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

After Robert posted that unflattering image, I’d like to link to a much sexier picture of myself. Thanks, phlog, for helping out at the LWE booth and posting the pic.

Just gave Garrett my old stereo and old VA Research box, clearing out a lot of floor space and helping Julia find a job here in Boston. Nice to see so much new space on the floor- hopefully I’ll get more when I finish ripping and can hide the CDs and server tower in a closet, exposing only the speakers. A few months into the experiment, VNC + XFCE + muine have proven a very lightweight, easy-for-Krissa interface for all of that- as long as the box stays up, it is a really nice solution.

Good to see that someone read my spelling post ;) For what it is worth, I mostly agree with Federico- compared to English grammar, English spelling is not much of a problem for English-as-second-language people I know.

Sigh. I had this idea ages ago. Should have tried to patent it then. :) Apple will again get credit for taking a basically obvious idea and then implementing it very, very well (which admittedly I was not prepared to do- would have been easy enough to do once Windows started selling their incredibly expensive tablet PCs :)

I’m fascinated by change in large groups which are deeply committed to something or another, and spelling changes in a large language are a pretty great example of that. Apparently such a thing is happening in Germany, with mixed reactions. Interesting read.

(Link from the almost-always-interesting Crooked Timber, which also has some interesting commentary on the article.)

I just got spam from newoemsoft.biz for … linux software. Truly, we have arrived.

Elijah: awesome.

The cult of Lebowski has gone mainstream enough to be written up in the NYT. I eagerly await insightful commentary on this from Dave.

In 48 hours of furious reading on the plane and in the park, I read The Confusion, which I enjoyed a lot more than Quicksilver. I’m seriously considering re-reading War and Peace now- I don’t think I was really equipped to do it when I first read it, and I gave it up about 100 pages from the end. And just breezing through the (admittedly much lighter) Confusion has given me the hubris to think maybe I could tackle something that long and complex again.

Also saw the original Manchurian Candidate with Krissa last night; that was fun to see again. The new one is getting good reviews, but I have to agree with Angela Lansbury- it was so good the first time, why do it again?

Davyd: you might want to look at this if you want to go through those patches against gnome-applets. There are by that count 37 unreviewed patches against gnome-applets, which is pretty bad, I agree. I wouldn’t write it off to elitism, though; it’s just that gnome-applets has been undermaintained for a while and bugzilla can be a hairy place to wade through for patches. Hope people have not forgotten about the patch-status and patch-report cgis I wrote up- hopefully that will make cutting into the patch backlog easier.

Mr. Yum: if you want gnome-blog+spell checking, try Monkey Journal. It’s all about the code reuse. :)

Had a good LWE, despite waking up at 7am today for an east coast meeting. Met a lot of potential customers who mostly seemed pretty impressed with the product, and more importantly, met a big chunk of the mozilla guys and saw the GNOME booth. Big hi to the guys and gals who were staffing :)

Ended up eating dinner last night with Jeff and KeithP, which was pretty nice, despite Jeff’s visceral reaction to the menu of the restaurant. :)

Baseball game on Wednesday night was a lot of fun- met an old friend of Christine’s who was also a Duke alum. The stadium was covered with Novell ads- it was a little weird, but cool.

Edd: I’ve long wanted to do something like that, but have always sort of been stopped by my own internal requirement that it be a full liveCD for it to be worthwhile. I guess if you’re already going to a lot of conferences, you can do it on one laptop, and still have a lot of impact. Also, I’d suggest Michael’s latest OpenOffice work- openoffice with better gtk theme compliance and a gtk file selector is a pretty nice demo.

I’ve posted some LWE SF pics; so far been a decent conference, even though I’ve forgone most evening partying in the name of sleep and staying on top of email. I can hear the EFF Freedom Fest outside my window, too- I gave quite a bit to them today, and I hope everyone else does too.

Quick! How many of your favorite large companies are running open wireless at LWE? Many thanks to the fine people at Sun for giving me the connection to post this on.