Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Here I thought Mariano was just a humble terminal hacker, and it turns out he has a very serious career. Pretty cool.

I’m using monkey-journal to post on my new blog for the time being. It is basically uber-sweet. Sadly, don’t have it running on my laptop; may install jhbuild there just for the monkey-journal/pygtk stack.

LWN/eWeek have picked up on the latest Novell reorg. Don’t know that it’ll actually impact my life much, in the end, but clearly we’re trying to be focused on the linux thing, and that can’t hurt.

edd’s post pointed me to something I knew I needed but didn’t know existed- a memory stick to flash converter. Will make the one serious pain point with my cybershot (having to carry around the USB cable + cradle) much less painful, since my loverly laptop just takes flash.

Going home this weekend; looking forward to that. Of course, for my second straight trip home, our resident frenchman offers me a baseball ticket during the time I’m home.

After a long but productive day at work, spent the evening with Joe and Robert, doing our fantasy NFL league draft. I knew I should have avoided the thing last year, but now it has sort of sucked me in.

Got home a couple of hours ago, and finished Absolution Gap. It was, as you sort of have to expect from this type of novel, an anticlimactic ending- it is very, very hard to cleanly or pleasantly tie up Big Pictures of this sort, and when you are sort of allergic to ‘characters’ :) it is hard to tie up their smaller pictures in a convincing manner either.

It’ll be good to have Krissa back home tomorrow, but it will also be stressful, since I will likely again have to work on Sunday. We’ll see, I guess. Definitely going to sneak over to Chez Henri for dinner, I think.

Hacked bugzilla for fun for the first time in ages tonight, and javascript for the first time ever. Mostly successful, though sadly the javascript I used as the starting point (and which is 98% of the code ;) is GPL, which means it probably can’t see the light of day in bugzilla, which is MPL. Exactly what either of those mean in a web context being up for debate though, I suppose. Hopefully I can at least demo it for fun on b.g.o on Saturday morning, if I can work out the feature regression it is currently causing, and maybe someone more skilled than I in javascript/DOM can reimplement it clean room :) (I’ve emailed asking for permission to relicense to use in bugzilla, but I’m not holding my breath.)

By the way, I highly recommend the site I got the javascript from, if you want to play with DOM and javascript. The walkthroughs are very clear and the example code is very clean and well commented.

Played around with blogging on my web server tonight for a bit; took a while to get myself satisfied with the stylesheet stuff, but will be very nice to be able to style it myself, and more importantly use image tags :) Not sure if I want to try to figure out how to double post like some folks have- it really seems like given the proliferation of blogging options, advo should consider turning recentlog.html into a planet, allowing people with accounts to either continue blogging at advo, or allowing them to enter an rss feed into their advo user settings page.

It is also worth saying yet again: Seth rocks.

Outside of that, today was a slog. More long bugzilla meetings; very worthwhile but very intense and focus demanding. And a small crisis after that, but we seem to have that mostly under control, I guess. We’ll see.

Had an all day meeting today about the possibility of moving the whole company to bugzilla- the first of four days of such meetings. It was really a blast- very cool to discuss the relative merits of closed and open bug systems, and how bugzilla could be made feature-competitive with more advanced closed systems. I expect that if we do settle on going this route, the bugzilla community will see a lot of code flowing out of Novell. Perhaps just as importantly, Novell will become a more open company (as opposed to a traditional company that just releases a lot of open code) and that will be pretty cool- we actually spent substantially more time today on the merits of open bug tracking than on any specifics of process or code. Everyone was pretty open to new ideas (once I was able to express them ;) and we had some really good conversations, even if some things died the death of a thousand caveats.

Novell meeting prep is sort of insane- when they came into our building (13 people, mostly from Provo but also from groups near Boston and from Nuremberg) they came not just with themselves, but wads of colored post-it notes, pens, even their own sketchpads. They even brought complete burned CDs of information. 159 documents on the CD in all. I did express disappointment it was not a populated bugzilla liveCD ;) Seriously, these people are professional meeters- it sort of creeps me out, but I’m also sort of in awe.

Andrew: I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you’ve read ZAMM. I first picked it up at 13; I can’t say it exactly changed my life or anything, but I did find it positive and inspiring. Certainly something that has influenced (many years later) how I assess the quality of my software, if not my life.

I think basically the reason I continue paying as much as I do to live where I do is that on a beautiful day, I can walk from here to Darwin’s and then to the river, enjoying a great sandwich on beautiful grass (and on Sundays in the summer, without even the noise of cars.) Read Absolution Gap for nearly three hours in the sunlight today, which was great. Warwalked a little bit after that, but with no luck- plenty of APs around Harvard Square, but none that were both open and with functional DHCP, as far as I could tell. So came home by way of Herrell’s Ice Cream. Tough day.

I finished The Bug very late last night- pretty depressing picture of programming, really, all the more so because of the basic accuracy in a lot of ways. Certainly a vivid evocation of programming, but frankly as a work of fiction I don’t think it was that good- if you’re looking for a story of someone who is frustrated by their job and descending into madness, go read Death of a Salesman.

By the way, several people have asked ‘where is the netapplet’; we’re not hoarding it, but it is pretty suse-specific code-wise at this point, so we haven’t released it yet because it wouldn’t be of much value/interest to anyone not running suse. It’ll be out soon enough anyway ;)

Currently watching Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’. It is… patience-requiring :) But good. Does at points feel like the Soviet Union said ‘our bloc has science fiction writers, just like the West! Clearly we should publicize that by doing another trippy scifi movie, just like the West!’

This week will be interesting- lots of people from all over Novell, including the Nuremberg office ;), coming to Boston to talk about using bugzilla within Novell.

The first details of the Rio Karma’s replacement are finally leaking. Having been burned once… ugh, I’ll probably go get burned again. This time with a better warranty ;) (And a 16-bit color screen?) Then again, the release date is now looking like Spring 2005. Not sure if I can wait that long, even if it does have ogg support and I don’t want to rerip all my CDs :)

My plans to stay away from the computer were thwarted by our lousy weather today, but I did get out long enough to get the final Revelation Space novel. We’ll see if it can keep me engrossed. I’ve also gotten several chapters into The Bug, which is about exactly what it sounds like- a software engineer and a QA person tracking down a bug. It is so far pretty terrifying, as it describes the field pretty perfectly, and apparently the programmer involved goes insane by the end. Which is too close to home :/

Oh, and I played with a bit of code last night- looked at the yast perl bindings and gnome setup tools. Sort of scary; neither are incredibly well documented. But I think I have at least some grasp of the gst bits, so if I can figure out how to actually do things via the yast perl bindings getting it running might not be quite as brutal as it seems. This is purely a spare-time project, sadly; YaST frontends are the One True Way for Novell/SUSE for the foreseeable future.

James Boyle, of the law school at my fine Alma Mater, had a fun Financial Times article on the iPod/Real thing last week. My favorite line:

If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering?… So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)

Good summary of really the whole API/interop problem for non-techies- it’s the same thing MS wants to do with patenting the Office file format stuff, and very similar to the CD-DRM problem, so it’s a lot more important than ‘just’ Real v. Apple.

The ever-brilliant Ben Hyde has a brief discussion of one community’s attempts to avoid DOS-by-newbie. Interesting. I doubt we could do a FAQ trial-by-fire, but still interesting to ponder the problem. (Not that we’ve been DOS’d by newbies lately, but I can see parallels in the volume of in/outflux in bugzilla.) Ben also has a link to an attempt to standardize CalDAV, which is roughly like what it sounds like- iCal+WebDAV. Hopefully that spreads- open-standard calendaring would be cool.

As some of you may know, I’m a sportsaholic; I’ll watch virtually any athletic competition that has reasonably objective rules. For obvious reasons, this has been a good weekend for that- Krissa and I ended up watching nearly 15 TV-hours of sports yesterday (with long pauses for dinner and such, then skipping through ads with replayTV, so ‘only’ probably 12 or so hours in front of the TV). And something similar today. I know this makes me a terrible, terrible couch potato, but… it has been fun- lots of volleyball (both types and sexes), men’s gymnastics, soccer, basketball (Argentina v. Serbia/Montenegro was great!), handball, sailing (worst commentators), rowing, and lots of swimming. Fun, fun, fun.

Aside from that, while watching, I snuck in a productive weekend- have ripped a zillion more CDs, done laundry, lots of dishes, and even snuck in some bugzilla cleanup. And I’m rebuilding HEAD gnome and other toys; generally looks solid, though the mime changes make me nervous- they look fine here, I just hope they are getting testing- anything that big and that important obviously has to Just Work. The new printing bits look nice, and I’m hoping this time I can actually get Vino to work. We’ll see, I guess :)