Hylke Bons drew a new logo for Banu yesterday. I had requested him for a cuddly brown bear, and adapting Linus's words for Tux, said the bear should look contented and happy, as if it's just had a lot of honey :) Hylke replied within 2 hours with this logo image which is the sweetest bear I've ever seen. It even seems to be hiding a jar of honey behind it :) It's amazing he created it in so little time. Thank you Hylke!
MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, according to research reported yesterday in Nature Photonics ... The design greatly increases the amount of backlight that reaches the screen. The researchers were able to get about 36 percent of the backlight out of a pixel, more than three times as much light as an LCD can deliver. But Microsoft senior research engineer Michael Sinclair says that through design improvements, he expects that number to go up — theoretically, as high as 75 percent."
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You could probably power a small island with all of these. Oh wait, we are! A rather large number of our favourite iconic green laptops will be charging on these surge-protected power boards very soon. 
Pia will land in Niue next week, as one member of an elite team tasked with kickstarting the world’s first 100% saturation deployment of OLPCs. Of course, it helps that Niue is a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific!
Technology is fragile. Systems go down all the time because someone forgot to maintain something, or someone deleted a file or a variable that they thought no one was using. In other words with Murphy's Law there are plenty of opportunities to put all the pieces together again after all hell breaks loose. Just ask the Twitter folk, who are doing the best they can to hold it together.
But there's a special place in hell for vendors who deliberately knock their customers off the air, without warning, just to get them to call. The thought is as abhorrent to a computer professional as it would be for a surgeon to leave a scalpel in a patient to be sure they pay their bill.
Comcast is going to get sued some day for what they do, and they're going to lose billions because of it. I tend to be an outlier on the leading edge. If they're shitting on me today, you can bet they'll be shitting on hundreds of people next year, and thousands the year after that. One of those shittings is going to cause an oil spill or a nuclear accident, or some horrible thing we haven't imagined yet. Maybe soldiers will die because of their deliberate outages. Maybe children. You just don't fuck around with some things, the kinds of things Comcast is fucking with. If you're going to turn a paying customer off deliberately, it seems you should do it slowly and carefully and covering every part of your anatomy while you do it, not the roughshod way they do it now. (And what would be so hard about slowing down the connection so it's impossible for someone to use too much bandwidth?)
That there are engineers inside Comcast willing to do the bidding of some very poor thinking business people says we don't have adequate professional standards. Some professions don't allow their members to do harm. You can't find a doctor who will administer the death penalty, or even advise on what would be a humane form of the death penalty.
An astounding AP photo of Barack Obama waving to his fans in Berlin earlier today. I saw this one scroll by on a large HDTV and couldn't believe my eyes. There's so much detail in the picture, so many stories, so many cameras!
This is the really cool thing about FlickrFan, btw -- the best photographers in the world, with the best equipment, at the most interesting events. And lots of pixels. People who think it's just a screen saver must think that Obama is just a politician (and many do of course).
But when you see this picture, think about all the pixels your displays have today, and how much of the photography that comes to you takes advantage of it, and you'll realize why I pushed so hard to get the AP and AFP to partner with me to get these photos for you. Yet so few have taken advantage of it.
Anyway, this picture gives you some idea of what you're missing.
PS: All those American flags, in Germany, give me goosebumps. 
nerdyH writes "The Debian project's maintainer, Luke Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the 'testing' or 'Lenny' tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux in ... September! The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian — and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will turn their attention to 364 release-critical bugs, and half-a-dozen high-priority goals. Given the work to be done, is September really feasible? Lenny always was a little slow getting back to his right place ..."
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creyes123 writes "I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I've gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he's mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he changes the subject and bad mouths a different 'flaw.' The cycle repeats a few more times, with no apparent end in sight. I want to encourage folks to share their opinions, but constructive criticism was clearly not his goal. I feel that the whole episode was just a massive time waster for me. What did I do to deserve this? Could I have handled this better?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slatterz links to a story which shows that nowadays, it's sometimes possible to find out whether someone is a dog on the Internet, excerpting: "A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate. Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer, set up a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted false information about his sexual and political preferences. He also set up another page for Firsht's television company, the latter entitled 'Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?' ... 'The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,' media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Doesn’t this look like the GUADEC t-shirt?
GUADEC was great and talks turned out to be more interesting than what I was expecting after all the decadence discussions, this is also proved by the fact that I managed to stay awake during all the talks despite having a party every day 
. Being in an awesome city with wonderful food[2] helped a lot for the final result, this is why I’m so happy that Gran Canaria was chosen for the next GUADEC.
In Istanbul I finally met other people working on WebKit or on related projects and had a chance to discuss with them about the future development of WebKit. While meetings on IRC are useful and allow you to talk with people from everywhere, real life meetings give you a much more efficient channel of communication: how about a hackfest for people working on WebKit, FireFox and desktop programs using them?
[1] Actually I came back to Cambridge ten days ago but, as usual, I fail at writing blog posts at the right moment, I wanted to write this on Sunday but my flight was moved to Monday and then real life started again. [Insert here other childish excuses for being so lazy]
[2] I’m already experimenting some Turkish recipes, Collabora people in Cambridge should expect a Turkish dinner really soon.
There's a famous cartoon in The New Yorker that mocks web anonymity:
You can be anyone you want on the Internet, apparently. In real life, it's a bit harder to masquerade as someone else, though in business, depending on your job, you can fake it for quite some time.
Not in sales.
A colleague, Michael Uzquiano, reminded me of something that Garrison Keillor once said. Keillor wrote, as Michael related to me, that he first decided to be a writer because, in fiction, no one could tell whether you succeeded or failed. This is very unlike, say, the high jump in the Olympics where everyone knows whether you are over or under the bar.
There's no room for fiction in sales, either. It's all "high jump." I manage half of my company's sales team. I don't rate myself as a particularly strong sales leader, but I'm still on the hook for particularly strong sales results, no matter what. There's no way to bluff a sales number. It's either $X or it's greater or less than $X. To find out whether I'm doing a good job or not, my CEO simply has to look at the sales number to see if it's > $X, where $X is the agreed upon quota.
Dealing with this brick wall - otherwise known as "reality" - has been one of the biggest blessings and curses over these past (nearly) three years at Alfresco. I have grown more as a business executive in these past few years than I did in the previous years doing "strategy" and other such frothy positions I've held.
I've also struggled more. Every quarter the numbers get bigger. Every quarter it gets harder and harder. Every quarter it becomes clearer and clearer whether I've done well or poorly. So far, so good. But you're only as good as your last quarter in sales, making it a high-stress job with limited emotional reward.
Just remember that when you look down your nose at "sales guys." Unlike most other professions, they actually live under the constant stress of being completely "naked" in their performance. Show some compassion. Please! :-)
Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny) have just released a new series of futurist essays on the amazing future of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges. The computer driver is just the beginning — the essays detail how robocars can enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and are the most compelling thing computer geeks can work on to save the planet. Because robocars can refuel, park and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs, they end up changing not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and — by removing dependence on foreign oil — even wars. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." (More below.)
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Dekortage writes "As today's lawsuit indicates, Hasbro has apparently had enough of Scrabulous, the online word game remarkably similar to Scrabble. Filed in New York, Hasbro's suit is against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, brothers from Kolkata, India, and asks the court to remove the Scrabulous application from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com web site, and grant damages and attorneys fees to Hasbro. Why did Hasbro tale so long to 'protect' its intellectual property rights in court? They waited 'in deference to the fans' until EA had launched the official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million. This was the next logical step for Hasbro after filing DMCA takedown notices against Scrabulous in January."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It seems that Moblin will be switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux as their base operating system. I’m interested in finding out the underlying reasoning for such a move. The stated reason is because they wanted to use RPM instead of DEB. I can’t quite buy that but perhaps that is because having come from both camps I think that packaging is an implementation detail that too many people put way too much stock in. This has the effect of causing unnecessary emotional splits within the community resulting in animosity which often overshadows real threats.
The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable. Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.
I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends - keep moving forward.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."
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I visited the set of "Sugar Town," the latest Vivid Alt Film from Dave Naz. Dave is doing a 70's-period piece, and asked to use the Grocery Getter in a (non-sex, I was assured) scene. (those are the original dealer-installed seat covers, after all.) The shoot was in this beautiful, slightly-run-down Art Deco building south of downtown. The interiors were amazing, you could shoot a
I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with my bank today because of an error with their online banking. I didn’t want to, I had to, after their email support told me my issue couldn’t be handled online. It was such a mind-numbing, protracted, time wasting experience that it made me ask myself, “How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?”
In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too.
Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times. I also totally and completely understand some people’s experience with email tech support is way too techy, unreliable or frustrating and dialing an 800 number is an escape from that. What I don’t get it is why a person would rather sit on the phone for however long it takes – maybe 45 minutes!!! – rather than send an email and go about their life while it’s read and replied to.
Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.
Emails can be printed out and saved. They can be sent to someone else who can chime in on th thread. They’re a historical document you don’t have to copy down hurriedly while information is spewed out to you. They can be sent quickly, tagged, labeled, archived. You can send an email whenever you want, there’s no business hours to abide by or schedule to confer with.
We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.
Since 2004, GovTrack.us has housed information about the United States Congress, including 10 years of bills, voting records, and contact information for individual members of Congress. Visitors can also find out who represents them and search the database for committee assignments, legislative statistics, and the Congressional Record, which is the official record of daily proceedings in Congress. All the code that makes GovTrack run is open source, and all the information stored there is freely available to everyone.
TechFiends32 writes "After years of working with NASA to bring Internet connectivity to deep space, scientists say Vint Cerf's efforts may be nearing completion. To combat the apparent challenges of extending the Internet into space (such as meteors and weighty, high-powered antennas), Cerf and others have made significant efforts, like adjusting satellite-based IP, and working on delay-tolerant networking (DTN) to address pure IP's limitations in space. According to principal engineer at The Mitre Corp., Keith Scott, 'The 2010 goal is designed to bring DTN to a sufficient level of maturity to incorporate it into designs for robotic and human lunar exploration.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Paul Graham thinks that startup founders need to sell their companies to get freedom and security:
They want enough money that (a) they don’t have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don’t have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.
I think he’s wrong in general and I know he’s wrong for me personally.
Fallacy #1: Owning a profitable company is like earning a salary
Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone. You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money. You deserve to pop a bottle and celebrate!
You certainly shouldn’t curb your ambitions because of that, though. The real economic pay-off for taking the risk of starting a business is what comes after this. That the company starts making enough money that you can take some and put away. After a while, that coveted financial independence you thought would make your life perfect should be achieved (and you’ll realize that it didn’t make it perfect).
But I can see how this line of thought would arise. If you’re building to flip, then profits aren’t really that interesting. If you can just get to break-even, you’re probably doing better than the majority of other companies in your made-to-flip space. So instead you focus on getting more eyeballs, more sign ups, or more of whatever you think an acquirer would place the highest premium on.
I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.
So let’s strike out the security claim. Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.
Fallacy #2: There’s always something you’d much rather do
You don’t have to work 60, 80, or 100 hours per week just because you run your own business. Many business owners do that, but if they’re successful, it’s usually because there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Look at the top tech CEOs. None of them need to work, many of them are billionaires, but still Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others continue to helm their companies for decades because they love what they’re doing.
I don’t personally like to work 60 or more hours per week. Even 40 hours is pushing it. At 37signals, we all try to work just four days a week. That’s a perk in addition to the fact that we don’t count vacation days (I probably spent 4 weeks last year) and many of us often attend conferences and other out-of-the-daily-rhythm activities.
But when I actually do sit down to work, it’s very often that there’s nothing else I’d rather do. And I don’t think that’s really an uncommon phenomenon. I think lots of people really like what they do and for bursts of the time consider it the most interesting thing they could be working on.
If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do. And that it can feel like you’re trapped trying to chase a prize that keeps moving. I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.
For me, the secret has been to do many other things besides work on 37signals. I enjoy working on Ruby on Rails and pursue a lot of hobbies. When you work less than 40 hours per week on something you actually like doing, it doesn’t feel very much like work at all. It feels like I’ve already retired and get to do a little of many things that I like so none of them really gets boring. There’s what I perceive to be healthy balance instead of a constant sprint.
This comes back to the earlier topic of early retirement as a false idol. I’ve talked to many entrepeneurs who’ve thought that they could just sit back and live the sweet life of no work after selling out. Most of them were right back working another idea after six months. Often times, the second idea wasn’t as good as the first one.
Bottom line is that you really should try to find something to work on that at least for substantial amounts of time constitutes that “nothing I’d rather do” feeling. I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.
Seth Godin has a great bit of insight at the end of a post today about how smart companies separate pleasure and pain.
He cites Disney as a good example:
Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.
And airlines as a bad example:
Airlines, on the other hand, surround the very thing they sell (getting you home) with armed guards, untrained TSA agents, long lines and sneering gate agents eager to take your money when you have absolutely no expectation or choice and when your stress is at its highest. This is a problem in the long run.
Obviously some of the security measures are out of the airlines’ control, but the insight is still a great one. It’s similar to the best advice I’ve heard on PR: Blast the bad news out quickly (to get it out of the way) and trickle the good news out slowly (to keep in the way).
RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I gave a talk a few hours ago at the inaugural Scratch conference at the MIT Media Lab. Having first used Scratch last week, and leaving for the airport at 4am this morning I found myself reflecting...
What am I doing?
The title of the talk is "Scratching All Itches Equally" and originally listed Gregory Rosmaita, Liddy Nevile, and Jutta Treviranus as speakers. Gregory and Jutta couldn't make it so I was asked to jump in.
Here is the description in the program guide:
A discussion of strategies for ensuring that Scratch is usable by all, whether one can see the screen, or use a pointing device or an on-screen keyboard. The goal of the panel is to discuss Scratch’s architectural framework to ensure that it is capable of communicating with operating system accessibility APIs, as well as platform-agnostic APIs, such as IAccessible2 and ATK/AT-SPI (Assistive ToolKit/Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface).
skeazer writes "Tucked away in a 1,200-page bill now in Congress is a small paragraph that could lead distance-education institutions to require spy cameras in their students' homes. It sounds Orwellian, but the paragraph — part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act — is all but assured of becoming law by the fall. No one in Congress objects to it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Oy. This is probably the end of the line for me and Comcast. About an hour before today's Obama speech, I was upstairs, with Slingplayer on the 2nd monitor, Audio HIjack Pro ready to record, when the net went down. I figured it was another outage, we had one here in Berkeley last week.
So I posted a twit to comcastcares, saying we had another outage. The response said it wasn't an outage.
Net-net, it's some kind of "security" thing, so says Frank Ellison, the comcastcares guy. I told him if this isn't a legitimate security issue, then please close my account, both Internet and TV (for which I now pay $183 per month). I have redundant service for both, with an AT&T DSL line and a DirecTV dish, I'm hardly watching any TV at all these days, other than MSNBC and a little CNN, and while their Internet sure is fast, if they keep taking it down and insisting that I grovel and listen to lectures to get it turned back on (or worse, who knows what they have planned for me this time) -- no thanks. I don't think groveling and being a valued customer go together.
Ellison also volunteered that he liked me. My response was you're a company rep, you don't get to like or not like me.
It's with a little bit of anger and frustration that I realize that Comcast paid $175 million to get Joseph Smarr to work on their network, and their answer to me is: 1. Pay $183 per month. 2. I should care whether they like me or not. 3. They'll shut me down when they want me to call. 4. They don't care if it's right before Obama's speech in Berlin or not. 5. Fcuk off Dave. (I threw #5 in there for attitude, they didn't literally tell me to fuck off, it's more in the body language.)
Oh yeah, they paid $75 million for a bunch of newsletters today. I'll end this piece the way I began it. Oy.
PS: Here's the writeup of the issue with Comcast in April.
Update: Their issue isn't with the security on my net, it has to do with how much bandwidth I use. Can't work with them when their method of getting me on the phone is to shut off my service, without any warning. I told them to close the account. I'm no longer a Comcast customer. I'm sure they'll send me another bill, adding insult to injury.
Mark Shuttleworth is one of our favorite open source celebrities. He does great things for the community, he's affable, and he promotes not only Ubuntu but GNU/Linux and FOSS in general. And it seems that he's always on the go -- from this conference to that conference to this meeting to that one, anywhere from California to Korea to Spain. While Canonical's CEO tours the world, Chief Operating Officer Jane Silber makes sure the company runs smoothly, that all the servers stay up, and that releases stay on schedule. She's hiring, too, so you may want to watch this video extra carefully; it's entirely possible that Jane Silber could be your boss one day....
We were a bit disappointed when we heard the recent two-episode Watchmen series announcement since it was to be set as a brawler. However, it seems that these two games will be set as a prequel with the ability to play either Nite Owl or Rorschach in the days before superheroes were outlawed. "If you're wondering who could possibly replace the much-revered Alan Moore in the scripting department -- as the story is the linchpin upon which the whole Watchmen experience pivots -- comic fans will be glad to know that respected comic veteran Len Wein (co-creator of DC's Swamp Thing and Marvel's Wolverine characters) is on board to provide the dialogue, and original Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons is lending his insights as the game's adviser. Due out around the same time as the film's theatrical release, the game will be released in multiple parts designed to lead the player up to the graphic novel/film's events."
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An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 3.0 approach of “no new functionality”, only wiping out weird stuff is good. But I have some concerns on the timing for the plan. If 3.0 is simply wiping old stuff out then, why should we wait to next Spring to finish this? Or, once we have it stabilised, why 1 more year of development to get new features? The total gap of 2 years is reeeeeeally long. Can we go faster?
I see the community has the will to make Gtk better, soon, but the problem seems to be that the community doesn’t have resources for this. So, in parallel with the implementation plan for Gtk 3.0, we may think about a organization plans for 3.x or for 2010. Do we want to make Gtk grow faster, better? Is current Gtk+ core team big enough for what we need?
Currently the list of core developers in Gtk+ as you can seen in the web page has 10 members. A goal would be something like this: let’s have 20 developers that deserve been in that list in 2010.
But getting people trained and productive so they deserve getting a core responsibility is hard and slow. Do we want Gtk+ grow healthier, faster, safer, with more quality? Don’t we feel that the current core team members are heroes that can miraclously maintain and grow Gtk+ because they are really good doing their work? Can we help them? Any effort on growing the core team will take a while, so we should take this seriosly soon if we want results in a reasonable schedule.
We have a lot of text labels in Flumotion where we put mid-sentence newlines just so that once in a while the line gets broken and doesn’t push the containing widget out wider than we want it to be.
Obviously this is a bogus way of doing things, but even our resident GTK+ wizard, Johan Dahlin, didn’t have a ready answer for what the right way to do this is. So - how should we do it so that text gets flown correctly without mid-paragraph newlines and without ultra-wide widgets ?
The answer is probably superobvious.
My kids have gotten so used to seeing me work from home that it was comical to hear Lily's interpretation of me working anywhere else. "Work" either means sitting with my computer on my bed with a headset on, or it means an airplane.
Today I broke the mold a little. I had a meeting this morning in downtown Salt Lake with my Utah-based sales team. As I was walking out, I had this conversation with Lily, my three-year old:
Lily: Where are you going, Daddy?I had to explain that I'd be back in a few hours....
Me: I'm just going to work.
Lily: You're going to London?
xaositects writes "Now I know all of you have your 3D glasses from 1985 still, so don them once again to check out these cool 3D images of Mars's Arctic landscape from the Phoenix Lander's stereoscopic imager. There are also a few close-ups of the parts of Phoenix that are in view and a link to more pictures on the Phoenix Image Gallery."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My advisors just told me my grade for my final thesis I handed in two weeks ago: a 1.0 (which is the best possible grade here).
Well, they've been quite clear about this being the likely result before, since the thesis worked out very well, with a publication on a good conference and such. So right now I'm looking forward to continuing this research and doing a PhD degree. Right now, this would be my favorite option, if I manage to get a position at the university.
Just a quick note to let people know that I have put my slides online. They are linked from lgo (in OpenDocument).
I'll provide PDF and HTML versions soon.
I have a problem that a lot more people are having.
I use three "micro-blogging" platforms.
1. Twitter
2. FriendFeed
3. Identi.ca
Each has strengths. FriendFeed can thread a discussion under each mini-post. It works better for me than the discussions on Twitter. Twitter is still where most of the people are, but -- well you know the rest. It's become unreliable. Leave it at that. And while Identi.ca has fewer of the people I care about, it's catching up, and its commitment to be open, and the fact that I can get Evan on the phone and he's easy to work with, well that makes me want to invest in it.
So in my mind, as of July 2008, Twitter is waning, Identi.ca is rising and FriendFeed is useful.
But using three systems presents a problem to which no one knows the solution. When I post on one of these systems, should the other two get the post too, and if so, how?
Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.
But this is temporary, it's not the last word in how this will work. Somewhere in here is nirvana, a system that makes sense, that makes it possible for people who base their work on one system to communicate effortlessly with people who base their work elsewhere. When we reach this nirvana, we will have the federated network of micro-blogging systems. To the extent that we're confused about this, and we are, is the extent that we're not ready yet to say what federation means in micro-blogging.
I want a computer with the following specs to connect to a TV:
Seems like an obvious product, but I haven't found it yet. Anyone have a link? Email me and I'll post an update if I find something.
An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Almost two weeks after the midterm evaluation, and I finally have a mostly functional predictive playback plugin. It can be downloaded from here, and the installation instructions can be found here.
In the Mood is likely full of weird bugs, inconsistencies, and incomprehensible programming decisions. There are a variety of things I would like to do to it, including possibly re-writing the whole thing in C++ to avoid the Python subprocess.Popen stuff. If you have any suggestions of features I should add, or suggestions on how I can do something better, or please let me know. The one thing I cannot do, unfortunately, is reduce the amount of time the processing requires... sorry.
The tenth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium kicked off Wednesday in Canada's capital, just a few blocks from the country's parliament building, in a conference centre in the midst of being torn down. The symposium started with the traditional State of the Kernel address, this year by Matthew Wilcox. Among the dozens of talks and plenaries held the first day was kernel wireless maintainer John Linville's Tux on the Air: the State of Linux Wireless Networking.
On how we blew up the place during the GUADEC cocktails party, I can only say...
Original picture by Mario Gonzalez
From left to right, Edward Hervey, John Palmieri, Lucas Rocha, me. Kudos for the others as well!
An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project (pdf) in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.The researchers neither sought legal review of the project nor ran it past their Institutional Review Board. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has written a legal guide for Tor admins, strongly advises against any sort of network monitoring."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I am starting to get some numbers for those of you interested in GNOME performance, and for those that are considering deployments. Our GNOME server is up to 106 concurrent users. More and more people are coming over each day, and it's interesting to watch the server scale. We have two identical machines, each able to run the entire City. Our total user load should be around 300 concurrent when finished, split between the two servers.
Raw data:
- Looks like it took around 8GB to get 106 users logged in + OS
- Looks like we could get about 300-400 total on this machine without swapping.
- The parent dbus-daemon is the top process 99% of the time.
- The python process for avant-window-navigator is a steady chew on the server.
- 17 users disabled gnome-panel and enabled avant-window-navigator
- Total of all CPUs sits around 10-15% consistently.
- Server is 4 CPU, dual core, 3.66Ghz
- 74 of 106 logins enabled Compiz and 3D effects.
- 15 total users are using NX from low bandwidth remote sites (no 3D for them).
- I can't add .desktop files with this user load, it hammers the server too much
Anyway, things are running well and looking forward to project completion in 30 days.
Bobfrankly1 writes "The FBI, IRS, and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force are helping the US Marshals search for escaped 'Spam King' Edward 'Eddie' Davidson. He apparently jumped in a car with his wife, changed clothes at home, and hasn't been seen since." Update: 07/24 22:20 GMT by T : It seems that Davidson has been found, victim of a murder-suicide which also left two others dead.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I stopped keeping track of the number of people following me on Twitter, I know it was pretty high, but I also know it wasn't a true measure of how many people were paying attention to what I said there.
Some of them, I assume, are people who tried Twitter and for some reason didn't become a regular user. I can tell beause when I post a pointer to a picture on Twitter, somewhere between 100 and 500 people click through. How many people are reading the stuff? I don't know, but it's less than the reported number would suggest.
A new kind of outage started on Twitter last night, it started losing track of the connections between users. I haven't seen this quantified yet, just various posts that indicate there's some kind of problem. I'm sure as the days goes on we'll learn more about it. I started this blog post in part to try to gather information.
I just relased PulseAudio 0.9.11.
It's an awesome release. To learn more about why, read the linked email, and this and maybe this blog story.
Philip will be happy. The author of this article for Linux Magazine UK is full of praise for the YouTube plugin. Good work Philip!
Barence writes "Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing. The six providers — BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse — will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing. Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffic 'filtered' to prevent media files from being downloaded. The ISPs are reportedly reluctant to impose the BPI's preferred 'three strikes and you're out' approach of cutting off users' broadband connections."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anonymous writes "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy. The study, 'Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,' examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's a great (relatively short) podcast on the power of marketing and branding.
"How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps" - Steve Yegge, Google.
I got delayed in Portland until two am night before last, missed my connection in Chicago, finally made it to Ottawa around two the following afternoon. Bob Murphy will be presenting on "Eye Candy for Mobile Devices" here at the Linux Symposium this afternoon at 1500 in the "Rockhopper" room.
My OSCON talk got a couple of good write-ups, at Information Week and on the "Wireless Blog". Evidently my "this is your cellphone and this is your desktop" slides were quite popular. It was really good to hang out with Neary and Pippin and Pia and Stormy and Dirk and the rest of the gang, just not long enough.
Things to do in Ottawa: get some poutine; have dinner at Sweetgrass; maybe do the Centennial Walk again... I'm also looking forward to the Whisky BoF here at the Linux Symposium; we're evidently breaking with tradition this year and having it off-site at some former government nuclear war shelter. Should be strange and interesting.
Starting this past Monday, we've begun a 2-week Moonlight 2.0 Hackathon to try and get as much of the 2.0 API implemented as we can (1.0 is basically done, but could still use some performance optimizations).
I've been reworking our c++ Collection implementation to support the Silverlight 2.0 collections of doubles and Points (Silverlight 1.0 only allowed collections of DependencyObjects) and I'll then move on to updating the c++-side code that used to use generic double and Point arrays to use my new DoubleCollection and PointCollection classes respectively.
I've also taken the liberty to implement some of the additional functionality that Silverlight 2.0 has added to the base Collection class (aka PresentationFrameworkCollection` on the .NET-side of things) like Contains() and IndexOf() (we used to get these 2 for free with my c++ List implementation, but I'm no longer using that as the base) as well as changing the way collection change-notification is done.
Once that is finished, I'll be binding them in managed land.
Meanwhile, Chris Toshok and Rolf have been refactoring the way DependencyProperties get registered since Silverlight 2.0 allows the programmer to create new DependencyObject derivatives and register new DependencyProperty's on those objects.
They'll also be making the type-system per-AppDomain rather than global like it is right now and will be looking into allowing each AppDomain to have multiple Surfaces so that applications like LunarEclipse will be able to work.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Everyone knows the problem that seemingly each project uses its own code style. So here is my solution for that problem:
$ cat ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/c.vim
if filereadable('.project.vim')
source .project.vim
else
set sw=2 sta et
endif
Maybe you had some better ideas already - I'd like to read about them.
My iRiver T60 has died after only 6 months of occasional use. This sucks. But since this is my 3rd MP3 player in ~ 2 years I feel i’m somewhat cursed in my ability to lose/break them. So my question is this: If I go into John Lewis (because it’s easy to take back if when it stops working) on Saturday and buy a shiny shiny iPod shuffle and turn myself into a complete sell-out will it *just* work with Rhythmbox 0.11.5? Will it just work or will I need to find a Mac to activate it or something painful like that?
For the record, the "00:05.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2)" does not work out of the box on Ubuntu 8.04.
Model: "Hewlett-Packard Company Audio device" Vendor: pci 0x10de "nVidia Corporation" Device: pci 0x03f0 SubVendor: pci 0x103c "Hewlett-Packard Company" SubDevice: pci 0x2a61 Revision: 0xa2 Driver: "HDA Intel" Driver Modules: "snd_hda_intel"
Yesterday, I got one of those extra-cheap (and fairly good) HP Pavilion boxes and I run into a problem when I tried to get the sound subsystem to work on Linux. Long stories short, I had to recompile ALSA 1.0.17 by hand with the --with-cards=hda-intel parameter, after which everything started working perfectly.
I wish someone had written this before, so I could have saved a couple of hours trying to realize what was failing.
64-bit computing is as prevalent today as multicore computing. Almost any new processor from Intel or AMD has the AMD long mode extensions, allowing the processor to use 64-bit registers. While 32-bit processors can address 4 gigabytes of RAM, a 64-bit processor can address 16 exabytes, or almost 17.2 billion gigabytes, of RAM. Most 64-bit-capable computers aren't making use of these capabilities, but instead are put to work running 32-bit operating systems, usually because of a lack of applications for 64-bit operating systems, since applications must be recompiled and in some cases rewritten for 64-bit operation. It is possible, however, to run 32-bit Linux binaries natively under 64-bit Linux kernels.
Pippin writes "Memphis Police Director, Larry Godwin, is suing AOL for the names of the authors of the Enforcer 2.0 blog. The blog is rumored to be authored by a Memphis police officer, and is critical of the department, Godwin, and some procedures. Godwin is actually using taxpayer dollars for this and, interestingly, the complaint is sealed".
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is essentially branding publicly available information as confidential. This 'puzzling contradiction' is the 'antithesis of the developer-friendly Apple Developer Connection' on which the iPhone SDK program is based, Yager contends. 'You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court — but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.' Anyone planning to launch an iPhone forum or open source project should have 'a lawyer draft your request for exemption, and make sure that the Apple staffer granting it personally commits to status as authorized to approve exceptions to the iPhone Registered Developer and iPhone SDK Agreements,' Yager warns."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ok, I should kick this out the door. So I mentioned before one of my spare time projects is to take over the SSH experience in GNOME, because there are a lot of things that could be better and it's too important to have it trapped entirely inside a VT100 emulator. HotSSH is the initial execution of that plan. You can see the (new) website for a list of things that are done now.
What's potentially in store for the future?
For now there's no mailing list, so blog comments or personal mail until I get that set up; bugs here. Free desktop vendors, start your packaging engines!
Edit: - The download link since the web page isn't synched quite yet
We’ve been wanting to get a single CD version of Foresight for quite a while. It is certainly also in the top 5 requests I have had, so… now we have one! Foresight Linux 2.0.4 was released today including a GNOME Lite edition that fits on a single CD.
Next up, single liveCD installer :) Any volunteers? /me is looking at Elliot
Grablets writes "Using a link analysis algorithm similar to Google PageRank, researchers at the SANS Institute and SRI International have created a new Internet network defense service that rethinks the way network blacklists are formulated and distributed. The service, called Highly Predictive Blacklisting, exploits the relationships between networks that have been attacked by similar Internet sources as a means for predicting which attack sources are likely to attack which networks in the future. A free experimental version is currently available."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Last updated:
July 25, 2008 06:32 AM
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