August, 2009

misc. — 3 Comments
28
Aug 09

wikitravel on android and in print

In preparation for a honeymoon in places where data access is expensive I’ve put all of wikitravel on my Android phone via the OxygenGuide project. I’m not sure how useful it will prove in practice (especially since all maps are stripped out and there is no search) but this seems to me to be an obvious next step for travel guidebooks- everything in your pocket, searchable (at first by text and later by GPS coordinates), etc. It certainly is not a straightforward process right now, and eventually it will be obsoleted by cheap, global data access, but in the meantime I look forward to using it on this trip and in the future.

In the meantime, I’ve also become a bit intrigued by other custom uses. I was just at the wedding of a friend in an exotic-ish location; as part of the gift bag that many wedding guests put in the room of their guests there was a very nicely done printed version of content from the city’s wikitravel page (which also included bios of the bride and groom, a schedule of events, etc.) I may do something similar, albeit probably just by emailing pdfs to people :) Will be interesting to see how this and open street map integrate in the future.

I have to admit (and I’m curious to know if others have had this experience) that I’m reluctant to rely on the hotel recommendations in wikitravel; not sure why that is- probably just that it seems fairly unsystematic and prone to manipulation?

forfacebook / personal — 13 Comments
27
Aug 09

making our rings

Krissa and I have mostly tried to make our upcoming wedding fairly low key. The groom will probably wear sandals; there will be very little ceremony; traditional decisions like who is taking whose name (if at all) have not been made; so on, so forth. But we’re not completely dispensing with the traditional bits, and one of them is the rings.

Luckily, through some friends, we stumbled into a pretty awesome way of doing the rings too. Sam at New York Wedding Rings is a former sysadmin who got into ring making as a hobby. During some time off from work, ring-making became the work, and now he helps people make their own rings as the bulk of his business (though he also sells rings of his own design). What Sam does is basically help people make their own wedding rings, from start to finish. He works with people to design their rings, gets the materials, and then walks them through the process from cutting to shaping to polishing. If you’re not artistically inclined (like yours truly) he will also help to make sure that the result is something that looks professional even though it was made in part by amateurs, so you get both the side of pride and ownership that come from making it yourself and the good looks that come from actually having experience and skill. :)

Luis solders Krissas ring while Sam, our guide, looks on

BEHOLD THE POWER OF SCIENCE and also oxy-propane. I solder Krissa's ring while Sam, our guide, looks on. The ring is glowing because it is at roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

I spent yesterday in the studio with Sam, working mostly on Krissa’s ring and a little on my own as well. It was a really great experience- I suppose I’m a fan of craftsmanship in general, and to put your own labor1 into the ring your partner is going to wear for the rest of their lives is a fairly powerful experience.

More details below the fold (lots of pictures so I don’t want it on planets, but do come by and say hi ;)

Continue reading →

  1. not much sweat, it was air-conditioned [↩]
gnome — 4 Comments
19
Aug 09

who writes the kernel^W gnome?

The new ‘who writes the kernel’ paper is out; an interesting read as always. I’m still waiting for someone to take the scripts and run the same analysis for GNOME, especially since GNOME’s data is all in git now. Should be a short project for someone, I’d think, and very valuable for the community as a whole to better understand who contributes and why.

misc. — 16 Comments
12
Aug 09

state of the art for bounties?

Is there a state of the art for free software project bounties? I’m sort of curious, because I’ve become a heavy user of a project which has an overworked maintainer and no particularly vibrant community.  I also  have no time/ability/desire to dive into that codebase, but I have two features that I’m pretty sure upstream would accept if someone coded them up. So I’m sort of curious about the options for situations like that, but realize I haven’t looked at the problem in ages and don’t know what the state of the art is, or if any one is even experimenting with it anymore. Anyone? Bueller?

misc. — 7 Comments
11
Aug 09

the nerd merit badges I’d make

I like the concept of nerd merit badges- I even want the inbox zero one- but the execution is a little weak. Seeing this started me pondering on what I’d do if I were going to make my own.

The temptation, of course, is just to have a logo per organization- gnu, gnome, moz, fedora, etc. But the core of the merit badge idea is that you’re indicating skills learned, not organizations. (Yes, I’m an old boy scout on top of all my other nerdiness.) So I tried to think along those lines, and here are some of the skills I’d like to decorate my bag/laptop with:

  • GTD: a david allen head, natch.
  • emacs: emacs logo?
  • bugmaster: old gnome bugsquad logo? (mosquito with crosshairs)
  • infolaw: scales, or something (yeah, I know… pretty weak.)
  • perl: a very short obfuscated perl program
  • peer production: (because open source just isn’t right for some reason) (but hell if I know what that logo would be; nerdmeritbadge uses github’s octocat but that seems… weak)
  • lego: you know it!
  • family tech support: nerdmeritbadges has this one, and it isn’t a bad concept, but their logo for it is terrible.

I bet you could do a passable job of them with this cafepress option and some decent gimpery, but if people have decent suggestions I’m all ears. :)

gnome / personal — 2 Comments
10
Aug 09

thanks, friends

A few days before the bar I got a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from Gran Canaria. I promise I only choked up a little bit. :) It meant a lot to me.

Thanks to everyone who signed it- I miss you guys (and gals) too :)

software — 20 Comments
2
Aug 09

how do busy people deal with identica/twitter?

I’m an anti-social denter/twitterer. I publish irregularly (to, apparently, several hundred people) but read at best daily and at worst weekly, and at that, I read basically only direct replies plus (by twitter standards) a handful of people’s dents/twits.1

This is primarily because the signal/noise ratio is not very good, and (worse) the presentation of that high-s/n ratio is generally a constant, distracting flow. I only barely had time for that when we called it ‘IRC’; I didn’t have time for that in law school; I certainly won’t have time for it when I’m a practicing lawyer. (The other option is to read it in bulk, say, once a day, but if I were following all my interesting friends that would probably take hours, and you lose the conversational aspect to boot.)

That said, I can see that there is signal in there; lots of interesting discussions seem to be happening (and sometimes amusing ones too, which matters.) And I’m a firm believer that ‘part of my job’ is to stay current; I spend 60-90 minutes on an elliptical trainer every morning reading blogs so that I have an understanding of what is going on in the world (both professionally and for entertainment purposes.)

So I’m willing to devote at least some time to reading dents/tweets… if I can figure out how to do it in a way that isn’t maddeningly distracting or a complete time suckage. And that is what I’m asking for here. :) How do you tame the flow? How do you extract value out of it?

Options I will not look at:

  • anything that amounts to ‘suck it up’ or ‘just treat it like the distraction of email’. If anything, I’m trying to move away from that model for email as well; one of my August projects is to move as much email as possible out of my inbox, either by unsubscribing, by moving it to my RSS reader, or by other means. The cognitive cost of this stuff is high; not so high that I want to get rid of it altogether, but high enough that we need to start tackling it with sophisticated tools rather than the naive models we’ve been using so far.

Options I’m going to experiment with:

  1. Historically, I followed a dozen people on twitter and 40ish on identica; those numbers have both gone up as a result of experimenting for this post. [↩]
This work by Luis Villa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.