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

After work, did some web cleanup today. Updated my planets to a new planet codebase, which did wonders for the feedparsing. And I finally jhbuilt gnome-blog-poster on my laptop, so that I can post from here (for about a month I’d been posting only from my desktop at home.) The final bit will be seeing if I can figure out image posting from gnome-blog-poster- it doesn’t appear to be supported by the metaweblog API code, so maybe I’ll futz around with that a bit.

Finally feel like I’m sort of caught up at work- sent a lot of email and read a lot of bugs today. I’ve been really swamped, but tonight I was mostly able to get things cleaned up. Doesn’t mean I won’t have too much to do tomorrow, unfortunately. :/

Live from the roof of the Stata Center…

Looks like wireless won’t be a problem. Weather might be :)

argh. First post this morning got eaten. I hate software.

What I was ranting about:

Awesome to see that Tim announced the Summit. The announcement is pretty late, because we couldn’t get the site we wanted, but the new location is pretty awesome. My personal helping-out task this morning is to go test their guest wireless access, aka ‘make sure ssh and irc ports aren’t blocked.’ We haven’t formalized any couch-sharing arrangements (we’ll probably just wiki-fy it) but my two futons are pretty much first-come first-served :) Slight priority for Aussies. Hope lots of people can drive up for the weekend.

After my post last night about open wireless, Ingo Lütkebohle emailed me to tell me about nocat.net, which is a registration project for open wireless. The basic idea, as Ingo presented it, is pretty solid. The two big things: if you leave an open network, you’re probably in many places legally liable for things that pass through your network, since there is no way to prove it wasn’t you that did $BAD_THING. nocat CYAs here, since you can match a service registration to the $BAD_THING. The second thing is that you announce you’re providing a neighborly service- to a user, you’re not some idiot who left their AP open, but someone conscientiously contributing to open access for others. I really like this publicity aspect- it’s something RMS (correctly) rants about all the time in regards to free software, and it applies to free networks as well. We can’t let people take either for granted.

Update: I’m writing this from the open balcony of the Stata Center, which apparently has its own, open, wireless net distinct from MIT’s. I couldn’t get on to MIT’s, which is a little scary, but whatever. It’s mad cool up here :)

By the way, I don’t often agree with Joel, but this piece on usability being (in some ways) superceded by what he calls ‘social interface design’ is really interesting. Worth a read, even if it isn’t directly relevant for most hackers I know (except maybe those of us hacking on bugzilla ;)

pcolijn: you should absolutely leave your wireless open. It doesn’t cost you anything (unless you’re absolutely getting crushed by someone borrowing lots of bandwidth) and who knows, maybe some day we’ll all live in a post-wired paradise.

There has been some very interesting discussions in the past few days about the relationship between Marxism and open source, spurred by this paper. I’ve been pondering this question on and off since I took intro to political philosophy (which can’t avoid having some heavy marx reading) the same semester I first installed linux. I don’t think most free software folks are marxists, or even particularly socialist (except the occasional nutty aussie), but by moving towards a post-scarcity economics and beating the free-rider and control problems that have dogged Marx since he wrote the stuff, free software provides some interesting discussion points for Marxists. And of course, Marx himself would argue that you don’t have to believe in Marxism to work towards the overthrow of the capitalist state- Marx’s Revenge, which I read recently, makes a pretty persuasive argument that globalizing multinationals are in many ways better Marxists than, say, Lenin ever was. Anyway… I’m rambling. Hopefully I can find some time to put these thoughts together more coherently at some point soon.

Good to see that GNOME 2.8 went out today- as usual, some cool new toys, and some nice advances in places. The new mime system at least at a glance seems to be much cleaner, and gnome-volume-manager should be mega-sweet, though I haven’t actually gotten it running yet. :) And vino does totally rock. I wish I’d been able to contribute more this release, but at least I did get to commit a few fixes to the web page this morning. :)

I’ve already been asked once when Ximian/Novell will ship 2.8; it’s not clear right now, but it is quite possible we’ll actually skip directly to 2.9 internally. I hope we’ll distribute that externally as well, but the plans aren’t clear on that.

I’m famous. Or something.

Read gun, with occasional music today. Enjoyable- must be, I blew through it all since around 4:30. Cover calls it a cross between Raymond Chandler and Phil Dick, and that’s basically completely dead on. Strongly recommended to anyone who enjoys scifi and good detective stories.

Bastien comes to the rescue for the second time this weekend. Thanks, dude. I wish k3b were a bit more clear on this issue. And maybe I finally will get a burner… (still haven’t tried out gnoppix because of the silly lack of burner.)

Dreamed about work last night. We were meeting in a pair of twinned towers, and were having a heated discussion about bug triage, though I was in the penthouse of one tower and Nat and everyone else were in the penthouse of the other tower. Oh, and all my hackers had been replaced by my little brother’s third grade class, who were mostly arguing about whether or not Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chips changed color if you lied while around them. Clearly, I need to work less.

Fantasy football starts in earnest today. I am supporting Joe for President, but in football, I must crush him like the bug he is.

Found Dave Barry’s random patch for muine, which seems to work quite well- I’ve been looking for something like that for a while. Now to just get vino+DAMAGE working correctly on my desktop.

2.8 is pretty nice, at least according to what I’m seeing on my desktop. A little scared by the mime stuff (shaun was having some problems with it yesterday), but at least for the very small bit of playing with it I’ve done, it seems to work fine for me.

Did spend an unfortunate amount of time yesterday fighting with creating an iso of an audio CD for my sister- the patches I can find for muine and RB don’t seem to work, and k3b happily creates all the .wavs, but no iso. Grr.

SuSE’s build system needs something like this.