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

I put together the gnome is people headshots, finally. I had a lot of fun doing them, though admittedly they are a touch inconsistent. Cut me some slack- I’ve never really tried to take good portraits before, so you can see the progression over time as I get better with encouraging people to laugh, and as I get better framing and using natural light. Of the ones I took, my favorites (artistically) are:

Of course, I’ve still got a ways to go as a portraitist- Ross and particularly David Z. had great shots of me from GUADEC:

The Berkman Center is a fun place to work, with smart people and great stuff going on. As a bonus, if you have any interest in thinking big thoughts, the hallway conversations are the best you’ll ever have in any tech job, most likely. And they are hiring: they need a Sr. Engineer for a very cool tool to measure users and their behaviors on a global scale. If you’re interested, click through the link and apply.

I do believe that I’ll be wearing this to my first day of intellectual property law, sometime in 2007. I imagine it’ll function like an IP Rorschach test…

I’ve posted the mosaics from my ‘gnome is people’ slide deck. I’ll post the mugshots and ideally instructions on use of the totally awesome metapixel tomorrow.

• Totally awesome to see that a couple high profile tech doers and thinkers, Mark Pilgrim and Tim Bray, are switching back to Linux from OSX.
• In his switching article, Mark makes the point that XCF (gimp’s format) is not particularly open, and is apparently undocumented. Norman Walsh expounds. I think this is a good example of what I talked about at LWE- open standards very often mean more than open source when it comes to protecting and controlling how you use software.
• This form of re-mapping the world and this form of re-mapping are both very cool, as is bldgblog, where I found them. (see also the incredibly crazy post about the world’s largest diamond mine.)
• see here for a great, concise list of what is wrong with webapps, though the poster calls it ‘what is wrong with web 2.0′. Despite thinking that webapps have inherent, unconquerable suckiness, likely I will post tomorrow (well, sometime before GUADEC) about why I’m going to abandon Evo for gmail as soon as I finish my job, and why I’m rapidly abandoning abi for writely for any document that other people are likely to see. Sad, but fixable- hopefully my post will explain what is wrong in enough detail that it points people towards what is fixable.
• It seems unlikely that I’ll ever finish the intended post I had on this, but every developer and every would-be linux desktop marketer should go to Apple’s new ‘Get A Mac’ page. Read the list of features they are pimping; read how they are pimping them. I’m not saying that GNOME developers should work only on things on that list, but every time you start a project or add a feature, you should compare it to that list and if it isn’t on that list, the bar for ‘is this really, really good for users, or for helping developers do kick ass things for users’ must be very high. Similarly, if you’re marketing the linux desktop, think about that list, and how it is presented- really excellent stuff.

If you’re a web person, or a writer, and in the Boston area over the summer (so yeah, presumably a student) you might want to take a perk at the three summer jobs we have available. Cool beans.

Having been a bit cranky and just wanting to get away from it all a bit, in the past two nights I’ve plowed through Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge. It is typical Vinge in some senses (the renegades who want to stay free of government surveillance use the HURD), but very near-future- set in 2025, just like True Names. The characters aren’t his best, but the ideas are all over the place, and most are just far enough out there to be challenging, but also close enough to be plausible. Anyway… I thoroughly enjoyed it, and anyone who likes Big Ideas scifi should definitely pick it up.