BTW, if there are still any moderately wealthy people *cough* with monkey fetishes out there, I saw this monkey at the Coconut Grove Art Festival in February. Just discovered the business card of the artist (Randy Hand, almost as good a porn name as one-time Venezuelan Thunder roommate Randy Starr) while cleaning up my living room. Fun stuff- worth going to the link just to see the look on the monkey’s face :)
May, 2005
13
May 05
Fri, 13 May 2005
I just want to say that I’m looking forward to german beer and the company of good friends in a couple weeks, and I’m really grateful for the hard work that has been put in to GUADEC- I’ve peeked into the process a bit more this year than in past years and it is impressive.
The ever delicious but now sadly-bimonthly NTK today described neooffice as being “for those in interested in software that is ‘free as in – oh shiny thing’”. That cracked me up for some reason.
`Bhaskar’ Ghose on IRC pointed me at Planet India, which is a pretty cool read. The energy Linux could (does?) have in a place like India is sort of mind-boggling, and it is cool to see things like Planet India that can let me peek into that. Apparently the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore is getting even more ambitious, which is cool too- I’d kill to make it this year; I had to pass it up the past two years because of budget, schedule, and vacation plans, but hopefully this year will be different.
10
May 05
Tue, 10 May 2005
Got back from DC yesterday. Good weekend with my grandparents, including kite-flying with a homemade kite with my grandfather. Also walked the Mall (probably did a shade over five miles on the morning), thinking about politics and software and other stuff. Perhaps rambling in this space some other time.
Also saw a good friend and talked to her a bit about the ‘good life’- she has a great job doing Good(tm) (or at least Fighting Evil, not necessarily the same thing) and gets really well paid for it. And is stressing out over it, mostly over the well paid part, ironically- she feels herself becoming a Consumer and isn’t happy with it.
Have purchased my first proprietary software in ages (an LSAT/GMAT prep thing) and am crossing my fingers to hope it runs on wine/crossover (which will be my second proprietary software purchase in forever if it works.) Have also signed up for the LSAT. Still not sure that this is the right thing for me, but I figure taking the test and getting it out of the way can’t hurt.
Heard from the monkeys yesterday that there was continued good news there; it seems like my timing in leaving was unfortunate :) Still, I’m pretty happy with my decision- it was the right thing for me. The continuing good news from there is great for them, and the fact that it doesn’t really make me want to run back confirms that I made the right choice for me personally.
Speaking of the monkeys, they should get one of these uber-cool world clocks for their lounge. Seems like it would fail to cope with daylight savings, unfortunately.
2
May 05
Mon, 02 May 2005
Random fun/3.0/no-fun thoughts:
- I think it is really cool that peope are talking about hacking on Project Soylent; I hope they hack to their heart’s content and come back with feedback, demoware (or better), and thoughts on where to go next.
- Cool apps are very, very cool, and rightly are where the fun should mostly be.
- It is not coincidence that the coolest apps of the past 12-18 months are on a platform that hides the ugly parts of our platform. Platform makes it easier for people to focus on writing cool apps. It would be interesting for someone to eliminate the core apps (required to be C) from gnome-files, and see what percentage the other apps are in terms of language, and ideally chart it over time. If you wanted to get really crazy, check the user ratings, and use them as a proxy for innovation- I bet you’d show at least mild correlation between !C and better user satisfaction (correcting for project age, at least.)
- If you’re really interested in toolkit/platform mattering to innovation, I recommend reading Democratizing Innovation, available as a CC PDF. Compare and contrast the lead users Von Hippel discusses as the source of innovation with the target users we pursue- sort of scary. I read it on the plane.
Was very cool to see a small project to create videos of using GNOME. I’ve wanted to do something like this for the liveCDs, and someone went off and did it! And anyone can contribute! Will be very nice to see some of these on the 2.12 liveCD.
Speaking of liveCD stuff has been quiet, but not dormant- the greek GNOME team put together their own Greek GNOME LiveCD (screenshot) and gave me pointers to lots of useful things, like how to change the default language and the bootsplash. I used that to whip up a proof of concept GUADEC-ES CD with a guadec-es splash. Sort of buggy splash, unfortunately, and quite a bit of english still, but I’m working on that :) Also, we’ve hit 25K bittorrent downloads, and since I’m guessing (from early stats) that we have about 1 ftp download for every bittorrent download, we’ve probaby hit 50K downloads. That’s not 50M, but considering that our download is roughly 1% of the size of theirs, we’re approaching 10% total bytes downloaded to play with our toy- that’s not bad. Pretty damn awesome, in fact, for the first time we’ve tried this, and basically only publicized it in English (though it sort of works in about ten other languages.)
Besides playing with the liveCDs, I had a really, really productive day today- just lots of stuff done, both short-term gnome-wise and long-term ‘what the hell am I doing next’ stuff. Also, short-term dishes. Yay me.