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

Had a nice, small, relaxed dinner and bowling last night to pre-celebrate my birthday. Peter and Thunder got me an excellent-looking rum and armagnac. Krissa got me an excellent Jim Morrison biography which I first read part of in Yass, and which I’d been looking forward to reading the rest of. Also the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, which is great fun. (Tangentially, I predict that Baz Luhrman would love to do a movie whose soundtrack was the Grey Album.)

(Warning: extended personal life rambling follows. I need to switch to a blogging tool with categories so most people can ignore these, and my mom can subscribe only to these ;)

Despite my birthday (perhaps because of?), I am sort of depressed about my overall life direction at the moment- I know a lot of things and people, and have accomplished quite a bit, and am in position to better each of those if I choose. But I don’t feel like I’m a disciplined, organized adult yet, so I’m frustrated that I’m not taking the best advantage of my situation, and am having doubts that attaining more knowledge is the right next step for me. I feel like, given the incredible luck I’ve had in so many facets of life (education, opportunities, college next-door neighbors, etc.) I should be doing better- I should be more effective, more accomplished- and my lack of focus and discipline- lack of willpower- have hindered me. I am not quite sure where to go next with this- like I say, I’m pretty unconvinced that right now more knowledge is the right thing for me. I do definitely need more skills- better organization, better self-discipline- but they aren’t things you can really sign up for a course on. Lots of people have recommended Getting Things Done, and I’m actually finally sitting down and reading that today- it addresses at least some of the focus-management issues I have, but I’m pretty sure it will only be a partial solution for me. Hopefully, at least, it’ll help me clear things out and allow me to focus on the bigger picture- the ‘where am I going next, anyway, and how do I make it fit with the things I enjoy doing in life’ picture. We’ll see, I guess… :)

Google is apparently blocking some Iraqi videos in the US. Scary.

Update: False Alarm. Still, a shitty world where Google even has to give you the option to block by location- one of the whole points of this internet thingy is that it wasn’t supposed to matter where you were. Not google’s fault, just unpleasant.

My sister’s album finally made it up at cdbaby. Yay. :)

Went on a retreat with work Friday. Was good, and relaxing- shocking how much of a difference a day completely computer-free can make to your state of mind.

We’re beginning to move forward on the Digital Media Exchange at work; should be interesting to see it progress. No code yet, still just the planning stages, but still- a really interesting concept that could be really impactful if it takes off. Faces stiff competition from Amazon on the one hand and Magnatunes on the other, though.

Have pretty much nuked my panels for the weekend in favor of gimmie and deskbar. Interesting experiment. With improved history support, deskbar is just great. The gimmie portion was mixed- obviously lots of stuff isn’t actually implemented yet :) More relevantly, I remembered why the OSX dock’s implementation irritates me- I find it makes for a very suboptimal situation when you have multiple windows of one app running. Still, could be a very useful window list/panel replacement as it gets refined- first-class people is an idea that really needs to get pushed. (Of course, first-class conversations I like even more, but I can’t imagine how that happens until you have ridiculously heavy-duty evo/gaim/beagle integration, so I’ll be patient on that score :)

ChipX86: awesome. I look forward to playing with it, and maybe showing it off to co-worker David Weinberger, who really thinks tags are the bomb. Am particularly excited by the deskbar integration- I’ve actually removed my menu bar at this point and just use deskbar. Of course, that doesn’t help me when I have to save things- I still then have to navigate all that nasty hierarchy. But still… getting there. :)

(See, people, concrete innovation in action. Apparently all the innovative folks are working at VMWare… :)

Cool to see that Open Clip Art is using CC tools to distribute their stuff- great testing and development ground for CC’s stuff, and hopefully better clip art for the rest of us :)

Was pretty blah this morning with a cold, so I stayed home; after some extra sleep I played briefly with gimmie. Might play with using it exclusively for a bit in the next few days, see how that works. Whether or not it works, I am really excited to see another example of someone writing code and experimenting with the future. Are we likely to use gimmie in a year? Dunno. Are we likely to benefit from the ideas Orph is experimenting with? Almost definitely. So it is very cool to see. Still waiting for my taggable desktop and conversations as a first-class object though ;)

Spent Thursday in DC for a conference hosted by the Anti-Spyware Coalition. Interesting; met a lot of smart folks and talked a bit of shop. Feel actually much more comfortable with ‘badware’ now- it is clear that overloading ‘spyware’ to mean ‘things that spy on you, and also all that other bad stuff’ is confusing, and puts the focus on a specific action (spying, popups, etc.) rather than the common thread of all of them- malicious and deceptive intent. Calling it ‘badware’ gets that straight and clear, which is great. Also seems to be interest in our long-term approach.

You know I’m bothered too much by GNOME politics because I dreamed I was having a conversation with JRB about mediating standards discussions. Of course, in the dream, people were arguing about fontconfig, which would be incredibly stupid. Additionally, I dreamed about zombies commandeering gigantic fleets of oil tankers. So, you know, take it all with a grain of salt.

CC is looking for Summer Interns. Pretty cool. We’re still looking for an engineer for stopbadware.org as well. I personally am crazy at work- lots of stopbadware stuff, plus h2o and dmx starting to eat away at my time again. But I love it- just really a great place to work, surrounded by great people.

Am completely depressed by this report on spending by the supposedly conservative and responsible Republican government. I’m going to be paying off the debt of these gluttons for the rest of my life.

Evo continues to impress me-I was quite embarassed that someone other than myself filed the bug for my last on-blog rant, and I’m pleased that lots of progress appears to have been made on lots of fronts- 110 bugs closed in the last week, more than gtk, nautilus, epiphany, panel, gstreamer, and control-center combined. A big chunk of those were closed by non-Novell folks, too, which is great. And Nagappan led all patch reviewers in the last week with 18. Not all is light and sunshine (more bugs opened than closed, and still lots of unreviewed patches, though evo is hardly alone in either category) but overall things appear to be in pretty solid shape for the release, from what I can see from here.

Did a fresh dapper install at work today (long story, involving much pain. vmware + XP, here I come.) Was really disappointed to see ‘Ekiga’ and ‘Evolution’ in the menus, bare, with no description of what they are, nearly a full year after Miguel talked about the problem with Evolution’s menu item at GUADEC. Otherwise, am really impressed- login/boot performance appears improved, install is easy (both of the OS and of additional software afterwards), and so far everything is stable.