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

Because I was curious, and before I forget, I poked a bit at sloccount tonight. The modules built by jhbuild in a roughly default 2.12 build include about 3.81M LOC; evo, e-d-s, and gtkhtml2 are 671K of that; a little over a sixth. Those same three modules have around a fifth of the open bugs and a fifth of the open crashers in gnome-core modules in bugzilla. Not far off, really; not what I expected.

My mom and dad both have power back as of this evening after Miami’s brush with Katrina. My father lives right on the water in a house he was able to buy because when he bought it, one entire wing of the house had no roof from Andrew and the basement still had terrible water damage. He generally has the sense to get out when predictions are dire; but not as quickly as I’d like. Sadly, I’m sure I’ll be able to wave New Orleans at him next time I need to make sure he gets out faster.

Tried to use evo today for the first time in a while; e-d-s segfaults on start about 2/3rds of the time, and the rest of the time it crashes on exit. This was not what I expected. :( Bugs are filed (though the e-d-s one has a spectacularly shit trace), so I guess I’ll see what happens.

I hope Bastien has seen this.

Mixed day; didn’t get too much done except writing of emails, but they were some important and much put-off emails, so I guess that counts for something.

I’ve gone on a bit much lately about ‘speaking in a human voice’. It’s not just true for people in marketing; the news folks should get on the bandwagon too. The use and abuse of adjectives I’ve seen today (I’ve watched several hours of CNN and Weather Channel) is just nutty. Perhaps most importantly in a situation like a hurricane, they can’t just shut up. They have to keep talking. They can’t let themselves be speechless, like normal human beings. They can’t just be awed at the power of nature, like normal human beings. They can’t say ‘I’m doing something stupid because it is fun, or because I like being on TV’, instead they have to ‘bravely venture out into the wind’. I want to see the images, and I want to get the details, so I’m still watching, but what they need to cover this sort of thing are poets who aren’t afraid to cite numbers or get wet, and instead we have hacks who don’t speak the same language as the rest of us.

It is probably worth noting that in non-hurricane contexts, they still can’t be speechless or outraged or shocked- everything is delivered neutrally, or in the case of Fox, spectacularly over the top. I think maybe a big reason people love the Daily Show is because Jon Stewart talks like they do when they talk about the news, or at least, like they wish they could talk if they had a team of comedy writers. No one wishes they had a team of news writers, or marketing writers. Maybe that’s a lesson.

Took a GMAT practice test this morning, which kept me completely out of the loop all morning. Other than being interrupted by a flaky network, it was good; I’m confident at this point I can make a pretty high score.

Blah. I did not intend to spend today rehashing the release notes. But I did anyway. Some of the damage is done in CVS; other bits will have to wait until tomorow before committing. All will have to wait for someone to unfuck the website build. I’ve tried and failed. I’m tempted to just throw the whole lot into the wiki and say ‘fuck it’. [snip embittered ranting about CMS discussion at boston summit... 2002.]

Among other things, the evening’s writing entailed creating a ‘Get Unstable’ page in the wiki. I seeded it with some information, but it could use more- if you provide 3rd-party rpms of development GNOME, or know of a distro that regularly provides rpms of development GNOME in a form like Breezy or Rawhide, please put them in the page! It’ll help get new people hooked on our drug.

I have put out a request for an XSL guru on the marketing list to fix one nagging stylistic issue in the release notes that really makes them less personable. I’m guessing for someone who knows what they are doing, it is a trivial fix, but I just can’t seem to figure out where this is happening. If this is you, this is your chance to help improve our most read document of the year for a probably minimal time investment of your own. :)

Am glued to the weather channel, crossing my fingers for New Orleans. Andrew was scary; this is nearly as big, faster, and New Orleans is 20 feet below water level instead of 20 feet above. Good luck to them.

Had a bizarre blog-land experience this weekend. Matt Asay wrote this post about ‘the open source ethos’, which I thought made a fairly common mistake- assuming that if an open source volunteer is not being generous to you, that he is not generous at all. Usually this is an assumption made by ungrateful users in chat rooms when reporting a bug that ‘you must fix now’. But I can understand that some academics who aren’t experienced with open source might feel similarly when they have heard that open source is all about giving, and then can’t understand why open source is not giving to them. So I tried to gently explain this to Matt, and pointed out that the company I assume he refered to can be approached more effectively using other means of persuasion. I expected Matt to respond when he returned from his weekend trip, and ask for clarification, or tell me I was wrong, or… something. He did respond, by… deleting the post. That is certainly his privilege, but it is weird- I’ve never had someone do that on a blog before. The usual response is to, well, respond :)

Saw a pretty cool post over at passionate users about ‘neo-marketing’. The best part of the post is this chart:

But really you should go read the whole thing if you are at all interested in marketing of any source. We’d do well to keep some of these in mind in our own pimping efforts, as much as makes sense.

hp: EW is pretty good. My roommate had a subscription in college and so I read it very regularly back then. It really is good stuff- as well written and generally low-fluff as you can get when discussing American popular culture.

Spent a lot of the day doing odd jobs- living room cleanup, board emails, release-team bits, email reading, more GMAT stuff, website stuff (the livecd page has an icon now ;). Nothing terribly big or useful, I’m afraid. Maybe later…

More people are signing up for the Summit, and adding suggestions on what to talk about. That’s great- hope more people do so. Ideally, if you’ve got specific topics you’d like to talk on, please also make sure it is added to the ‘proposed topics’ section of the schedule, so that when a couple of us sit down and whip things together, it is mostly in one place and easier to find.

We have two volunteers for the SoC article for GNOME Journal, which is great. Hopefully we’ll get an interesting overview of the summer out of this.

Am downloading opensuse beta 3 over bittorrent right now; I’ve never before seen a bittorrent situation before where my upload is consistently 2-4x as much as my download. Very irritating. I chose bittorrent to be a ‘good guy’, but as a result, my download will take close to 40 hours. Blah.

If you are looking for a way to get involved with gnome-journal, I’ve posted a pretty fun and easy way to get involved to marketing-list.

The sysadmin team (not just GNOME’s but really everyone’s) tends to get noticed only if things go wrong. So a big shout out to them for finally eliminating our anoncvs lag. Yay!

Was bummed to realize today that the 2.12 release is the same day as my GMAT. I’d had the release down as being a week later, giving me (conveniently) a week to polish the liveCD and such. Sucks. :/

This Jason Calacanis post says really well what I was thinking when I read the NYT’s ‘google is the new microsoft’ article the other day. Worth reading.

Bug day tomorrow. Goal: find showstoppers. If you can find something embarassing that is worth stopping 2.12 for… well, I’ll do something. Probably that embarasses me and (hopefully) that makes you happy. Or something.

Place is irc.gnome.org #bugs as usual; time is 9AMEST-9PM EST tomorrow. [1500GMT->0300GMT] I’ll be mostly lurking because I have to study, but I will try very, very hard to respond any time someone says ‘showstopper!’ :)

Maintainers: just because bugday hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean you are off the hook- I emailed d-d-l with some nasties we already know about.

Off to dinner at Fugakyu, yummy.

For those not in #gnome-hackers tonight, the main subject of discussion has been talk.google.com, for some reason :) You can get through to it with gaim via google’s provided gaim instructions, which is pretty cool; I presume something similar works for gossip, though I have not tried it yet.

Apparently the voice component is google-only ATM, though they supposedly will both be documenting their spec and supporting SIP in the future.

The best part (IMHO) is their apparent committment to open standards. To quote:

Today, with instant communications, you can’t talk to your contacts or buddies in one service while using another service. We hope to change that. We want to work with other willing service providers to enable their users to communicate directly with Google Talk users. And while we hope many people will use and like the Google Talk client, we’re committed to making it as easy as possible for you to communicate with your friends using the client that you want–even if it doesn’t happen to be ours. That’s why we’re also supporting open standards and the same protocol that clients such as Trillian, GAIM and iChat do.

If google is successful in this, and can really turn IM from the current set of walled gardens into a truly open space like HTTP or SMTP, open source will be one of the great winners out of this- no more fighting with AOL or MSN about constant protocol changes, and no more having to go to third-party providers for accounts and information when we’ve already got perfectly good accounts and servers of our own. Yay.