodness's sake.

by Josel (not verified)

Jacob has a nice link. Try http://canllaith.org/?p=4
Maybe you get it now! Those comments about someones "cuteness" are completely innapropriate in this enviroment. If you really feel the urge then send her a email expressing and explaining your feelings about her looks - that will probably be good fun.