software « Luis Villa

software

continued notes on the macbook experiment, week 3

Some more notes on running a mac (original post and explanation here):

installing new software is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great.
suspend and resume is, like everyone says, perfect. It just works. Every kernel developer should be given a laptop and not allowed to do anything else until suspend and resume works this well.
one interesting side-effect that I’ve noticed of controlling the hardware is that you don’t need to fit the OS on a CD, so the OS preload is huge- 13-14 gigs. Which is insanely great!¹ Instead, even when I tried to do something 99% of mac users will ever do (install a rails app locally) it Just Worked. Rails was there; gems was there; sqlite was there. That is specifically because they don’t have to worry about fitting everything on a CD and can instead rely on the humongous hard drives that every system comes with these days. A very nice luxury, that. (Or to put it another way: emacs is in the default install. And it isn’t in the default install on most linux distros anymore. I understand why it must be so for linux distros, but still, it is sad.)
I’ve long suspected that Dashboard + Expose is roughly 1,000x better as a user experience than panel applets. Now I know I’m right.
it is great that a lot of the libre software that I love is available on mac; having tomboy and tracks available is already making me more productive. (And obviously I’m using firefox. Sadly it is way more performant on mac than linux- someone who was serious about the linux desktop experience but didn’t know where to start hacking would be well advised to work on firefox performance.)
I just saw the following on Krissa’s fresh F12 install:

I am not yet an expert on Mac-style UI design, but I’m pretty sure anyone who put an error message like this in a product shipping from Cupertino would be flogged. Anyone who put it in in such a way that it (as far as I can tell) always comes up on a default install would be fired on the spot.

First commenter who calls it bloat is shot. [↩]

the macbook experiment, day 2

The last time I regularly used an operating system other than Linux was fall of 1997. Windows 98 was all the rage; Mac OS/X was not yet (publicly) a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye. So this means I have a fairly dysfunctional view of desktop software- I basically really don’t know what Linux and GNOME are competing against. I’ve read reviews, and played with the competitors from time to time, but I’ve never really seriously forced myself to use them- to learn the keyboard shortcuts, the quirks, and their real benefits. And I think that is a problem- it makes me a less effective part of the software ecosystem if I don’t know how most people experience computers.

An apple a day, by angermann, used under CC-BY-SA.

So when my new employer offered to get me a new laptop, I decided to get a mac, and set myself to using it for a year so that I can learn how the other half lives. It will also have Win7 installed (probably mainly in a VM) as well as Office.

Some thoughts so far:

OS/X is nice, but has not really jumped out at me as particularly awesome. It gets the job done, and is very polished (very consistent; low effort required), but by and large my experience with the core OS hasn’t felt that radically different than from any modern Linux distro- the differences are (so far) probably smaller than I expected.
that said, there are definitely nice touches- the multitouch trackpad is definitely leaps and bounds above any other touchpad I’ve ever used, though I’m going to miss the Lenovo/Thinkpad nipple a lot. The hardware in general is just awesome- solid like a rock.
the mac software ecosystem seems to be a mixed bag; I’d heard good things about adium, for example, but I’m not very impressed so far, and in my very limited playing with mail.app it seems roughly on par with thunderbird; that is to say, well behind gmail in usability.
but some of the software is brilliant- a friend pointed me at scrivener, which may be imperfect (time will tell) but so far impresses me as a rare piece of software which truly seeks (and may actually achieve) fundamental reinvention of a class of software; it just seems like software dedicated to the process of writing rather than primarily to text layout, and that feels to me like a huge, huge leap. The only reason I don’t look forward to using it is because I don’t want to get hooked :/

Anyway, I expect this will be an interesting, and potentially very troubling, year, as I get a better grip on what was accomplished, software-wise, during the time I’ve been working on the Free Software desktop.

law / software — 4 Comments
30
Nov 09

software freedom rainmaking

A little over a year ago, I formally introduced John Resig of jquery fame to Brad Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I was therefore very pleased to see today that jquery has joined the Conservancy.

Rain Making on me and Krissa in Tongariro

Sadly no one gives me a partnership cut of this rainmaking but I will feel very good about it tonight nevertheless.

gnome / software — 2 Comments
23
Sep 09

pathetic, part II

My system failed to functionally come back from suspend yesterday, which appears to have cost me a substantial part of what was the final draft of my wedding vows and ceremony. This is the second time in the past few months I’ve lost big chunks of important work because of a system crash.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, from Wikipedia, by factoryjoe, used under CC-BY-SA

I’m reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization (freedom of choice, of action) is pretty nice to have but it turns out it doesn’t do you much good when you fear for your safety or lack the ability to feed yourself. Software freedom feels fairly similar- at this point tonight, admittedly sick, angry, and stressed, I’d be pretty happy to pay for a shiny pair of handcuffs if I knew it would do c. late-90s basics like ‘work reliably,’ ‘resume and suspend’, etc.

Best wedding present GNOME (not to mention X and the kernel)¹ could give me: dedicate a release cycle (or three) to implementing test-driven development. No features, no ‘regular’ bug fixes, just writing tests and implementing the necessary build tools so that those tests are run on every commit. End the stability regressions and get us on the right track to compete with modern user-centric OSes. We used to be more stable than they are; we can be and should be again.

GNOME could call it 2.90; zeitgeist and shell could spend the time actually figuring out a use case, ahem [↩]

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:

Using venus’s meme tracking code (probably with Long URL Please or ideally a python equivalent?) but that only gives me conversations about URLs, so is probably a start rather than a finish.
…
(non)-profit?
just about anything people suggest here :)

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. [↩]

mozilla / personal / QA / software — 4 Comments
23
Jun 09

10th bugiversary

Some part of me will always be a QA guy, so it is nice to note that today is the tenth anniversary of my first formal bug filing (and first formal participation in Mozilla, I believe): mozilla bugzilla bug 8749, nested <DL> tags don’t display properly. Happy bugday to me, happy bugday to me… :)

law / school / software — 6 Comments
26
May 09

ending the celebration

Law school, even when you’re done with it, has ways of beating you down. In this case, it is the lack of preparation for the bar. In the next two months, I have to learn several topics I hadn’t previously learned, and re-learn several topics about which I know a lot of theory and very little practice. I’ve also got to move at the end of this week, which already puts me behind schedule for the studying. As a result, I’ll probably not be very digitally sociable from now through August.

Two tools that are going to make that a little easier:

As usual, leechblock. Truly excellent for defining your workday. (I know I was on semi-vacation the past two weeks because I turned off leechblock.)
Anki- libre, multi-platform flashcards to help me memorize all the various stuff that I have to stuff into my head in the next two months. Includes sync and a web-based version so I can work on my phone or across multiple laptops.

The celebration, while it lasted, was pretty nice. Some things that got done this weekend with my parents in town:

lots of good food: at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center; at Blue Hill; at the awesomely yummy yet fairly reasonable Kuma Inn; at the awesomely yummy yet totally cheap Caracas Arepa Bar.
music: Dizzy’s had music too- Bill Charlap trio. I think the music critic-approved phrase is ‘spectacular display of piano virtuosity.’ Also saw In The Heights again (first musical I’ve ever seen twice); still spectacular.
museums: went to the Museum of Art and Design to see their glass and industrial ceramics exhibitions, and to the Guggenheim to see their Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective. Both highly recommended.
walks; the weather has been terrific and we’ve been able to walk quite a bit, including some time in a gorgeous Central Park yesterday.
friends: shout out to the close friends who ended up at the impromptu hat party!

So really, I can’t complain too much… now back to the grindstone.

software — 40 Comments
9
May 09

easy openoffice self-collaboration?

I’ve got an openoffice document that I need to edit on more than one machine (probably on Linux and XP; long story about why I have to use multiple machines/multiple OSs but hopefully it isn’t a long-term thing.)

I can’t use abi/abicollab or google docs because this is a very, very large document (100-150 pages, mostly in outline form, w/large auto-generated ToC), which in my experience both abi and google docs don’t do well with.

So OpenOffice it is. But is there any way to do that across the two machines more easily/efficiently than just mailing the file back and forth? Does OOo for XP support webdav, for example? Or is there a clean/easy solution to dump OOo files into proper RCS? Open to any and all suggestions, thanks.

(By the way, weave makes doing this for my moz data really pretty nice, and since it is encrypted on the server side, it avoids the problems I just posted about. I look forward to their identity solution.)

law / software — 6 Comments
9
May 09

on getting subpoena’d for participating in Zotero

So, apparently Thomson Reuters is subpoenaing everyone who has ever committed to Zotero as part of their ongoing lawsuit.

I have not looked closely at the lawsuit itself (relevant looking extracts here; James Grimmelman comments here); my sense is that given the current primacy of contract over common sense they probably have at least some legally valid claims in there, though I think that as a matter of policy it is a horribly bad idea to allow contracts that prohibit reverse engineering of this sort.

A couple quick thoughts, though, on other issues around the subpoenas:

First, it is hard to see this as anything other than pure intimidation; if there really were an issue with the relevant code they could have subpoena’d only the names/identities of those who committed the code. A purely harassing/intimidating subpoena is against the lawyer’s code of ethics, but since we also enforce it ourselves, and since there are (I suppose) thin-but-not-completely implausible arguments that this is for real informational purposes (perhaps, for example, they want to check all inboxes for discussions of the code at issue) the odds of anything happening on this front are slim to none.

Second, the real thing that you should take away here, if you’re a regular computer user, is that if you give your personal data to a third party, you have given up essentially all rights in that data in the face of a subpoena.¹ As I’m sure Zotero’s lawyers told them, there is pretty much no way Zotero could have prevented that information from getting out once Thomson Reuters decided they wanted it. Nor does Zotero have to notify you- what Zotero did here (notifying everyone whose information got subpoena’d) is actually purely polite. So bottom line: if someone else has your information, that information is available to anyone with a subpoena (or a warrant), and there is nothing you can do to stop it. That applies to things like committer information, but also your email provider or any other third party who has your data. Keep that in mind next time you give your information out even to ‘trusted’ third parties.

Really, you give up virtually all rights, period, but that is a story for a different blog post. [↩]

gnome / software — 3 Comments
1
May 09

gourmet!

New GNOME Journal is out, and with it is a nice article on gourmet. Gourmet is a pretty awesome little piece of software and deserves more users and more love. Go check it out, and cook something yummy for yourself. :)

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