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

Couple other things I was reminded of last night (as I continue to try to purge :):

• The Evolution 1.0 cheerleading and testimonials.
• Not attending the Not A Gay Sex Party.
• The last night of GUADEC in Sevilla, and missing the plane with Dave the next morning, and the cathedral with the artists/photographers the next morning.

Somebody told me in IRC today that yesterday’s list had depressed them; that was not the intent. I think (though it was maybe subconscious yesterday) part of the intent was to catalog how great both GNOME and a company can be- I don’t want to lower my standards and accept mediocrity. I firmly believe that both work and GNOME can be a total blast (BTW, Blake of Firefox fame captured this well captured this well a few days ago), and I want to make sure that that kind of energy and positivity is part of my life, as it has been the past four years. As a middle manager at Novell, that wasn’t happening for me- I think it can and does happen for others at Novell and may happen a lot more in the future- and so it was time for me to move on. I realize this sets a high bar for future employment, but what the hell. Aim high :)

In bug news, Krissa just ran into file-roller bug 102501. Blah.

Finally (thanks to large gift certificate to Amazon) got a WAP that lets me effectively ban my neighbors from my network without excluding first-time visitors cleanly. Have so far put four neighbors on the banlist. My effective bandwidth is up significantly. Yay. (Pleasant side effect is that I discovered my laptop has working 802.11 g.)

I don’t have java installed (and am back to using epiphany) so I haven’t actually tried it yet, but the new simile project ‘piggy bank’ for browsing and searching of RDF data looks interesting. I haven’t really plunged in, and probably never will, but the tagging/sorting/metadata issues brought up by del.icio.us, flickr, and others seems to me like a really fascinating area for actual innovative and interesting software. I’d love to just dump it all in beagle, of course (piggy bank and beagle are both lucene-backed, amusingly) but the notion of all this rich, interconnected, quasi-self-organizational stuff is really very cool. (Had dinner Thursday night with Stefano Mazzochi, who is heavily involved in simile, and it is just cool stuff, that flickr and delicious have made me think might actually work in the future.)

(This is where Curtis comes and beats me over the head saying ‘I’ve been saying this for years…’)

All of my adult working life, up until yesterday, was spent as a monkey, and nearly 50% of what I’d consider my total adult life as well. So… I’ll always be a monkey, at some level, regardless of the letter I sent yesterday[1].

Can’t speak to the Novell ID.

Some of the things I’ll remember, in roughly chronological order:

• Peter telling me in IRC that Helix had decided over dinner that they needed a bugmaster, and that he and Thunder had said they knew just the right guy.
• Coming to the office for the first time, during the Ximian GNOME (aka ‘prion’) release crunch. exchange from one of the many fairly grungy people on a couch: ‘are you the new QA guy?’ ‘yes.’ ‘great. you can’t leave.’ ‘I have to leave, I still have to graduate.’ ‘you don’t need to graduate, we need you now! please!’
• The old office, which just ruled in general.
• Thunder and Dave cursing mightily about HPUX.
• Lots of totally, totally exhausted people trying mightily to enjoy the TMBG show the night before (after?) the evo 1.0 release.
• Having a meeting canceled with Sun Ireland during world cup 2002, saying ‘great, that means I can watch more soccer’, and sitting down to realize that the game on during the meeting was… Ireland-Germany. Immediately opened evo to cancel a meeting two days later during a US game.
• Telsa calling me to invite me to be part of the release team after I obnoxiously barged in and said ‘I think we should track bugs this way.’ I don’t think I’d ever actually spoken to a non-Ximian GNOME person before.
• The general headrush of the Sun contract and GNOME 2.0.
• Having to explain to Chema what it meant when Richard decided to become Rachel.
• Drinking on Dave’s couch, waiting for the actual release of 2.0 to happen.
• 400+ hours in the office the month before XD2; running across the street to buy food and toothpaste and such all the time.
• Monkey wars.
• Nat emailing me on the day of the acqusition to say ‘The CEO is coming at 1. Please make sure your team is sober.’
• “Do you own a trenchcoat?”
• St. Patrick’s day in an Irish pub. In Germany.
• A thousand other things and a hundred or so really awesome people.

Anyway… it’s been an awesome ride, and I hope I’ll always have the friends I made as a monkey. I hope this post starts bringing me some mental closure, too… Christine made fun of me last night for the ‘we’ habit, which will be hard to shake. :)

[1] Yes, it was cliched, I used ‘thanks for all the fish.’

I packed up most of my desk today, bringing home my treasured IBM T-ad penguin, the gift I was given during Diwali by the Novell Bangalore team, my brand-new signed Kernel Love (I’m in the acknowledgements! woohoo!) and other assorted bits of stuff. Intellectually, I know this is the right thing for me, but emotionally, it is hard :/

On a brighter note, I went to a small small lunch presentation by Daoud Kuttab of ammannet at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Was really quite fascinating. Kuttab is working on building some of the basic bits of democracy from the ground up in Jordan by using internet radio to create an open, fair media. It is still oddly restricted in some ways by the political climate, and of course it is limited in distribution by economics and other factors, but it is rebroadcastable (which some Palestinian stations have done, ‘leaking’ it over the border to Jordan) and gave them the leverage to help push for private radio station licensing in Jordan- which hadn’t happened until now. Anyway, sounds like an incredible effort to be involved in the birth of. Glad I went. I’ll probably end up taking Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control at Harvard Extension this semester, we’ll see.

Spent most of yesterday tracking down bugs, and posted to d-d-l about it. Bottom line- we let quite a few stability issues slip in to 2.6 and 2.8, and I think we should get them out for 2.10. The list of 2.10 showstoppers, then, has grown to 22, and more will come. I hope everyone with a little bit of C knowledge who reads this or the d-d-l post (and certainly all maintainers) goes and reads the list and tries to pitch in a little. Think of all the users you’ll help :)

In continued experimentation with skippy, it seems to cause the panel to lose its magical panel properties, so that maximized windows and nautilus take up the whole screen. Very odd. Still fun, though.

Had a phone call with my dad yesterday; appears all my hep tests are clean, and some of the cholesterol/etc. ones are better than they appeared at first glance. My family is still paniced my heart is going to explode any day now, but… that’s what parents are for, I guess.

This newsforge article pointed me at skippy. Fun toy. Does seem to somehow break my panel, but creates cool screenshots :)

I am of the shiny things generation.

Either composite or skippy is damn slow, unfortunately, else this would probably replace alt-tab for me now.

Got hit (starting friday night) with a nasty cold. Have discovered why people used to love silk hankies, since we ran out of kleenex and didn’t really feel like walking out in the storm to get more. Still loading myself with drugs and vitamin C and krissa-produced goodness, like lentil stew and warming, beautiful toast.

Was gratified to see this morning that 40 patches got marked reviewed last night. At that rate (yeah, right) there will be no unreviewed patches in two weeks. ;)

The other creeping embarassment is bugs. There are 347 high-priority non-enhancement bugs with a GNOME version set. 150 or so of those have been reported against 2.9 or are 2.7/2.8 bugs that have been confirmed to be against 2.9.

It is a sort of pathetic commentary on the state of GNOME-KDE relations that the highest level thing we can productively agree on is an ever-expanding database crammed into a crappy text file with really, really terrible performance characteristics. This is not to say that what Fernando is looking at doesn’t excite me, but it does make me a little sad every time someone says ‘stick it in a .desktop file.’

Final blizzard totals for most of eastern Massachusetts will range between 28 and 38 inches setting a new single storm record for Boston… surpassing the amount from the great blizzard of 78 and the presidents day storm of 2003.

My street this morning.

They say the storm is only a little past half done. Yay for having planned a day of sloth anyway…

Assholes. Gigantic. Fucking. Assholes. I hope all spammers have a special place in hell reserved for them. In the mean time, I can’t wait until the law allows me to sue the hell out of them.

This outburst of rage brought to you by my discovery that there is now comment spam for gallery.

Sebastian Bacher has been a complete, total, utter stud lately. 181 bugs closed this week.

Also, I sat down and read the open 2.10 showstopper list. The list isn’t perfect and in some ways is slightly arbitrary but it is a good start on the ‘known most embarassing open issues.’ If you have something you’d consider holding the whole release for, add it to that list.

In other, more personal news, I’ve decided to leave Novell and the monkeys. This was a really hard decision for me- I’ll likely never again work with a better team than I did at Ximian, and ironically, I’ve never felt more positive about Novell’s future, both as a profitable organization and as a free software contributor. But I realized that even while I was getting some great opportunities (team management! germany! india! $RANDOM_PLACE_I_NEVER_THOUGHT_FREE_SOFTWARE_WOULD_TAKE_ME!) in the end, my heart wasn’t in it- too many things that weren’t what I wanted to be doing. Was best for me and for the company and the people I care about to move on.

As for what is next… I plan to spend some time just being a full-time board member and bug guy, and focusing on marketing and board transparency. Past that… not sure. I’m certainly going to look hard at professional schools (and the requisite preparation for them). My father practically wet his pants with joy when I told him I’d be looking at that opportunity. :) I’ll also openly look at opportunities within software if they come my way. But for the time being I won’t be seriously pursuing anything- I want to keep taking the deep breath I took at the end of last year and refocusing myself on the fun parts of Free Software and playing with small, flat, dynamic organizations that have open, flexible communication, and seeing where that takes me.

[Along those lines, I read cluetrain manifesto last week and The Future of Work is on its way. Cluetrain had a lot of late '90s utopianism about it, but it still had some good insights, I think, into what has made 'working' in ximian and with gnome so much fun for me personally. Future of Work seems to build on some of the 'why can't business be a democracy?' musings towards the end of Cluetrain, but obviously I'll have to read more of it to find out :)]