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

gnome-blog, how I love thee, how I hate thee.

Every year the organizers stress about the quality of GUADEC, and every year they pull it out of the fire :) Looks like we’ll have another great get-together this year; so far I haven’t made it back to my room before midnight either night despite the really terrible heat. (I walked around Berlin in the same brutal heat on Friday and took a lot of Berlin pictures.)

Kjartan: that jhbuild-mozilla bug has been known for a long time; check bugzilla. I hacked up a patch for it that I used in the tinderbox, but it didn’t have error checking (because I don’t know squat about

Nat: part of the reason shortcuts aren’t shared between nautilus and gtk is that the gtk people flipped out when that was implemented for the panel. Perhaps Federico’s manager could give Federico time to create the Right API for this :)

Got a docbookized ‘why gnome’ into CVS last night, and did a lot of play with yelp-as-docbook-viewer. Pretty slick- thanks for everything, Shaun. Hopefully more docbook to come, too. Brace yourself, translation teams :) Also quintupled the number of open sabayon bugs. In the mean time Marcus is doing real work- we’re up to six language liveCDs on torrent.gnome.org, and more are in the pipe, including hopefully Punjabi.

Paper is creeping towards done; sadly the marketing stuff is way more fun :) Only about 30 hours left to finish it, though, so have to get my ass in gear- the paparazzi who constantly follow me around will have noticed I’m no longer in IRC.

Rodrigo: Sounds like GUADEC-ES was a blast, sad I missed it. FWIW, gvidcap is a straight port of xvidcap, and just as unusable. I really think someone needs to integrate video capture into the current screenshot applet, or something like it, so that we can have dead-simple desktopcast creation.

Also, related to Rodrigo’s comment on the first day about a session talking about hackers being ‘corrupted’- I don’t think that people are necessarily corrupted by going to work for The Man, but there is an extensive literature on goal displacement in non-profits that I keep intending to read more of. In a nutshell, as I understand it second hand: ) the argument is that once you start introducing different motivations, there are fundamental, measurable differences in how organizations work and what they create, often unintentional. So it is something we need to be aware of, even if the motivations of everyone involved are totally pure.

Got the Greek liveCD up on torrent.gnome.org, and looking through my email backlog, made some connections that will hopefully result in more languages soon. Also, Seth rightly pointed out that the page said ‘hosted by Red Hat’, which was, uh… not right. :)

While browsing the flickr feeds I mentioned in my last post, found the best GNOME project name I’ve seen in a while- Simple Menu Editor- GNOME. Sweet.

Paper continues to come along; after days of worrying that I wouldn’t be able to make the minimum length, I think I may now need to spend some time editing to make it under the maximum. Also, Joe’s recommendation during my last paper of the Economist Style Guide was useful enough that I’ve ordered a hard copy of it.

I googled ‘gnome torrent’ to see what was up there, and torrent.gnome.org is already cached. It took them less than 7 hours after the CNAME was created- they must send crawlers to things as soon as DNS changes reach their DNS server. Crazy.

I set up Gourmet on Krissa’s box, and she’s been happily playing with it since, to the point where she now wants me to set up xcave for her. I’m hoping she’ll get involved with the project and get them some feedback, but in the meantime, she is excited :) Nice to see her excited about free software. (And as a plus, gourmet has a windows version, which her mom can install, and then they can swap recipes. Coolio.)

Marcus Bauer has been kicking a ton of ass on the liveCD stuff, making them available in French, German, and Spanish, and offering them in other languages as well. We didn’t really have a way to distribute them, but Seth Vidal came to the rescue, and we are now the proud ownersish of torrent.gnome.org.

So, action items for p.g.o readers:

• If you’ve got some bandwidth and disk space to spare, go seed some torrents.
• If you see errors or omissions in the page (particularly in the ‘installing bittorrent clients’ section) please email me.
• If you’ve got a large strictly gnome-related object you want to let people download via bt, drop me an email.
• If you’re a translator, and have a need/desire for a liveCD in your language, drop by marketing list.
• If you can help with marketing materials to place on all these liveCDs, bring your energy and creativity to the marketing list- we need short, concise, translatable selling docs and demos to put on every liveCD desktop, and anyone can help.

We still have open questions about getting all these CDs mirrored the old-fashioned way- that still works better for some folks (particularly those in smaller languages (and we’d like a liveCD for every supported language!) to poke at ftp or http instead of bt. But that would also be an assload of data to be syncing every release. Dunno… well, anyway, we’ll figure it out by 2.12. Suggestions very, very welcome- send them to marketing list.

BTW, I love edd’s notion of throwing flickr into the mix of a planet- I’d already created a mini-p.g.o with technorati ‘gnome desktop’ links, but flickr hadn’t occurred to me. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can only get ‘or’ with tags in their feeds- ‘and’ doesn’t seem to work, which is pretty crucial, since, uh, well… see for yourself.

In personal life notes, had a great time last night at the Red House with a Duke friend from out of town, who does not have nearly as cool a nickname as the under-loved Venezuelan Thunder. I’m nearly finished with my paper for class, and I’m even beginning to not be embarassed by it. Just in time to start writing materials for presentation to the Advisory Board and get on a plane. Yay. Other than those things, has been a pretty uneventful few days- just staring at the paper and trying to pound it into some semblance of an argument, and sleeping, mostly. Hopefully Stuttgart will be different :)

Things I saw today that blew my mind:

• I read enough of the Poignant Guide to Ruby that (a) I want to learn ruby and (b) I am desperately waiting for Robert Love’s Poignant Guide to Kernel Hacking, and/or Robert Love’s Poignant Guide to Macroeconomics.
• GNOME 2.8. On HURD.
• Paul Kedrosky’s blog, which totally blew up my morning, productivity-wise.
• I had a nice, productive conversation on usability-list, about the potential design for a cross-desktop ‘oops, I’m offline, try that again’ error dialog. Shouldn’t be mind-blowing, I guess, but it has been a while :) Mpt and Bryan were most helpful. Now all we have to do is get Network Manager into the Platform…
• We had our first wiki spam that I’m aware of. Fuckers. I wonder if Massachusetts has an anti-graffiti ordinance that could be used to take them down.
• Lots of traffic on the marketing list. Nothing particularly earthshaking yet, but I’m feeling motivated.

In general, I agree with Jeff’s thoughts on the language thing and much more importantly with the future of the ‘release’, such as it is. There are a lot of questions to ask and answer about what GNOME’s role would be, how we message this change, how we document the interfaces Jeff talks about, how we keep ‘federated’ release teams from making some of the same mistakes, etc., etc., but in the end, more importantly than any of those, it’ll be more fun. And that’ll be nice for everyone :)

Also, before I forget to post this publicly, I was looking for guadec-es news today, and realized that the spanish gnome planet was probably the best place to get it. I had to google (didn’t remember where it was) and discovered there were even more gnome planets than I thought there were. Greetz to gnome planets from:

• Spanish-speaking world(which really should be blogging more about guadec-es!:)
• France
• Germany
• Korea
• Netherlands
• Chile
• Bangalore

If there are others I’ve missed, let me or gnome-web-list know- I’d love to see a complete list of gnome planets show up on p.g.o someday.

In the ‘things I should be putting off until after my paper is done’ category, I played with sabayon and the liveCD today. I’ve had a mention of sabayon on the liveCD HOWTO for a while, since it seemed like an obvious choice to create/manage the CD, but since it hadn’t been packaged until recently, I hadn’t had a chance to play with it directly. W00T. Thanks to the magical seb, it has now been packaged, and for my minimal test (set gconf key to, ahem, reassess an ubuntu file-manager design decision ;) it worked like a charm. I hope in the next few days I’ll find time to port all the changes I’m currently doing to a sabayon profile, and to experiment with using inheritance to play with language-specific changes. There is still a lot of learning to do here- I saw quite a few unintended side-effects that I’ll need to figure out, and perhaps some sabayon feature requests to file. But those are details- in general, I’m really excited that we finally have a tool for admins to use that really rocks, GNOME-style. Big thanks to everyone who has contributed code there- mostly DV and Mark, but also seb and many others. Rock on…

Twice today I had to explain why I am so passionate about what I do, seemed worth writing up again, and figuring out where we are. In a nutshell, I don’t think that Free Software is a positive moral right (i.e., one that must be provided), but I do think that the ability to own, control, and modify your data is a negative moral right (i.e., one that must be protected) and the only way to provision that right in the current climate, IMHO, is to actively develop and spread the free software desktop, and tools that go with it that allow people to consume, create, and disseminate their ideas and creations. That means not just abi and gnumeric (though that is important) but gimp, and soon audio and video editing tools, and blogging tools and bittorrent and friends to get things out once they’ve gotten made. And ideally, of course, collaboration (you go, guys!) to make it easier to do these things, not just alone, but with friends. And of course tools for taking in whatever the passing fad of the day is, content-wrapper wise. We’re getting there- we’re finally consuming media like we want to, more or less, and people are talking about creating it and sharing it, which is awesome. But we still have a long way to go before we are the semiotic democracy and personal control platform we should be.

(phew). It is late at night, sorry for the rant. :)

Beyond that, it has been a good day… wrote some press release stuff and other marketing-y bits for the board, went to my last class, had a good talk with Professor Palfrey, got some hints for my next big law read, got a little more clarity on my paper for said class, and saw a cool talk about Public Radio Exchange- think an internal-only podcasting planet for public radio stations, sort of.

BTW, Charles Nesson, I mean, uh, eon, is insane, but still probably smarter than the rest of us.

I’ve been increasingly fascinated with the notion of greasemonkey (sadly firefox only right now :/ and bookmarklets- of (like wiki) making the web more interactive and less one-way. Coolest example of the day is the tip bookmarklet (by way of Cefn Hoile), which lets you email a digital tip to any email address in a page. Pretty cool hack, and a nice example of thinking about making things more interactive/two-way without really messing with the basic infrastructure of the web.