I was not set to be cheerful today, but the lazyweb has done me wonders so far, with at least partial solutions to both my flickr and flashcard rumblings.
Of course, then Nat’s picture was on boingboing and that just really ruined the day. ;) (Seriously a wicked cool picture.)
Discovered this morning that the mindblowing performance problems I was having last night was because I went from running the intended-for-2.12 clearlooks to the intended-for-2.14 clearlooks, which uses cairo in some ways that are not really ironed out performance-wise. Moral of the story here- cairo is way better than it was performance wise, but as always, a theme that is not fully baked can still blow everything up. :)
After that, spent about four hours this morning doing test review, and a good chunk of the rest of the day playing with various flash card apps. None of the three on gnomefiles were Just Right, which made me spend part of the day reviewing python docs and playing with glade to at least clean up the python-based FlashBack. I actually prefer gflashcards in most respects, but it lacks a separate field for examples, so… :/
Other than the test prep, honestly a sort of dysfunctional, depressing day- not really sure why as I actually got quite a lot done in the morning, just felt very blah all afternoon. Have downloaded a new liveCD for the first time in a bit; hopefully be more productive with that tomorrow.
(On as upbeat a note as I can muster, this gdm theme is the cutest, most human gdm theme I’ve ever seen. A metacity theme and clearlooks color scheme that matches it would make me smile.)
Robert: ‘All a distributed VCS does is make it easier to return changes to the project’ is an irritating statement to me. It is just part of the story. Yes, good VCS makes getting changes upstream easy (which is good) but, necessarily, it also makes maintaining changes inexpensive. And the biggest impetus right now for ‘large-scale’ forkers to merge is the cost of branch maintenance. If branch maintenance is suddenly easy and cheap, then the biggest single argument for actively and regularly merging goes away. The kernel community likes good distributed VCS exactly because they have this insane maze of branches, all not quite alike, and they (crazily) think that is a feature, not a bug.
Now, this is basically a social problem that was just hidden by our crappy tools- if the cost of branch maintenance is the biggest reason for regularly getting patches upstream, then we willl need to find or create other reasons, instead of doing what we currently do, which is rely on on our crappy tools to create reasons :) And like you say, the cost will be lowered, so we might not need as many reasons as we did in the past. But just because we’re uncovering a problem doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. So, again, I’m irritated when distributed VCS proponents (who generally are pimping a great product) respond to a legitimate concern by saying ‘oh, it isn’t really a concern.’ It is a concern. It takes away a stick we had (for better or for worse) to get people to merge, so we’re going to have to find some carrots. Don’t get me wrong- it is a problem I want to have to solve, because I’d rather have to convince distros to hurdle a low barrier than a high barrier. But still… saying it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away.
Besides rant about VCS, not much to today- slept in a bit, watched some baseball, made some delicious eggplant onion pasta salad (also from Foster’s cookbook), cut down a bit on my email backlog (though still bad :/, encouraged the xchat-gnome guys to track down a very troubling xchat-gnome bug that is probably really some deep gtk 2.8/X interaction bug (it doesn’t happen with gtk 2.6 :/), and worked a little on my trademark essay/rant.
Also spent a bit of time wondering how hard it would be to ‘scrape’ the interesting flickr photos for CC-SA interesting photos. Seems like many of them would be great backgrounds :) Sadly, there is no rss feed for the interesting photos (AFAICT) which makes it slightly more scrapy and slightly less web-2.0-y. Oh well…
Have eaten well so far this weekend- last night was salmon cakes with a corn-onion garnish from the Foster’s Market cookbook. Night before was a great dinner with Trow, and as usual stimulating discussion. Nice to have one’s assumptions challenged. :) Breakfast was french toast with blueberry topping, and tonight’s dinner was coconut-almond snapper from norman’s topped by a delightful pseudo-asian slaw. I should take pictures of all of this to compete with Federico ;)
Have started work on an essay on trademark; I realize the research-ish paper form is just too formal and too stilted for what I wanted to communicate to anyone other than my professor, so it is getting redone.
Bug day was a mixed success- some great new folks, but I was really out of it for chunks of the day (nearly fell asleep on my keyboard) and had to step out for a bit for an interview-y-thing at the law school, so I missed some of the high energy part of the day. So not as much fun for me personally. Oh well.
Have not touched liveCD or tinderbox all week, unfortunately. Perhaps tomorrow. :/
Cairo and evince folks have collaborated to really speed up cairo on my personal torture case. Well done, guys. I’m told in particular I owe thanks to vektor. This does remind me, though, that I need to figure out a controlled way to run gtkperf. [I ran it quickly tonight, and am getting much better numbers than I did earlier in the devel cycle, particularly in GtkTextView, but it doesn’t exactly feel controlled. Not even the same themes, really. :/
Basically nailed the test, except that 18% of the test was one essay question. And that one question was on a book that I actually owned before the class started, so I read it the first weekend of the class, and then totally, literally, forgot to review it this weekend. So I had to wing the question. I think I did OK on it, but irritated that as a result I didn’t really nail the test overall like I could have.
Board meeting today was decent; we’re moving forward (albeit more slowly than many of us would like) on a number of fronts, including trademark, store, and financial accountability. So that’s good.
Bug day tomorrow. Come by and say hi :) No hugs, though.
Spent almost all of yesterday off the computer studying for my exam tonight; probably the same today once I finish writing this. Several people have emailed me with not-quite-urgent stuff, if so, I’ve ignored you, sorry- if it makes you feel better, you’re in good company. Board emails (some of them) and emails from harvard.edu are about all I’ve seriously read over the past 36 hours, and that will continue until after my exam tonight.
In an effort to not study for like ten straight hours, but also seeking to avoid the time-sucking quality of the computer, I spent part of the day reading The Authoritarian Dynamic, by Karen Stenner, who I took some classes from at Duke before she fled to Princeton. The book has been in the pipeline for a while- we read some drafts of part of it when I was in her class (spring 1998) and Amazon just shipped the first copies on Monday. May I never work on a project that takes that long to ship ;) The topic of the book is what she calls ‘the authoritarian predisposition’- badly paraphrased, a type of personality who craves societal homogeneity, and who reacts to perceived threats to that homogeneity by increasing the degree to which they agree with authoritarian political viewpoints. In scope and aim, the book is one of those (like Lessig’s Code or Rawls’ Theory of Justice) that at least attempts to basically overthrow all established learning on the subject- this wikipedia entry on what was formerly called ‘Authoritarian Personality’ will have to be nearly completely rewritten in a year if her theory is widely accepted. The book is excellent so far (I’m through chapter five), though disappointingly it seems like she has narrowed her claims somewhat from what I understood her to be saying in 1998, in accordance with what seems like (to me) the least verifiable part of her otherwise quite excellent and extensive data sets, and weakening the relevance to our current political situation. Seems like she has another book (‘The Politics of Fear’) in the pipeline to remedy that, though.
Anyway, off to study…
Good weekend (including Friday.) Spent nearly three hours on the phone with Jeff- spectacular how little we flame each other when we can actually hear each other ;) Immediately after getting off the phone with him, Sebastien Biot walked up and introduced himself- he had just been wandering Cambridge and recognized me from my planet picture. Fun to meet him; hope he can get more involved again.
Finished up my paper Saturday morning; at least to the point I’ll be happy to hand it to my prof. Still needs more work before I’ll be happy making it public, though.
Spent a bit of time hacking around on tinderbox this afternoon- main result is that the atom output sucks much less now and all patches apply. For those interested in being on the tinder collection, you should check out the packaging list.
Glad to have a printer again; making paper editing much easier. Thanks to the lazyweb (you know who you are :) for the advice.
There is a patch for jhbuild tinderbox atom support now, so I threw a tinder planet together. Hopefully I’ll get my own (working) planet together soon. If you’re interested in hosting a tinderbox and can export results, email the packaging list and we’ll discuss it there.
Interesting list of open source speakers, with (currently) a heavy bias towards women. We should consider talking with some of these folks for the next GUADEC.
Overview of doing real business with free software. Interesting, covers some categories I didn’t even know existed.
Excited by this- hopefully we can make some of the cc stuff easier to build, if nothing else ;)
I think that’s about all the random links today.
Some quick thoughts about OpenSUSE, before they pass from my mind. In general, I think this is great- the more distros which allow for and encourage open distribution, the better. It makes our whole ecosystem more robust and healthier. And like I’ve said before, I still have a lot of friends at ximian, novell, and suse, and I honestly think opensuse will help them become successful by increasing suse’s mindshare in important markets. It seems like they’ve done a lot of things ‘right’ too- learning from Red Hat Linux Project, I mean Fedora ;), they have not overpromised on the build system or governance, and little birdies tell me that they will likely even hire a bugmaster, something fedora and ubuntu still are screwing up ;) SUSE’s engineering is good, and while this will be a big cultural change for many of them, I think in general this will be something they’ll all adapt to and appreciate down the road.
That out of the way, suse and novell’s marketing people should go out and buy a copy of the cluetrain manifesto tomorrow. (It is available for free at the website, but they need hardcopy on their desks.) Manifesto is at points a little naive, and often just plain weird, but it is at its best when speaking about communication and community- which is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about opensuse.
So, when I went to sleep last night, this space contained a 2400 word lecture on the manifesto and the opensuse FAQ snipped. No, not kidding. Still might publish it later, if there is interest.
The argument of it in a nutshell: the essence of cluetrain is that you are in a conversation- a dialog- with the people who might interact with your product. Treat them like intelligent humans, not like ‘customers’, or else they’ll go elsewhere. The opensuse FAQ… well, it has ups and downs, and the ups are good (kudos to suse for publishing a conservative schedule) but the downs are very down. The folks who wrote it should go through every question and ask ‘is this how I would have explained it to a computer-literate friend?’ In many of the answers, to a friend, you’d cut the adjectives and answer with simple facts, and in some of them (particularly the last one) you’d be honest with a friend, instead of making things up like ‘yast is a standard’. In all of them, you’d speak ‘with a human voice’ (to quote cluetrain)- I don’t see the voices of Sonja or AJ in that document; I see marketing. Intelligent friends know when they are being BSd, and there is a lot of BS in that FAQ. Growing openSUSE (or really, growing any community) is a process of creating new friends, and that FAQ doesn’t do it- at best, it speaks only to the converted, and at worst, it sets off everyone’s BS detector, which is no way to start a relationship.
A very happy gnome birthday shout-out to Elijah and Kjartan. You guys make GNOME rock- it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without either of you.