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

Zaheer: Ronald was not the first to ask for this, but I’m glad he asked you… Istanbul rocks! Should be great for the GNOME Tour Murray and others have been scripting.

Had a great day yesterday, educating Thunder on America. (granted he has been here nine years, but… whatever :) Watched Bull Durham and Coming to America, and ate burgers, hot dogs, apple pie, chocolate chip cookies, Ruffles, and jello (off of american flag plates), and drank MGD, Budweiser, and whisky. We discussed manifest destiny, and listened to Sousa, Springsteen, and 1776: The Musical. It was good.

Also met Dave’s friend Anne- she seems pretty cool. And she puts up with Dave. So maybe she’s not sane, but I guess certain types of not-sanity are good to have around. :)

On the dirty side, I installed VMWare and XP. Blahhh.

[Later: note that the 'blah' was more for the need to install VMWare/XP than the actual process; VMWare is very nice software so far- probably more options than I'd like, but I'm clearly not at all the target market, so that's fine.]

[NB: there seems to be a pattern of gnome-blog eating my posts, but I can't figure out what it is. Blah. :/]

For the record, I wish to say ‘engorged cock.’

Put up the rest of my GUADEC Stuttgart pictures. Please add your pics to the list in the Wiki.

I told Roozbeh after the general meeting at GUADEC that there was a risk that I’d leave GUADEC actually demotivated this year. That didn’t happen; the party on the second night and very, very long talking with some good friends on the last night put the important thing- which is working with good friends to do important, cool things- back in perspective. I’m still frustrated by some stuff going on, of course, but overall, I’m fairly positive and I’m going to work harder to cut down on the frustrating stuff so I can focus my energy on the good stuff.

Some other highlights besides those two long nights with many friends:

• Another fun marketing BOF. Some very good ideas were thrown out- I think it’ll help get some more new blood and frame our language and tactics better. Notes up on the wiki soon.
• Saw my first ☠ demo. It has changed radically from the description I first saw of it (which I thought at the time was insane), and I look forward to seriously using a more robust version- I think it’ll really improve some of our communications processes, and probably more importantly, serve as a great testbed for a collaborative future.
• Met tons of people, of course. Listing them would inevitably mean I forgot some…
• Talking some with Christian Meyer about the gnoppix/liveCD stuff. Some good ideas there, and hopefully we’ll keep moving that forward and keep growing that micro-project community.
• Dinner Wednesday night on the garden. Long, lazy, no pressure. All good. And I ate in the presence of a Master of the Lazy Side of the Force. Sort of like Yoda, except that he is so perfect in his laziness that I can’t see him ever taking on a student.
  
  Master of the Lazy Side of the Force, and his arch-nemesis, Darth Owen.
• Meeting John Rice at the Ad Board. John is new in the Sun crew, and seems to have a lot of energy and interest in doing stuff well.
• Bryan Clark’s t-shirt collection.
• Quality talks with Seth and Havoc. I have too few of those, sadly.
• The power of the lazyweb translating the plaques from my Berlin trip before I’d left the country.

Some minor negatives:

• Organization and goals of GUADEC. How do we reach out to governments and users while still keeping things clear and interesting for hackers? And how do we fix communication so that local volunteers feel like it is their conference too? Overall the conference went very well, but we can do better, and with less effort.
• An IBM sales/marketing dude (rightfully and usefully) urging us to focus our marketing on the things we do best, and then following up by basically saying that we aren’t a desktop, we’re a reliable, cheap frame for thin clients. Blah. I’d rather lose on the desktop than ‘win’ as a thin client.

Random German and travel observations:

• German architecture seems in general very forward looking/experimental, possibly partially for the same reason as Chicago- had it, got it burnt down, got to start mostly tabula raza.
• I saw Trabants for the first time. One more piece of car history. Not quite Robert’s Poignant 959, but close.
• Germans seem to be the only Europeans who actually pay people to check train tickets.
• Finally had good German food- either I just had bad days in Nuremberg or maybe there is something to Schwabian food as distinct from Bavarian. The Bavarians seem to win on beer, though, from my light sampling.
• Turns out that traveling next to someone who has to buy two tickets is a good thing; they only take up 1.5/1.75 seats, so you have more space to spread out than you

By the way, someday a merciful god will give me bullet points in gnome-blog-poster.

Speaking as someone who is a big fan of simplicity, this seems like the sweetest, shortest, most correct commentary on the EU constitution that I’ve seen. 250 pages? (Oh, and the NYT had the gall to say that a 250 page document ‘bore a lot of similarities’ to the US Constitution. Mind boggling.)

Threw up some pictures from GUADEC Day 1. Because f-spot is making it so easy to caption stuff and upload it (captioning things in gallery sucks) I find myself telling more stories there and fewer in the blog, which is an interesting (and probably largely undesirable to me) side effect. I will say that like others, I’d expected an industrial wasteland and instead found this very beautiful city.

I usually slavishly attend as many talks as possible, but this year I have drifted- spent a lot of quality time talking with Havoc and Seth about UI design (particularly as opposed to UI testing) and how Seth really needs to write out a ‘beginners guide to designing a new GNOME program.’ There would be a couple of really important wins for us if we did that (and I think I had a couple others yesterday, but now I don’t remember what they were.)

• Experience with doing ground-up design (even inexpertly) would make people more receptive to experience design by experts, as the HIG has made us all more receptive to UI testing and what Seth refers to as ‘interaction design’ (as opposed to experience design.)
• While some people certainly have a preference for top-down, expert-driven design, and there are some good reasons for it, that approach doesn’t scale. And people are going to write the apps, whether or not they have the expert-driven design. Better to give them the tools to try (and perhaps occasionally succeed) themselves, than to have all of them fail for lack of understanding.

Some people I’ve met for the first time (really, always the best part of GUADEC):

• The totally awesome Olav Vitters.
• The fairly wacky Jono Bacon.
• LDTP’s energetic Nagappan.
• James “Lovin’” Bowes.
• Others, I’m sure, but last night was a long night. Miracle I remember as many names as I do ;)

Blah. So, on the flight back home I cracked open Jon Perry Barlow’s ‘Economy of Ideas.’ I’ve had it on my ‘to read’ list since the very beginning of the semester, but more immediately relevant things have gotten in the way. I thought it would be just a fun read- Barlow is… well, you know, a little nutty :) Sadly, reading it now on the flight… blah. Really, really should have read it before I wrote my final paper. Barlow says a lot of the same things I said, but more elegantly, and has other observations that may or may not have fit in my paper, but are damn sharp anyway. Of course. This is why I haggle with bugzilla and he wrote for the Dead.

The most important part of my paper was in essence a taxonomy, though I don’t think I ever called it that. Barlow’s taxonomy is different than mine was- better defined, but also very Barlowian. I don’t think I’d ever claim information is a life form :) Partially because of that Barlowian nuttiness, he reaches conclusions and makes predictions I wasn’t willing to do in my paper, but it does make for a more interesting read.

As a gnome-related aside, the paper is very interesting for anyone interested in the ‘economy’ (not business) of free software. Go read it :) And read between the lines, of course- there are both some pretty odd bits in there, from where we stand today. For example, he repeats the suggestion that the most widely pirated software becomes a standard and hence wins. Examples in point: Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. And he predicts DRM, more or less, though he seems to suggest it might be a feature rather than a bug in many cases. So it is a touch dated. On the other hand, the datedness of some of the references make his (small) point that ‘collective “volunteer” work… may become the dominant form of human trade…’ seem even more prescient, even if he wasn’t talking about software. And he also correctly suggests that software revenues in the future will be generated largely from ‘interaction’ between authors and users- aka support.

Related to my current GNOME concerns, and my open-information practices in the bugsquad and marketing teams, I found this quote so perfect:

Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop swimming, and the same is nearly true of information. Information that isn’t moving ceases to exist as anything but potential…at least until it is allowed to move again. For this reason, the practice of information hoarding, common in bureaucracies, is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically based value systems.