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

Ph33r me- I have written another patch. Longer than one character this time. With it, pyldtp/ldtp in tinderbox is a bit closer to reality. Unfortunately, AFAICT, forge.novell does not allow non-interactive, anonymous logins, and that is sort of putting a crimp in actually finishing the project.

Saw Howl’s Moving Castle today; was pretty good right up until the end. I really enjoy Miyazaki’s work, but this one reminded me more of the cheesy, overly heavy-handed, and occassionally incoherent Mononoke than his more complete and less heavy-handed works like Spirited Away or Totoro.

Spent a chunk of time (Thursday->Saturday) in Durham, mostly seeing some old friends, and meeting some new folks. Hit many of my major Durham haunts- Elmo’s (apple-stuffed french toast) Cosmic (burrito), Blue Corn (plaintains, aborted attempt at a mojito), Foster’s Market (apple streudel muffin, strawberry scone), and Francesca’s (bourbon vanilla ice cream). Also had some really delicious Greek (tapas-style) in Cary, at Xios. You can see a trend here :) Durham still feels way more like home than Boston does, really- I think probably just because of the green and the open space. The inability to wear shorts today in Boston, in June, probably helps too. Seth ‘mr. yum’ Vidal kindly put up with me (and put me up) for the weekend, and we even occasionally discussed things that weren’t packaging. ;)

Finished Everything Bad is Good For You in the airport on the way down- really good; I strongly recommend it for parents or soon-to-be parents, particularly those who played with video games and watch a lot of simpsons and want to somehow reconcile those ‘bad habits’ with having grown up to be fairly functional themselves. Read Altered Carbon on the way down- fun near-ish future scifi whodunit; if you’re into scifi and looking for a light summer read I recommend it. Am currently pounding on Design of Everyday Things- I’ve had it forever, and have already read Emotional Design, but just hadn’t gotten around to reading this one. Great so far.

Random shite from today:

• Holy shit! I don’t know if this is upstream, or an ubuntu patch, or what, but the system tools’ network manager just gave me a dropdown of essids that it got from iwlist scanning. Sweeet. Thanks to whoever did that.
• Attended a talk by JD Lasica at the Berkman center. JD’s Our Media is trying to become the sourceforge for the creative commons set- the place everyone can host and share and play with CC-licensed media, compared with sf’s GPL-licensed code. Uraeus probably should have used them. Pretty intersting stuff. Interesting new thing he mentioned was Media RSS 1.0, a standard for media metadata. Yahoo is already a big supporter, but apparently google video will be supporting it too, so it looks like it’ll become a defacto standard very quickly. Nifty, and maybe somethign we should support. He also mentioned the Broadcast Machine, which I hadn’t heard of and looks pretty cool- lots of wheel reinvention, but the basic notion (torrent-ish web TV) is very interesting.
• Am about 2/3rds through Everything Bad is Good For You, which is excellent so far. Also read Freakonomics last week- it was a fun read, but ultimately mostly fluffy.
• It would be great to get some people out to this FLOSS usability sprint in SF- I don’t think in the end it would actually change much (we’re a bigger task than some other projects there :) but it would be great to get the word out that good stuff is going on, and build contacts in a community we don’t see much of.
• I haven’t actually had a chance to use it yet, but Muine Tagger seems like a fairly sane way of fixing the common problems I have with tags. Yay.
• Sox won last night, which was nice- been too few and far between lately.
• Came to the realization that the goal for liveCDs for 2.12 should be to get 100K of them downloaded, and have them as close to stock as possible- which means fixing the theme issue, among other things. A probably easy but sort of time-consuming fix for someone who wants to help with this task would be to replace the terminal and nautilus launchers on the panel with Evolution and Epiphany- see bug 307626.

Wingo: jhbuild will do a notification icon as well; probably doesn’t fit your other needs but WTH :)

Speaking of jhbuild, it is now one tiny bit sweeter. I’m testing, but I think with this commit (and perhaps a howl change :/ it is possible to do a cvs checkout of jhbuild and immediately use it to successfully build the full gnome moduleset, for the first time since evolution-data-server was added to the repository.

On the downside, I’ve been poking a bit around buildbot, which I’d really hoped would easily let us set up a distributed build setup. No such luck- might well be that the easiest thing to do is make jhbuild a pseudo-buildbot-client (outbound only) instead of wrapping buildbot around jhbuild. Alternately, making the buildmaster jhbuild-aware… neither seem fun. Not something I have time for ATM, at any rate.

Spent a good chunk of today talking to Evangelia; sounds like her research is taking her interesting places. I look forward to reading the final product.

My evening:

Broke a rule, had sushi on the weekend, at the quite yummy Takemura in Harvard Square. Was new for us, and glad we went. AC and cold, yummy mochi certainly helped our impression of the place ;) but we’ll go again.

The revitalized hand of tinderbox has pointed its first finger at… Colin and Ross. Ahem. [Sorry, no public logs yet.]

Had a go at some of the wiki pages for Marketing, Release, and a bit for tinderbox. Was good- felt clearly productive. Will totally rock if we can soon get together the collateral and Box we discuss in the wiki. Also did some 1337 board stuff.

Watched the Sox have a satisfying win, which was nice.

Otherwise, strenously avoided melting. More of that in bed soon.

Whoa. Things I learned yesterday- there is a fairly large GNOME China website, and a whole Chinese distro based on GNOME. Very cool. [Someone pointed me the other day to a Japanese distro in the same vein, but now I can't find it.]

James Ogley is giving me hope that one can go back to school and still participate in open source, and responding to my note about the packaging project. Woot. James, if you can prove that it is simple to write/maintain spec files that work on modern redhat and suse, then we could certainly push to make that something that people maintain across the project.

Fought a little this afternoon with jhbuild, and I think I won, with a little help from some friends. (Or not.)

Mostly I just tried not to move:

Went to a reunion dinner with my dad last night, for the 35th anniversary of his medical school graduation. We had some miscommunication… there are three Harvard Clubs in the city, and the dinner was at the third one we went to. Oops.

Telsa:

missed a conference, was completely unmissed at it

Very much missed. I think I had at least two conversations about how sad it was you didn’t show :/ I think the only reason it has escaped mention/email/etc. is that it was sort of expected- you’ve dropped out, and we miss you, but that’s not exactly news, so… Definitely know that we’re not the same without you.

Pragmatic bits: the discussion of gtk 2.7/2.8 on the list reminds me strongly that the Packaging Project badly needs to be resurrected. We achieved our best quality when people were regularly pounding the very latest code and looking for bugs. Ubuntu’s packaging of tarballs has really helped in the last two release cycles, but more could still be done, both by packaging regularly for RHat and SUSE, and (dream world) by packaging CVS daily. if you have that particular skillset and want to get involved, restarting the Packaging Project would be a great way to make a huge impact quickly.

So… let’s play ‘Luis is a journalist, who writes for a news site with a focus on small, timely articles’, and see what Luis might have written about today in GNOME.

Developers discuss dependency on next version of GTK

GNOME developers today discussed whether or not the next version of GNOME (2.12, due out in September) should depend on gtk 2.8, the next version of GTK. Two main concerns appear to have been raised that might block the dependency. First, several GNOME release team members had concerns about the timeliness of the gtk release process; Mattias Clasen and Mark McLoughlin attempted to address those. That discussion appears to be ongoing. Second, there appear to be serious performance issues with gtk 2.8, because of the planned dependency on the cairo library. Tests performed by a community member (who admitted to lacking gtk expertise) suggested that some 2.8 widgets were up to 400% slower than their 2.6 counterparts. When contacted by email, gtk developers said that these performance issues were known and there were ongoing plans to address them in the three months before the release. LuisNews will keep you posted on the state of the discussion and the progress of the gtk team in resolving these issues as gtk 2.8 moves closer to release.

There, that was constructive yet critical, no?

I’ve previously blogged about Eugenia here and here. I’ve never previously been directly misrepresented by her, though, until now! Oh, the excitement. Let us see what is wrong with this story. (Well, with the original version; some of the problems listed below have been corrected. Yay for doing research after publishing.)

• I’m described as a Novell engineer, which is wrong, in as much as I haven’t worked for Novell for… jeez, five months now, and as Dave pointed out, I was never an engineer there either :) By making me sound like an expert, she’s making the situation sound different than it really is.
• Oh, wait! The email I sent explicitly says ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, an expert should verify these.’ Good to know that Eugenia read the whole thing, and mentioned the disclaimer in her ‘news’ article.
• Cairo is described as an engine that ‘makes things look good and scalable throughout different resolutions.’ While not inaccurate, it’s a pretty shortsighted view of what Cairo does, and doesn’t in any way provide a balanced picture of what we expect Cairo to provide that might explain the performance tradeoff we might make.
• She describes Cairo as ‘supposedly “accelerated”‘, which is certainly planned, but certainly not implemented in any way that a mere mortal like me can test. A simple email to anyone involved would have given her that information. Again, she is either misunderstanding or deliberately misrepresenting to make the situation look worse than it is.

So, that’s four misrepresentations, misunderstandings, or outright errors in two sentences, all of which could have been corrected with a single email to me. If anyone wants to give me a few bucks, I’ll happily buy osunsubstiatedunresearchedrumors.org as a small gift for our friends over there. ostrollmasqueradingasnews.org is also available, I’m guessing.

Sigh… this is coming across as very vehement. Which it is. It is a shame, because gnomefiles.org is one of the most useful sites we have right now. An actual gnome news site which did research and reporting, instead of repeatedly sloppily mischaracterizing d-d-l emails, would be immensely useful. I do wish that osnews could be that site; it seems very odd to me that people who clearly mean well for gnome (by providing the very useful gnomefiles.org site) can at the same time provide a site that is at best terribly sloppy and at worst deliberately sensationalistic.

Had a very good dinner yesterday with some random tech folks from around the area. Interesting take-away from the dinner: all of the other attendees are proprietary people by background who use and like open source (though that wasn’t a goal of the organizers, just happened that way) and all thought that they were seeing signs that the attitude of the software world in general is becoming more and more accepting of us- customers expect to deploy it, VCs want to know what relationship you have to it, and (of course) academics are studying it.

As of this morning, I have contributed code to cairo. Note the boldness of my strategy for attacking the problem.

Glad to see John Rice has started blogging. John attended the Ad Board on behalf of Sun and I thought he had a lot of fairly interesting things to say- certainly fresh blood and fresh perspective, which is great. Apparently he’s also going to focus on performance issues, which is probably much needed :)

My father will be in town all weekend for his med school’s 35th reunion, but he is more interested in seeing me than his classmates, so I’ll be in and out all weekend. Hopefully still get some work done :)

Had great dinner with the Cap’n tonight; we’ve had our disagreements at times but I’ve always valued his advice and I’m going to spend a lot of time mulling over what we talked about. Otherwise, the day was mostly about getting little things done- laundry, more Windows/VMWare/school stuff, some reading. I’ve totally fallen behind on marketing-team email, which sucks, but it seems like there is lots of traffic going on without me, which is great.

‘Small is the new big’ is a fun little diatribe I bumped into today. Certainly inspiring for those who’d like to work in small companies, if short on concrete suggestions ;)

Random GNOME-y stuff that makes me excited today:

• Ephy 1.7.1 has a greasemonkey plugin, thanks to work from Adam Hooper and others. The gmail saved search greasemonkey plugin makes me hot.
• Big congrats to the Debian GNOME team for getting 2.8 into the new release. About time ;) Davyd Madeley and I had had a little talk when he wrote his footware page about what to do with Debian (which we want to support, but which technically shipped 1.4)… thankfully that isn’t a worry anymore- big congrats to everyone who made it happen, both in the GNOME team and the Debian team at large.
• I’m pleased to see folks working to get more women into GNOME; certainly there is a problem there and I wish them lots of luck. I’m a little surprised that no effort was made (that I can find) to do this within gnome-love and/or an existing IRC channel, and that neither of the women involved have ever tried to post to d-d-l or g-h, but given that the folks involved have apparently been involved with the debian women project, I’m sure they have some good ideas on moving GNOME forward in this area. I wish them luck and of course hope that they feel like they can reach out to the community for any help tha they want/need.
• Herman, the author of GBTcr, emailed me a question today; I’d never heard of GBTcr but it looks pretty cool- hopefully I can play with it and my phone soon.