Last “Lost” blog post, I promise (I hate being repetitive, but man, the show rocks). ABC just released a 2-minute promo of the next Lost episode here. In the snippet we learn that the losties were not part of a “list”. It is apparent that the Others were only abducting the survivors that were on a specific “list”. It seems that the actual plan was to land the Oceanic plane on a runway in the island, get the people they needed, and let the rest go. But when Desmond failed to enter the numbers, the magnetic field of the island went berserk and so the plane was cut in pieces instead of landing. This is also why the Others imposed borders to the losties in the island (they had to deal with them in one way or another), and also why the pilot was killed in the second episode by the smoke monster so abruptly: so he wouldn’t talk! Intriguing, no?

I also realized why I like Lost more than Heroes: it’s the characters. If a lostie dies, I would feel the pain. Heck, I even care what do they eat, or how they protect themselves from the rain! If a hero dies though, I don’t seem to care at all, because they have new heroes pretty much on each episode! Heroes seems to be all about the plot, while Lost is about the characters in the short term and the plot only in a longer term. Despite this, Lost keeps me at the edge of my seat, while Heroes –although enjoyable– has failed to do so.

For a long time the Gtk/Gnome community did not have a good CD/DVD burner. The KDE guys had K3B and I have heard many stories of people who didn’t want to have the KDE libs installed on their Gnome-centric distro, and yet they had to do so just so they could use K3B.

I was one of these users, although I am very picky about user interfaces and so K3B does not do it for me. And the Nautilus Burn facility is too bare bones for my taste. In the past year at least 3 independent GTK+ CD/DVD burning projects became available: Gnomebaker, Graveman! and Brasero. I installed all of them to check them out, and I have a few comments about their UI.

Gnomebaker is very traditional in the way it lays out itself. It’s a bit like K3B and a bit like Nero. Its UI is easy to use, but it’s far from “modern”. Graveman! users a step-by-step interface which is also easy to use, but it can get complicated or confusing at times. I found Brasero to be the best application in terms of a satisfying UI. I am not saying that it’s the most trouble-free burner, but it definitely has “mac-style” usability. In fact, it reminds me a bit of OSX’s Disco.app where everything is done via drag-n-drop and while the UI looks very plain, it is actually usable.