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

If you’re on a nice pipe and want to help your fellow gnomies around the world to get the liveCD, try this:

mkdir dir-I-can-put-a-lot-of-isos-in
cd dir-I-can-put-a-lot-of-isos-in
wget -r -l1 -nd -nc –no-parent -A.torrent http://torrent.gnome.org/
btlaunchmanycurses .
Sit back and watch your bandwidth get used. :)

If you want to speed up the service you’re able to offer the bittorrenters, and you’re very serious about putting up seeds and leaving them up to help people out, email me and I’ll give you the magic command to get the isos at very high speed, which you can then offer to the torrenters.

I think the Berkman center does really awesome work, and I’m very interested to read their new report on open standards. I’m terribly amused, though, that their press conference on open standards will be broadcast… in Real Player format. Looks like that is worldbank’s doing, so I can’t really blame Berkman, but it is pretty funny.

Marcus Bauer has been a stud; as a result we have eight liveCD languages on torrent. LiveCD FTP is lagging a bit but should have all eight languages soon. Marcus continues to pump out languages; if you want your language to have a fully translated liveCD, talk to him. If you want to be an ftp mirror and/or a superseed for torrent, drop me a note and I’ll show you the 1337 hotness where you can get the full isos from for mirroring.

Apparently a11y is broken on the CDs. I’m frustrated by this; it’s clearly not something that is truly part of our culture yet to test.

Other than that, I’m going to bite the ugly bullet and dive into LSAT prep this morning. Yay. :/

Oh, and as OS/X slips further into theme franken-ness, I thought this was hilarious. More in-depth commentary (though from before the iTunes 5 announce) here.

Grrr. Every once in a while either gnome-blog or my server-side setup eats a post. Hence the blank post people asked about yesterday. It basically said ‘yay! release!’ and ‘yay! liveCD!’. I think maybe also ‘damn, no localized liveCDs yet!’ Hopefully we’ll figure some of that out today.

Got together with a handful of folks last night; was fun. Thanks to those who came out.

I have basically kicked the crap out of the GMAT. Oddly, compared to the practice exams, I did substantially better on verbal and substantially worse on math, making this the first standardized test I’ve ever done better on in verbal than in math. The perfectionist in me is bothered by the math score, but…

Lunch is being sourced from Belgium. I am afraid that even if I had managed to organize a Boston release party I would be too drunk to attend. Everyone have a drink for their homie.

LiveCDs up soon, hopefully; Marcus has been kicking ass while I’ve been away.

When I posted last week about evo and GNOME’s relative LoC and bugs, it was pointed out by at least three people that I used the wrong gtkhtml for the comparisons. Using the right gtkthml, evo/e-d-s/gtkhtml goes to 771K LoC(20.2% of all GNOME core LoC, including gtk), and up to 2379 bugs out of 10265 (23.2%). Enhancements are included in those numbers, so take them with an even greater grain of salt than usual.

Honestly, this all surprised me- I expected evo to be buggier per LoC than most of the rest of GNOME; it appears that this expectation was badly off. To be fair to my sense of things, things would have looked a little different a month or two ago- the evo guys have closed net over 400 bugs in the past month and a half, which is a pretty herculean effort.

For some comparisons with the same (weak) metrics, gtk+/glib is 13.2% of the code and 13.5% of the bugs. Nautilus+vfs is 4.9% of the code, but 11.1% of the open bugs. For nautilus/vfs, this is actually much better than it used to be; in the past year nautilus+vfs have closed net over 500 bugs, which is really impressive considering that this represents nearly 50% of the bugs that were open a year ago, and that a lot of those are the kinds of unpleasant, hard bugs that volunteers are supposed to hate, but that Martin, Manny, Christian and others are tackling effectively and with gusto.

I’d really like to be able to trend these types of numbers over time; bugzilla 2.20 should be slightly better than the current setup for this purpose when we’re able to upgrade. But getting the numbers right will take a while, as the bugzilla db layout makes getting such numbers very slow, unfortunately, and historical numbers have to be regenerated every time a new query is conjured up, which can apparently take days.

[LoC numbers were of course generated with the most awesome sloccount.]

I don’t know why, but I felt tired and sort of depressed most of the day. Unsub’d from some lists, which felt helpful, but still just felt overwhelmed. Did do some minor liveCD stuff towards the end of the day, which helped some. Hopefully I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow for my exam, and for the release.

The GUADEC name discussion on foundation-list is probably part of the reason for my bad mood; I think Glynn nailed it on the head- for the energy expended on that discussion we could already have a website and a written CFP. Or god forbid, maybe someone could have written out a clear, simple mission statement for GUADEC so that we understood whether or not the name actually mattered to the people we’re trying to reach with GUADEC, instead of blathering on with no common idea what we’re trying to achieve and hence no way to accurately assess whether or not a name change is a good idea.

Was also irritated to see a global, standardized solution that can be used and most importantly improved by all of us compared unfavorably to the gross, per-distro, unstandardized hacks that many distros used to use. Am glad that most people see the wisdom of moving these things out of the distros and into the broader communities. (Relatedly, am still alternately amused and annoyed by the opensuse faq still calling yast an ‘open standard’.)

On the plus side, holy cow is the new splash screen sweet. I still think we should have a 2.13.0 ‘remove the splash screen’ contest for hackers, but then we can just use this cool stuff as backgrounds :) In that vein, I am looking forward to seeing all of Lorenzo’s startup time improvements land. In general, if even half of the things mentioned on d-d-l for evo, gnome-meeting, etc. land in 2.14, it’ll be a very nice release for users. And if the gtk team can keep their focus on the core goal of ridley (cut lots of crap out of the platform) 2.16 will be a very nice devel platform.

Ben: while I approve of your move into the famed Acetarium, you should let the management know that rss is very passe for events, and ical is much preferred by the in crowd these days.

End of an era: I’ve been removed from planet suse. Ironically, I am planning on installing suse for the first time in ages in the next few days to play with their beta.

Board meeting today. Am finally clear on and happy with the foundation’s financial state, and hopefully the questions I’ve asked will mean more clear board financial statements for everyone in the future. It also means the board should have a greater understanding of what our resources are for things like helping Forum GNOME, paying for lawyers, and helping people attend events that might benefit GNOME (all things we discussed today alone.)

Completed my GMAT review today, for exam a week from today. Signed up for LSAT review for exam in a month. I have to say I’ve been extremely pleased with Princeton Review’s online prep test (except for the IE dependency)- my test scores are up substantially from the first practice exam I took, at least partially because of the very good advice they provide about pattern matching on the exam. Really, the exams are gameable. Oh, and they have very, very strong correlations with performance at b-school and law school. What that says about the schools themselves, I’m not happy to think about ;)