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

I’m not typically a big joel fan, for reasons I’ve probably listed before, but if you’re a college or high school student and reading this, drop whatever else you are doing and read this right now. It is great, really great advice on what you should do in college if you want to be a successful programmer after graduation.

In a related vein, Joel has two pieces (particular the second one) that capture perfectly why the old desktop group (particularly during the Sun and XD2 periods) were such a pleasure to work with- we were a bunch of cantankerous bastards, but in the end, basically every team member was ‘rosh gadol’ and not ‘rosh katan’.

I’m surprised that in the discussion of the supposed $500 headless imac that I’ve seen, no one has discussed the thin form factor and headlessness and concluded ‘steve jobs is finally producing a computer to replace my DVD player, hook to my TV, and let me control itunes + dvd player with a bluetooth mouse from across the room.’ A small, cheap, sort of slow machine- sounds like a perfect media box to me. In fact, if it really does exist, and really is that cheap, as soon as someone ensures a good distro runs on it I’ll probably buy one and slap muine, totem, and sound-juicer on it, and nothing else. (Yes, I am that much of a free software bigot.) (And yes, muine is that good, ditto sound-juicer, and totem is catching up very fast.) (And yes, I’ll probably keep OS/X for testing/comparison purposes.)

Slightly related, my first thought when I saw this was ‘wow, I want customers that devoted.’ And then I remembered this, from LWE. So I guess maybe we’re doing OK. (Better pic here.)

Second day back at the office today. After thinking some during the time off, and gauging my own reactions on return, I am coming to the conclusion that I can hack this management thing if I become more aggressive about shaping the world around me instead of letting it kick me in the ass, or alternately, if I am in a work situation where things are inherently not kicking me in the ass. Hopefully now that NLD 9 is out the door we’re moving towards that second situation.

If Arnie can pull off his redistricting plan, I might actually consider amending for arnold. The gerrymandering we’re seeing all over, particularly Texas, should be an embarassment to our nation.

I just did my first successful run of the LDTP tool that the Novell Bangalore folks have been working on. Took me about 10 minutes to get running. It is pretty sweet- I typed ‘./ldtp gedit sanity’ and a little script called out to the a11y stuff and opened a file dialog, and told me that gedit PASSED. Now all I have to do is figure out how to actually create the test data files…. :)

Down to only 80 unread emails, and trimmed the number of emails in the INBOX from 112K to 54K. With Zucchi’s optimization work and that, I’m down from a shade under 1/2G for evo to 298M.

Have not achieved Sunday’s goal of reading all 2.7/2.8 bugs, but I posted to desktop-devel about the next step, aka ‘making the GNOME milestone useful for project planning.’ I want this release to kick ass, and that means I have to kick ass myself, I guess :)

Finally responded to two emails from mid-october, related to my frankendesktop post. In a similar vein, I posted to ephy list about where their focus needs to be going forward, inspired by Bryan’s post on the same subject.

In going through my October posts to find the frankenpost, I followed back a trackback, and someone posted a great idea to the post about the nautilus/pygtk cc plugin- gnomoradio and RB should get glued together, so that (as Apple users have iTunes Music store) we could have transparently a Free music channel. Nifty idea, hope someone runs with it :)

Now to settle down, have some incredibly yummy Krissa-provided soup, and watch the Orange Bowl.

Just wrapped up listening to an hour long NPR show featuring Lawrence Lessig. Informative piece for ‘newbies’ but nothing particularly insightful for people who have followed him for a while- there is a Real stream in the link for listening.

The last call-in question he took was well done: a caller who was apparently a musician, and was strongly opposed to giving her stuff away for free. Lessig jumped right in and strongly said ‘I’m here to give choice- if you don’t want to give your stuff away, you don’t have to. I’m not at all opposed to that, if that model works for you.’ I strongly agree with Lessig here, and I think this probably encapsulates my biggest disagreement with the doctrinal RMS/FSF position on free software. I believe strongly there is a fundamental right to write and use Free software (which implies a right to reverse engineer and a moral requirement for open standards) and I would find it fairly distasteful (and/or boring) to work on non-Free software personally. But I don’t believe that writing proprietary software is something that is immoral or should be restricted/prohibited, and I can’t get particularly worked up about the GPL/LGPL distinction.

Slightly related: Lessig is a good FSF board member; he corrected the use of ‘Open Source’ and used GNU/Linux.

Blake Ross, who my sister may have a crush on (and went to the same school my brother is at right now, oddly) points to an all too brief article on simplicity v. bloatware, and why they think Firefox is winning explicitly because it is simple and lighter. I love reading this in slightly more mainstream computer press- I think GNOME has been pushing in this direction for some time, and (hopefully) it is only a matter of time before OOo sees the light and follows mozilla down the road towards a purging. Or alternately, until we get a good slideshow program to complement Abi and Gnumeric :)

Too long a day, spent nearly completely and frustratingly in front of the computer. My spam filters somehow magically failed while I was away, leaving me with 3-4K spam messages to weed through and delete today. Probably I should have force-fed it again instead, but… whatever, it is done- I’m down to a shade under 200 emails to read, from 9K in the inbox this morning. Hopefully I’ll get to do some actual work tomorrow- there is lots of triage love needed in b.g.o.

Just finished reading all open bugs filed against GNOME Version 2.9/2.10. Only about 180 or so so far; not bad. And many of those should be ‘unversioned enhancement’ instead of 2.9/2.10, or have mysteriously gotten the version when they aren’t part of GNOME proper. Of course, most of the 358 open bugs against 2.7/2.8 almost certainly apply to 2.9/2.10 as well. I hope to read those over the next 2-3 days and reassign many/most of them. We’ll see how it goes :)

Marc: I thought my break was a mess, health-wise. My thoughts are with Wendy’s dad- hope he pulls through.

In working on my goal of reading all 2.9/2.10 bugs today, I discovered that a few months ago, a new bug high (or low) was reached when a flash animation of a bug was created.

Fairly productive day today so far- lots of grocery shopping, lots of vacuuming (lots of crap on the floor makes baby roomba unhappy), and lots of bug reading, though not as much as I’d like yet. Hopefully get some more in before and after the Duke game. NB: I hate the Celtics. Or maybe just their contract with Fox Sports New England.