An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Orkut. Used it? I did back in 2002, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Jaiku. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Dodgeball. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.
These are just a few of the failures Google has had trying to figure out the social space.
Tomorrow they’ve invited a ton of journalists to see a new social effort. The headline on top of Techmeme screams “Twitter killer.”
Um, I’ve learned in life that past behavior is the best predictor of future results.
So, why is Google going to succeed THIS time when its past experiences into social networking have failed and failed miserably?
I’ve identified a few:
1. This time they built everything in house. All the efforts above were purchased companies that were bolted onto existing infrastructure. This time? Look at the foundational pieces that Google has put in place. Google Profiles lets you enter the social networks you’re on. Check out mine, I’ve told it more already about myself than I’ve told Facebook. Then take a look at Google’s Social Circles. Social Circles is a clue that Google is studying ALL social networks, not just Facebook and Twitter. Some of my friends’ entries there have hundreds of websites and social networks listed there. It’ll be very interesting to see what Google does with those tomorrow. Hopefully a feed like FriendFeed had, along with real time search that’s filterable.
2. Employees on board. In 2006 whenever I talked with a Google employee about social stuff like Twitter or Facebook they’d turn their noses and say something derogatory. “That’s lame,” is what I heard over and over. It was clear that the rank and file Google employee just didn’t think Twitter or Facebook would ever challenge Google in any real way. I haven’t heard that attitude for quite a while now. You just have to look at Compete.com for why.
3. Mobile has made social more important. Look at the average mobile phone ad in the United States. A good percentage of them mention both Twitter and Facebook. Google can’t ignore this fact, especially now that Google is pushing Android on small devices and Chrome OS on bigger ones. Google knows that carriers see social networks as important things to push, so if Google can bring something new and interesting that will get people and brands to even talk about switching from Facebook or Twitter, it will be interesting to watch. Look for Google Contacts to add much better integration with all of the social networks that Google’s Social Circles algorithms are collecting. Yes, Palm got there first, but Palm doesn’t really matter, so look for Google to exploit that fact with really deep integration with contacts.
4. Twitter looks attackable. For the past few months we’ve all been watching Twitter’s engagement, traffic, and new feature releases. So far Twitter just hasn’t stepped up to the plate and lifted the drawbridge off of the moat surrounding their castle. Yes, Twitter is the best place now to find real time news, look at my list of world news brands for a great example of that. It’s also the best place to follow companies in real time, look at Dominic Jones’ list of 499 public companies for a great example of that. But look deeper and you’ll see a limping Twitter. Engagement just hasn’t taken off for a whole lot of reasons (let’s be honest, most people come to Twitter looking for celebrities, but look at Listorious’ list of Twittering celebrities done by Pete Cashmore and you’ll just see mostly lame tweets that don’t hook users much at all). I can see a whole lot of ways to beat Twitter, and if me and others, like Dave Winer can see ways that Twitter is beatable, then so can the engineers at Google.
5. Normal users are hungry. Normal users I talk to have now figured out Facebook. Most have played with Twitter and found it lacking, they tell me, but they are interested in other uses of social networking now. The market is primed for a new service to come along that shows us something new. Will Google deliver that tomorrow? Well, we only have a few hours to wait. But there is a latent unsatisfied interest, especially because Facebook has made its privacy stance confusing with its founder saying that we are in a post privacy world.
6. Location-based services are gathering attention. Well, at least they are being adopted by early adopters and, thanks to deals with TV networks and others, Foursquare, at least, is starting to move out of the early-adopter echo chamber and into the mainstream. Even Yelp has copied Foursquare’s “check in” metaphor and has primed the market for Google to come in and demonstrate some real leadership here. Interesting to note that Google Latitude has largely failed too when compared to the smaller upstarts. Will Google turn around its failures here?
7. Google HAS won in video and done fairly well in blogging. YouTube is a huge adoption success, even if it hasn’t yet made Google much money. That said, most of my friends are noticing that more and more users are coming into YouTube (indeed, even I’ve switched much of my video publishing to my channel there and I’m seeing strong subscriber and engagement growth). While services like Redux or Tweetmeme show you just videos that have been shared on Twitter and Facebook, look for Google to build on this strength.
8. Google has the best email and collaboration suite users. Whenever I speak at a conference of early adopters most people say they are now using Google Mail. That’s huge because these early adopters are the types that are willing to try new things and, better yet, are willing to tell their friends how cool they are. Look at how Google Wave — despite a crappy user interface — became very popular very quickly. Why? Because of this army of early adopters. See, email users are NOT all equal. Next time you are on a plane, look around you. Is the guy who is using Outlook 2003 using anything else that’s bleeding edge? Not very likely. Now look at the Gmail users, they are more likely to have a bleeding edge mobile phone, they are more likely to have a Windows 7 or Macintosh laptop. They are more likely to try things. They are more valuable because of that and is why Yahoo or Microsoft never were really able to capitalize on their hundreds of millions of email customers. Plus, look how Google integrated Docs and Spreadsheets into Gmail. Look for them to do the same thing with their social network efforts. It’ll be nuanced and addictive. If I were Gist or Xobni you bet I’d be worried about what’s coming tomorrow.
Anyway, this is all a long way of me saying that don’t expect Google to keep failing at this social networking thing. Its past behavior is NOT a predictor of what’s coming tomorrow.
Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.
Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.
While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.
“Huh,” he said.
“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”
“It’s a clunk.”
He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)
And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”
I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.
So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.
And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:
Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).
So this whole knee-pluging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.
That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.
The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.
I took a plunger home with me, too.
Steph's MacBook is affectionately known as the FrankenMac. It was built from the parts of 3 other MacBooks. The other night it started going into what seemed like swap death. Turned out to be catastrophic hard disk failure. Also, in what can only be described as a massive oversight, her laptop was not being Time Machined (whoops).
Anyway, after trying and failing to read the disk back using targeted disk mode plus dd_rescue on another Mac, I ended up swapping the disk into my Thinkpad last night and booting an Ubuntu LiveCD, ran dd_rescue and copied the hard disk image to an external hard drive. The filesystem is a little corrupted, and OSX can't read it... but Linux can! [Gotta say, this surprised me.]
I probably could have just booted the Mac itself with a LiveCD, but after targeted disk mode didn't work, I was worried it might be a logic board failure (let's just say Apple and I have a jaded history regarding logic boards). Also, I forgot for a bit that Macs can run Linux.
Since it did just seem to be a bad disk, I went and bought a new hard disk today, and have just successfully gotten the machine reinstalled and running again. The FrankenMac lives again!
So in summary, I am secretly brilliant, and Steph now has a 500GB USB harddisk to use with Time Machine.
P.S. something I forgot. This is for people who write articles for online Apple magazines: just because something is an Apple filesystem, they are still inodes, not iNodes.
P.P.S. I had to laugh, but I also forgot to give kudos to gnome-disk-utility which popped up a dialog during my dd_rescue, something like "One of your hard disks may be failing". Let's just say OS X loses here, being an OS that can't tell the difference between disk failure and filesystem failure.
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.
This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.
I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.
They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).
I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.
So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.
When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).
What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?
The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:
Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers
Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.
This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.
I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…
In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we'll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn't seem to be trying to solve them.
Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here's a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don't have on my list. It's always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.
So here's the list of must-have features:
1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night's SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter's installed base is, it won't matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.
2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn't enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?
3. Open architecture metadata. Let developers throw any data onto a status message, giving it a name and a type, and let everyone else sort it out. It would result in an explosion of creativity.
4. Relationships with hardware vendors. I still want a one-click Twitter camera. If I can't have it from Twitter, I'll take it from Google.
5. No 140-character limit. I debated this one with myself. At first I compromised and said okay let's have a 250-character limit, or a 500-character limit. But I really don't want a limit. If I want to write short status messages, no problemmo. We've already made the cultural transition. We know how to do it. But sometimes a thought just can't be expressed in 140 characters. No one is wise enough to know what the limit is, so let's just not have one.
6. No URL-shorteners. I've explained this so many times. They're stupid and ugly and they hurt the web. I like it when developers take the time to craft their URLs so they make sense to users. That's all the shortening we really need and all we should have.
Those are some of my wish-list items. It seems likely Google will offer #1 and #2. Very unlikely they'll do #3 (they don't trust developers any more than Apple does). Probably not #4, though it would be easy to get some people from Kodak and Sony to come on stage with them. #5 would take a teeny bit of guts. It's a perfect way to throw some serious confusion at Twitter. I'd recommend going all the way, but if they can't, go to 500-characters. Get some editors and authors on stage to say how nice it would be. Because they're making a commitment to their own URL-shortener it seems unlikely they would outlaw them on their status network, but one can hope.
I usually don't subscribe to the idea that new products aimed at the user base of an established product are "killers" -- but it's been a long time since we've seen a product as ripe for killing as Twitter. (Lotus 1-2-3 was probably the last great example.)
The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out. Sooner or later one of their competitors is going to test that theory, and I'm pretty sure it'll prove incorrect. And where they include horrendous features that a competitor might leave out (I'm thinking of URL-shortening) they don't seem to feel any pressure to take it out. Yet almost every user would enjoy a Twitter with real full URLs that didn't take up any of the 140-character space. Hard to imagine anyone objecting.
OTOH, Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don't trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that's another thing. It'll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won't get killed, because Google's product will likely fall far-short of what's needed to get us all to think they can be trusted.
The usual disclaimers apply. This is all tea-leave-reading, I have no actual information, and I'm usually way wrong with these prognostications, but it's still good to share the thought process. 
Update #1: A commenter named Scott says: "If people were posting dissertations, I'd be much less likely to read." Tom Caswell says: "How about a 'more' button you could set in the preferences? I would set mine at 140 characters for old times sake." Even better, it could default to 140 for old times sake.
Update #2: Cesar Razuri: "also, make hashtags some sort of meta data in our tweets that doesn't add to character length" Good idea.
Update #3: Scoble weighs in. Even though Google's past efforts at social media have failed, he thinks this time they have a good chance of succeeding.
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I hope a few people wondered why my blog looked a little bit neglected in the past few months. Well finally I can say that I have been busy with several larger projects I was not supposed to talk about. For two projects I am involved in there are related press releases from our customers and business partners.
One project is the Linux port to the Höft & Wessel skeye.pos mobile – I really like the press release because it mentions the fact the supplied devices are running Linux and what the devices are used for. The filesystem on these devices is built with OpenEmbedded and is based on an older Angström release.
The other big project is closely related to both my job for kernel concepts and OpenEmbedded which is one of my favourite open source projects. The µCross distribution will support chip- and device vendors who are going to ship Linux-based solutions. The main idea is to combine the power OpenEmbedded and its large community with a good portion simplicity and a few additions. I do not want to mention too many boring details here so I will just introduce the basic concept: The idea is to offer customers binary packages matching their target architecture, matching toolchains and tools for assembling and configuring filesystem images for their devices.
There is not really an offical announcement yet but one of our business partners just announced a nice SBC module which will come with a µCross-based SDK. The TK71 is a QSeven format module powered by a Marvell 88F6281 SoC (Sheeva core based).
A third project that gained some love is the updated Linux port to the Toshiba Topas910 and TopasA900 boards. I am trying to maintain an upstream compatible and up to date Linux port to these devices here – for the people who do not want to use several year old kernels or this strange Aura stuff. The latest achievement is that I got some patches to make NAND flash work which is vital for the TopasA900 because its small NOR flash can’t keep a decent filesystem image with GUI.
Ok now I’m done with showing off and I should return to do something useful… such as writing a short report about FOSDEM!
There’s quality control for you. This is the latest entries in the Entertainment category on iTunes.
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML)"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Following Libcaca 0.99beta17 release (including plenty of new stuff like dirty rectangle framework, troff output, php and java bindings, triangle texture mapping), I uploaded today the first package of neercs into Mandriva Cooker.
Using the power of my new laptop I also captured a video demonstrating process grabbing (ogv, Youtube), and one showing the cube effect (ogv, Youtube).
Process grabbing still only works under Linux x86/x86_64 so help to port it to *BSD, OSX, Windows, Hurd and other Linux architectures is welcome.
neercs is still experimental so actually all tests and bug reports are welcome (patches too of course)
I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point.
We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support the features. We really like Ember, so we decided that holding back the features until this pro forma update went through was prudent. We’re still waiting.
This has made me think about all the ways the app store process sucks and how little we get back in return. The argument I keep hearing for why this terrible process is worth it is quality control. Here’s a breakdown of each argument:
We’re paying for the inconvenience of quality control without the quality part. In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.
Contrast this with OS X and the web. Both platforms are much more open and on a mac you have very little trouble with stability or malware or even quality. In general, the market is pretty good at sorting this stuff out. If you make a crappy application, people don’t buy or recommend it. And OS X seems to be holding up well as a secure platform compared to, say, Windows, so malware isn’t much of a concern either.
What I think Apple should do instead is to reserve the power to nuke apps that prove troublesome. Have a “if you fuck it up, we’ll yank it” policy rather than a “we’ll review everything poorly and slowly and still not catch it all” policy. They’d be able to get by with a much smaller App Store clerk staff, developers would be thrilled to escape the needless gate keeping, and consumers would enjoy more applications updated more frequently.
What’s there to loose except for the feeling of powah?
MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Had to approve a email message to foundation-list. Noticed a spam message in the queue from WebEx. Already knew that company, but apparently it is (now?) owned by Cisco. Anyway, there is no excuse for sending this to foundation-list.
The email ends with a sad:
This email may be an advertisement or solicitation. If you do not wish to receive marketing messages from WebEx, please select this link for removal.
Wonder what other solutions like WebEx exists. This as the company I work for unfortunately is a customer of WebEx. 
An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.
Edited a GNOME Journal article. Check out the latest issue with its multimedia focus!
Published the GNOME Q4 2009 Quarterly Report! Thanks to all the teams that wrote things up - we have some great write-ups about some awesome work.
Submitted the GNOME Google Adwords account for approval. I was bummed when the automated response says it could take up to three months to get approval. However, it was approved within a few days! We've been running ads for Friends of GNOME and Women's Outreach for the past week or so. I've played with the keywords and ads some and gotten some feedback from the marketing list as well. Anyone with experience with Google Adwords would be appreciated!
Conversations with several board members about how things are going for the Board and how things are running with the GNOME Foundation.
Many one on one conversations with GNOME Advisory Board members. These were mostly brief chats 20-30 minutes about how things were going for them and how we could best work together. Discussed things like hackfests and GUADEC as well.
Friends of GNOME update for December 2009 and January 2010. We had a stellar 2009! In 2009, Friends of GNOME raised $29,578 for GNOME! That is the same amount raised by 3 large companies. From community contributions. It's enough for several hackfests and close to the amount needed annually for a part time system administrator. In December we raised $2,663, more than any other December. Spread the word!
Sent thank you's to people who donated money to GNOME. Sent a few postcards out for the Adopt a Hacker program. Sent on addresses to others who also owe thank you postcards.
GNOME Jobs. Heard about several GNOME jobs and asked people to post them on the GNOME Jobs board.
Had 1:1 meeting with Rosanna. Still working with her to try to get her workload balanced.
GNOME Board of Directors meeting.
Pinged a lot of people about a lot of things. Including GUADEC sponsorships.
Checked on getting a Euro account for the GNOME Foundation. Found one option that is good for large amounts but has excessive wire fees for small amounts.
Attended the Women in Free Software IRC meeting.
Attended a "Benchmarking Women Leadership" event put on by the White House Project. I was expecting more data about the new report but instead I met a lot of interesting people that may be able to help with contacts for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.
Started planning a "Meet the Funders" event with other free software projects. We'll invite people from Foundations and other funders to learn more about free software projects.
This week:
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word "deserve". But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I spent a little time this weekend doing one of the things I've wanted to do for years - eradicate one of the oldest files in Banshee: banshee-dialogs.glade.
The vast majority of Banshee's UI is custom widgetry that is laid out dynamically at runtime. The main window and the preferences dialog hasn't been restricted by Glade for a couple of years, but all the other dialogs were defined in part in Glade:
These were all fairly simple dialogs in Glade -- mostly consisting of a table, some static labels, and placeholders to pack in custom widgets at runtime (e.g. the import source combo box in the Import Media dialog, or the actual query builder UI packed in the Smart Playlist Editor dialog).
Old Banshee Glade Dialogs
These are now fully defined in code, allowing the dialogs to derive directly from BansheeDialog, which provides extra common functionality for dialogs on top of Gtk.Dialog.
The big take-away here is no longer depending on the deprecated libglade/glade-sharp libraries (well, almost -- later this week Gabriel will port Muinshee -- an alternative Banshee client in the image of Muine, but not a core component). Additionally, I removed our dependency on libgnome/gnome-sharp, which is also deprecated.
This means that Banshee 1.5.4 will be GNOME 3.0 ready. The last thing to do is implement a udev hardware backend. We already have partial DeviceKit support, and GIO support. However, we don't take a hard dependency on HAL. The removal of the last Glade file represents the eradication of any hard obsolete GNOME 2.0 dependencies. Exciting!
As a quick aside: what was really nice about the porting from Glade to C# was the use of C# 3.0 features - specifically type inference and object initializers. This permits interface construction using a more terse syntax than available in C# 2.0, yielding improved readability and organization. For instance:
var table = new Table (2, 2, false) {
RowSpacing = 12,
ColumnSpacing = 6
};
table.Attach (new Label () {
Text = Catalog.GetString ("Station _Type:"),
UseUnderline = true,
Xalign = 0.0f
}, 0, 1, 0, 1, AttachOptions.Fill, AttachOptions.Shrink, 0, 0);
Bring it on, GNOME 3.0. We are ready!
A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
GJdeBoer writes "The book is aimed at people who are managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it's not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, and it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti." Read on for the rest of GJdeBoer's review.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sometimes you are coding a template and you need to refer to the same method chain over and over. For example, you’re coding a template that summarizes activity on recent messages. You iterate through a block of messages, and for each message you want to display some information pertaining to the last comment. You could do it like this:
<div class="active_messages">
<% @active_messages.each do |message| %>
<h1><%= message.title %></h1>
<div class="latest_comment">
<div class="avatar">
<%= avatar_for(message.comments.last.creator) %>
</div>
Latest comment <%= time_ago_in_words(message.comments.last.created_at) %> ago by <%= message.comments.last.creator.full_name %>
</div>
<% end %>
</div>
Everything inside of div.latest_comment deals with the exact same comment, but we have to use a method chain to get the comment each time (message.comments.last).
One solution is to set a local variable inside the iterating block with the knowledge that the variable will be reset after each iteration:
<div class="active_messages">
<% @active_messages.each do |message| %>
<h1><%= message.title %></h1>
<% comment = message.comments.last %>
<div class="latest_comment">
<div class="avatar">
<%= avatar_for(comment.creator) %>
</div>
Latest comment <%= time_ago_in_words(comment.created_at) %> ago by <%= comment.creator.full_name %>
</div>
<% end %>
</div>
One on hand, this is better because the methods called on `comment` are easier to scan. The whole div.latest_comment is more readable without the repeated method chain. On the other hand, setting a local variable is bad style. The local variable assignment creates state without explicitly showing where that state applies. It feels a little too PHP for my taste.
A better approach is to use the `tap` method to scope a variable to a block:
<div class="active_messages">
<% @active_messages.each do |message| %>
<h1><%= message.title %></h1>
<div class="latest_comment">
<% message.comments.last.tap do |comment| %>
<div class="avatar">
<%= avatar_for(comment.creator) %>
</div>
Latest comment <%= time_ago_in_words(comment.created_at) %> ago by <%= comment.creator.full_name %>
<% end %>
</div>
<% end %>
</div>
The `tap` block shows exactly where the scope of the assignment starts and ends. I like how the template explicitly says “now we are going to deal with a comment in the following section, and this is the comment we are working with.”
I just hit on this pattern today while working on a feature and I think it’ll come in handy in the future.
Luciana was munching on sausage slices. She grabbed the curved end of one sausage, looked carefully at it, and exclaimed, "look, a little vault!".
I guess that's what she learns in this house.
With the oh-so-dreaded Hallmark holiday on the horizon we are flooded with tips and tricks (mostly designed to sell us things our mates cannot live without) of how to please/capture/sedate the ones we care for. One writer even suggests ways to capture the interest of a geeky girl. That said, what are some of the crazier romantically inspired, geeky V-day stunts or activities that you or someone you know has executed to terrible success or failure?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What doesn’t this stuff do? Lather up and this naturally gentle, richly foaming, pure and soothing nourishing cleanser will synergistically refresh, harmonize, replenish, protect and restore balance with cool soothing botanicals.
Kinda ridiculous, isn’t it? Reading this should remind you to read your own site, your own marketing copy, your own definitions.
What claims are you making? Do you really believe them? What are you saying? Does it make any sense? How are you describing your product? Is it accurate or just a sea of adjectives that look good and sound good together? What story are you telling or selling? Whatever it turns out to be, are you really OK with it? Deep down inside, is it something you’re proud of?
Recently there was much gnashing of teeth as SourceForge (who shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) started programmatically blocking users in certain countries to comply with US export restrictions. Thankfully they didn't let it end there and have found a way to put the power back in the hands of the users. "Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we've ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month's change."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When debating UI, a picture is better than a description. And a functional mockup is better than both. But debating UI without being able to look at something is a waste of time.
The latest build of the Kynetx Rule Language (KRL) provides a significant upgrade in capability with the addition of functions. We've also added some new array operators that take advantage of functions to make using arrays easier.
KRL supports functions as first-class objects in the expression language. KRL supports only anonymous functions, but they can be given names by binding them to a variable in a declaration. Here's an example:
pre {
add5 = function(x) {
x + 5
};
}
Functions are evaluated statically (e.g. the environment they are defined in, not the environment they are executed in determines the binding of free-variables) and can be recursive. Here's an example of a recursive function in KRL:
pre {
fact = function(n) {
(n <= 0) => 1
| n * fact(n-1)
}
}
Functions are declared using the keyword function and contain optional declarations followed by a single expression that returns the result of the function when executed. To see this,
consider the following example which uses Newton's method to calculate square roots (taken from Section 1.1.8 of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs):
sqrt = function(x) {
average = function(x,y) { (x + y) / 2 };
good_enough = function(guess, x) {
v = (guess * guess) - x;
v < 0.01 && v > -0.01
};
improve = function(guess, x) {
average(guess, (x / guess))
}
sqrt_iter = function(guess, x) {
good_enough(guess, x) => guess
| sqrt_iter(improve(guess,x), x)
};
sqrt_iter(1.0, x)
}
Functions can return functions as values and functions can be passed as the arguments to other functions and operators in KRL. The following example defined a generalized summation function that sums the numbers from a to b incrementing using inc and applying the function f to each term:
sum = function(f, a, next, b) {
(a > b) => 0
| f(a) + sum(f, next(a), inc, b)
};
inc = function(x) { x + 1 };
cube = function(x) { x * x * x };
sum_cubes = function(a, b) {
sum(cube, a, inc, b)
}
We could define a function that creates incrementor functions. When given a number, it returns a function that increments by that value:
inc_generator = function(n) { function(x){ x + n } };
inc = inc_generator(1);
inc_by_2 = inc_generator(2);
inc_by_25 = inc_generator(25);
Being able to write functions adds significant power. More so with some of the other languages changes we have in mind for the next few months.
Weve also added several new array operators in recent builds. Most notably, array references now work as follows:
a = [1,4,3,6,5]; b = a[1]
This would bind the value 4 to the variable b. Note that array references only work for arrays of one-dimension, so c[1][2] is not allowed (presuming c is an array of arrays).
In addition, there are a number of new operators available for arrays.
The following array operators are now available (in addition to length which has been previously available):
sort - sorts the array. With no argument, sorting is done in ascending order. The argument "reverse" causes sorting to happen in descending order. The argument can also be a function that takes two argument and returns a boolean value which will be used as the comparison function for the sort. filter - filters an array, producing a new array. The operator takes a function argument that takes a single parameter and returns a boolean value. The return array contains elements for which the function returns true. map - modfies an array from mapping a function to each member of the array. The operator takes a function argument that takes a single parameter and returns any value. The array returned from map is the result of applying the function to each member of the original array in turn, collecting the results into a new array.head - returns the first element of an array without modifying the array.tail - returns an array that is identical to the orginal array except without the first member. You could use these like so:
pre {
f = function(x) { x < 4 };
g = function(y) { y * 2 };
a = [1,4,3,6,5];
b = a.sort(); // returns [1,3,4,5,6]
c = a.filter(f); // returns [1,3]
d = a.head(); // d has the value 1
e = a.map(g); // e has the value [2,8,6,12,10]
}
Operators are fairly easy to add and handy to have, so if you have ideas for other operators, on arrays, strings, and so on, just let us know.
Tags:
SpuriousLogic writes "Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being 'mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights' even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google's Nexus One a couple of days ago."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "Zero-day vulnerabilities have become prized possessions to attackers and defenders alike. As the recent China-Google attack demonstrated, they are the basis on which most of the successful attacks are crafted these days. There is an underground market growing around these vulnerabilities, but there are also 'white markets' — set up by VeriSign, TippingPoint, Google — where they buy zero-day flaws and alert the companies so that they can patch their products before the vulnerabilities can be taken advantage of."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Barence writes "Mozilla is ready to exorcise support for Mac OS X 10.4 from Firefox's development code, closing the door on Apple's aging OS. The foundation stopped supporting 10.4, codenamed Tiger, in September 2009, but, according to Josh Aas, a Mozilla platform engineer, "we left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision." We had come to a point where we need to make a final decision and either restore 10.4 support or remove this (large) amount of 10.4 specific code," he notes on the Mozilla developer planning forum."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Barence writes "Mozilla is ready to exorcise support for Mac OS X 10.4 from Firefox's development code, closing the door on Apple's aging OS. The foundation stopped supporting 10.4, codenamed Tiger, in September 2009, but, according to Josh Aas, a Mozilla platform engineer, "we left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision." We had come to a point where we need to make a final decision and either restore 10.4 support or remove this (large) amount of 10.4 specific code," he notes on the Mozilla developer planning forum."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gwmaw writes "The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad on Monday on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station. The 4:14 a.m. EST (0914 GMT) blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center shattered the predawn tranquility with a deafening roar and a brilliant tower of flames that momentarily turned the dark Florida sky as bright as day." HD video of launch attached.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes "A new Google domain — 1e400.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name — is now the net's 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Washington Post updates a story we discussed last spring about a push in the Democratic-controlled congress to legalize some forms of Internet gambling in the US. "Partly bankrolled by offshore gambling companies, the campaign has already persuaded the Obama administration to delay enforcement of a 2006 law cracking down on Internet wagers. ... The federal government, which rarely prosecutes online gambling, would net billions of dollars in tax and licensing revenue if it were legalized, proponents say. ... The outlook on Capitol Hill, however, is uncertain given a slate of unfinished business... [and] nervousness among Democrats about November midterm challenges. ... [A politically conservative poker player said] 'There's a part of the party that always believes this isn't something people should do. But I think it behooves the party to be a little more broad-minded on this issue.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As many of you may have heard, from blogs by Eitan, Mike and Joanie, as well as an e-mail to the gnome-foundation-lists by Fernando, the Gnome a11y community is having a tough time.
I have been interacting with the a11y community for over two years now, and in that time the funding situation has never looked good. I do not wish to insult or demean companies that are no-longer involved in funding Gnome a11y. Companies and individuals have their own priorities that they must follow. Work they have done in the past on Gnome is very much appreciated by me, even if they cannot continue that work in-to the future.
That said, I believe that in the past two and a half years Gnome a11y has lost a huge amount of funding. First from IBM, which, to many peoples dismay, pulled out of a11y funding before I started work on AT-SPI. I was glad to hear that Mozilla is providing $10,000 to the Gnome foundation for a11y work. I’m extremely grateful for that, but I do not believe that Mozilla are providing the level of funding that they have done in the past. Our work on AT-SPI D-Bus has been funded jointly by Codethink, Sun, and another un-named benefactor. None of this funding is likely to continue past the end of February. All of this would seem slight were it not for the news that Oracle have let-go of important Gnome a11y community members working for the Sun Accessibility Project Office. Sun have been the major contributor to Gnome a11y, and this is a worrying signal that Oracle do not intend to continue the current level of contribution.
Assuming that Oracle do not wish to involve themselves in Gnome a11y, my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that we may have lost greater than $200,000 in anual funding over the last three years.
Although huge amounts of Gnome development takes place un-funded, by hackers, volunteers, users and hobbyists you would probably be surprised how much is done by folks working a 9-5. I don’t expect the figures to be the same, but as an example, 75% of kernel developers are paid by corporations for their work. The loss of the Sun Accessibility Project Office and other sources of funding will be felt very heavily by the Gnome a11y community.
Accessibility is incredibly important to the Gnome project, and not only to its users. Gnome has a fantastic, credible, accessibility story. This, to me, marks Gnome out as a class ‘A’ open-source project. Were we to lose this, it would be a turning point. In my eyes Gnome would then be a project in decline.
What can we do?
Firstly we need to go on a cohesive search for funding. The Linux Foundation has an accessibility group that I have been involved in for a long time. This seems to me the best place to combine our efforts in the great funding drive. Funding channeled through the Linux Foundation would not be Gnome specific, but cross desktop a11y technology is what we have long been striving for.
Ideally enough funding would be found to hire someone to work full time on Linux Desktop accessibility.
Outside of the search for cash all Gnome developers need to spend more time on accessibility. Its not always easy to make ones application accessible, and I’m sure it can seem daunting. There are still a11y community members ready to help out though. All is not lost. 
I’m damn near certain that we are going to pull together. Gnome 3.0 will have the same great accessibility that has made me proud of past Gnome releases.
An anonymous reader writes "The licenser of the HDMI specification has announced the intent to 'secure the application of 3D' by making the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 Specification available for public download, as well as extracts from the upcoming HDMI 1.4a. While the spec includes a 3D component, apparently not everyone has decided to sign up to adopt it. Given the developments happening in DisplayPort v1.2, the next year in displays looks like it will be an interesting one."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A brief note of congratulations to the City that Care Forgot.
It's so wonderful that the Saints won the Super Bowl!
This will go down as one of the big moments of sports history, imho.
As the 1969 Mets undid the betrayal of NY fans by the Dodgers, the Saints give hope to a city that was betrayed in so many ways.
From what I know of New Orleans, this victory will be the stuff of legend for a long time to come. It's a city with a great sense of history, and destiny. And humor.
Until 2005 its destiny was to be devastated by a monster hurricane and the failure of the rest of the country to come to its aid.
But tonight begins a new beginning for the Crescent City. From now on this is the city of champions!
Laissez les bon temps rouler!
The TED conference has given me a huge responsibility. They’ve handed me one of a small handful of press badges (as I understand it fewer than 10 are handed out every year). Regular tickets are $6,000 each and the conference was sold out more than a year ago (next year’s TED is already sold out).
They do put a major restraint on the press covering the event: no filming, or recording of sessions. Another restraint? No computers in the main session unless you want to sit in the back row. OK, I can live with that. So I doubt you’ll see a view of TED like I got of Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, in photo above, while he spoke at LeWeb.
But, really, this isn’t an event that generates news (except when last year Bill Gates released a bunch of mosquitos). If you’ve ever watched a TED Talk you’ll know that this isn’t about news, but is about expanding your mind. Coming up with new ideas. Hearing from people who are changing the world and being challenged to do the same with your own life.
In fact, they’ve asked me to not bring my computer or phones to the main sessions and just absorb the TED experience (Chris Anderson, the guy who runs TED, spoke at LeWeb a year ago and walked into the audience and told them all to close their laptops and listen, he really believes that we can’t learn if we’re multi-tasking and paying attention to email). As you might expect I’m thrilled at being asked to do this and I’m even going to report my time at the conference as vacation so that I won’t feel pressured to take care of Rackspace business while I’m there).
But when people invite you to a conference that costs everyone else $6,000 they are laying a huge responsibility to that person.
The question is, what’s the responsibility?
For me, I’m going to try to get as many interviews as I can outside of the main room. That’s one way of delivering value to you. But that’s just the baseline of the kind of responsibility that I’m feeling going into this. Can I step up my game this year? Can I improve the world my children are growing up in? That’s a little closer to the weight I feel through this gift.
Why is this such a big deal? Well, when I was first on musician Peter Himmelman’s show a couple of years ago I told him I try to live every day like a TED conference or a FOO Camp (O’Reilly’s famous conference where they invite a bunch of geeks to camp out over a weekend). I’ve been very fortunate to have had tons of great people in front of my camera lens (my off-the-cuff work is on YouTube, my pro work with Rocky Barbanica as cameraguy and producer is on building43).
That’s why I’m so excited and why I feel a ton of responsibility going into this event and I’ll try to bring you into the event as much as possible.
One thing, watch Chris Anderson’s Twitter account. He runs TED and is an inspiring figure in my life. He and his team has laid a heavy responsibility in front of me. How should I handle it? Here’s the schedule, who would you like me most to interview?
Siri is the most useful thing I’ve seen so far this year.
But after playing with it, getting an interview with its CEO (video here on building43) it’s even more important for you to pay attention to.
It is the best example of what the web will be.
Let’s go back.
Web 1994 was the “get me a domain and a page” era.
Web 2000 was the “make my page(s) interactive and put people on it” era.
Web 2010 is the “get rid of pages and glue APIs and people together” era.
Siri is the best example. First, it’s not a website. It’s an application you put on your phone (today iPhone, soon others like Android and Blackberry). Second, it isn’t a search engine, those are so 1998. It’s a system that assists you in your life.
Why is it so different?
Because on the back end they’ve stitched together a sizeable group of APIs from services like Opentable to Flightstats. With more coming soon.
Before it was common only for a couple of APIs to be joined together, here they have dozens. The system figures out which ones need to be used based on what you’re asking for.
That’s the other thing. You ask it to do stuff like “find me a pizza place near me” or “tell me the weather in Chicago this weekend.” With your voice or by typing commands.
Why is this really new and important? Don’t get confused by the awesome voice recognition engine that figures out your speech and what you want with pretty good accuracy. No, that’s not the really cool thing, although Microsoft and other companies have been working on natural language search for many years now and have been failing to come up with anything as useful as Siri.
No, the real secret sauce and huge impact on the future of the web is in the back end of this thing. A few months back the engineers at Siri gave me a secret look at how they stitch the APIs into the system. They’ve built a GUI that helps them hook up the APIs from, say, a new source like Foursquare, into the language recognition engine.
I just asked Siri “who checked into the Half Moon Bay Ritz?”
Now you and I know that we could look at Foursquare to find that answer, but Siri didn’t know the answer and brought me results from Bing. Very unsatisfying.
But the team now could hook up Foursquare’s APIs and make this question answerable.
Siri has developed a new programming language and GUI for the API web. This is huge, although it’s too bad that it’s so early and so hidden. We can’t help Siri’s developers out (if we could, maybe we could add Foursquare’s APIs tonight) and we can’t think of ways to make systems like Foursquare that would have APIs better designed to talk with a system like Siri’s.
I hope everyone takes a look at the video, it really shows the magic of this system, which is getting a lot of great reviews around the web. Most of the bloggers I’ve seen are slobbering over it, deservedly so.
This is the future of the web. How can we get there faster?
quaith writes "Quinn Dombrowski, a member of the University of Chicago's central IT staff, has been recording the graffiti left in the Joseph Regenstein Library Since September 2007. To date she has photographed and transcribed over 620 pieces of graffiti; over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. She has now published in Inkling Magazine a statistical analysis of the entire graffiti collection covering such subjects as love, hate, despair, sex, anatomy, and temporal fluctuations of each of these. After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring, while sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December before declining for the rest of the school year. The story includes links to all of the original graffiti photos, which the researcher has made freely available to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.
The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.
So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!
The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!
I had a crack at creating some electronic music. I know, not metal. I figured I would share this, and I have never done this before, so be gentle. 
Check out Master Of The Situation in MP3 and Ogg format.
Created in Cubase with Halion One, a KeyRig and Drumkit From Hell.
theodp writes "CNET's hunch that Google might run a Super Bowl ad entitled 'Parisian Love' proved to be well-founded. The ad just ran (did you know that you can search the Internet using Google?), and Apple certainly doesn't have to worry about losing its claim to having produced the best Super Bowl ad ever. In fact, you might want to check out the spoof 'Parisian Love' apparently inspired — 'Is Tiger Feeling Lucky?' — if you want to see a better pitch for Google."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I spent my first full day living in NYC since 1977.
Lots of observations, but I only have time to share one.
In other cities, the places you drive to are places you walk to in Manhattan. There's every kind of restaurant within a block of my apartment. In Palo Alto, you can get it all (but the pizza isn't as good) but you have to drive everywhere unless you live off University Avenue. Same in Berkeley.
And the walking in Manhattan is amazing. It's huge and has so much variety. And everywhere you go the buildings reach the sky. In every other city I've lived in, they might have had a few buildings as tall as the average tall apartment building in NY. And that's even in neighborhoods which aren't known for big buildings.
I live two blocks from the West 4th St subway station. From there you can get to every part of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. One change gets you to everywhere in Queens.
But I spent five hours walking today. I'm wiped, but in a good way.
Now on to the SuperBowl. Of course as a Tulane alum I'm rooting for the Saints!
alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
alphadogg writes "A Chinese man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a US prison this week for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco Systems gear. Yongcai Li, 33, will also have to pay the networking company nearly $800,000 in restitution after being the conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer hardware, the FBI said Friday. Prosecutors said he procured the fake gear in China and then sent it to co-conspirators in the US. His alleged co-conspirators have not been charged. Li was arrested by FBI agents on Jan. 9, 2009, in Las Vegas — while the annual Consumer Electronics Show was taking place there. Two years ago, the FBI claimed to have seized more than $78 million worth of counterfeit equipment in more than 400 seizures."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have been on the road for the last two weeks. Headed back to Seattle tomorrow after a great FOSDEM in Brussels.
While on the road I have heard all sorts of news regarding GNOME accessibility, none of it good. I am angry, I feel like blaming somebody or something, but I am not sure what. Right now I am directing my frustration towards academics who still have funding to continue various assistive technology research that will probably never see the light of day as a usable application while the real bread and butter of an accessible platform is being taken away. It’s reflexive, I know it. Maybe later I will have a clearer picture of how we move forward.
Until then, here are some notes from Joanie and Mike.
While my initial reaction was what a damper this is on our first a11y hackfest, I really hope that it will be an opportunity to regroup, have some good discussions, interact with the wider a11y community, and have some business interactions. So please come to San Diego, you know who you are!
Curlsman informs us that the first beta of Ruby on Rails 3.0 has been released (release notes here). Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson blogged that RoR 3.0 "feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand." This release is the first the Merb team has participated in. Merb is a model-view-controller framework written in Ruby, and they joined the RoR development effort over a year ago. Reader Curlsman asks, "So, is version 3 of RoR going to be a big deal, more of the same (good or bad), or just churning technology?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hugh Pickens writes "US government policy is that photos produced by federal employees as part of their job responsibilities are not subject to copyright in the US. But Kathy Gill writes that after originally putting official White House photos in the public domain, since January the Obama White House has been asserting that no one but 'news organizations' can use its Flickr photos taken by the official White House photographer, who is a US government employee. This change appears to be a heavy-handed response to last month's controversy resulting from a billboard that implied the President endorsed The Weatherproof Garmet Co. after the company used an AP photo of the president for a Times Square billboard. However a New York law already protects individuals from unauthorized use of their image for advertising, and the billboard was quickly taken down. Gill writes, 'Whatever the reason, the assertion of these "rights" seems to be in direct contrast to official government policy and is certainly in direct contrast to reasonable expectations by the public, given that the photos are being produced with taxpayer (i.e., public) money. Ironically, the same Flickr page that claims (almost exclusive) copyright also links to the US copyright policy statement.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I had a wonderful experience this past week, one that everyone should have, and which I'm convinced everyone could have (and certainly one that everyone deserves). I announced a new job, and in the process discovered that I'm not alone. That people actually care about me.
It was exhilarating…and bewildering.
All day Friday, congratulations hit my Twitter account (mjasay). I got dozens of emails, too, and 50+ comments on my CNET blog where I announced the change. It was overwhelming, because I (perhaps like you) normally assume that no one is that interested in me.
Of perhaps greatest significance to me, my close friend and former boss, John Powell, wrote a public thank you for my service to Alfresco. It made me cry. Each time I read it. Here was a man that I love and respect dearly showing me profound respect, even as I left his company.
You can't buy friends like that. If you could, I would have tried, as I often feel alone.
Not that this is peculiar to me. I suspect that Facebook, with its 300 million members, is ample proof of this. Even as technology has made it easier to connect we're perhaps growing increasingly distant from each other.
But this isn't what we want. We want to stay in touch. We want to feel a connection to others. We don't want to be alone.
And we're not. My job change experience confirms it. If people can care about me, they can care about anyone.
Growing up, I assumed that everyone else was having fun, and didn't want to involve me. I still feel that way much of the time, which is what makes my family so comforting to me: I know that Jen, Scout, Isaac, and Greta all want to see me, and care about me.
As for Lily, well, let's just say she's willing to acknowledge that I'm her dad, but only from a distance. :-)
I keep discovering, however, that whenever I leave my shell long enough to reach out to someone else, they were waiting for someone to recognize them, too, and want to be with them. I think we're all like that: pathetically, pathologically incapable of realizing just how much we matter to other people.
Not because we're famous. Not because we're rich. Not because we're anything other than…ourselves.
Life is good, because people are good. Even me. Friday confirmed that. Thank you.
When a web application needs to display many items, e.g. search results or large lists of records, it is often desirable to chunk the total list of items into equal-sized pages for easy navigation. This process is called pagination. Alternative techniques like continuous scrolling might also be worth considering, but this blog article is just about pagination.
If multiple pages of results are available, navigation links should be displayed on the output pages so that users can browse to other result pages. The list of links is what I call a pagination control. A pagination control could look something like this, where each item is a link to the corresponding page.
previous 1 … 5 6 [7] 8 9 … 15 next
In my examples the active page is shown in square brackets. I also set the display width to 9 (see below). For all examples the total number of pages is assumed to be 15, unless stated otherwise.
Controls like these are quite intuitive to use, and many websites (e.g. search engines) use pagination controls similar to this one, with subtle differences in their implementations. For example, some have ‘first’ and ‘last’ links, some don’t. There are many other choices to make.
Implementing pagination controls like the above seems trivial at first sight, but there are a few corner cases to consider, and it takes some thinking to get all cases right.
In my implementation, I assume a fixed number of links, so that the resulting output is always has more or less the same size, which I find very useful since the control would look roughly the same on all pages. I use the term display width to denote this value. In the example above the display width is set to 9. The gaps (shown with an ellipsis) are also considered, since those take roughly the same space as the links to the pages. (Optional ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links are not counted.)
A small exception to the fixed display width is that if there are less pages than the display width of the control, the complete list of pages is shown. For example, if there are only 8 pages in total, it looks like this:
previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 [7] 8 next
Note that the display width should be set to an uneven number to ensure a nicely balanced output. (For even display widths, the algorithm favours showing one extra link after the active page, since if a user is making its way through many pages, it is much more likely the user navigates in forward order.)
The control should always show the active, first and last pages, which make for three items in the list. In the remaining space, the control should show as as much context around the current page as space (defined by the display width) permits.
Gaps within the range of page numbers should be easy to spot to make it clear there are more pages available than the visible links. Gaps should be avoided if possible, so when the active page is close to the first or the last page, the control should try to align the numbers so that only one side of the control has a gap. The example below should clarify this:
[1] 2 3 4 5 6 7 … 15 1 [2] 3 4 5 6 7 … 15 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 … 15 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 7 … 15 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 … 15 1 … 4 5 [6] 7 8 … 15 1 … 5 6 [7] 8 9 … 15 1 … 6 7 [8] 9 10 … 15 1 … 7 8 [9] 10 11 … 15 1 … 8 9 [10] 11 12 … 15 1 … 9 10 [11] 12 13 14 15 1 … 9 10 11 [12] 13 14 15 1 … 9 10 11 12 [13] 14 15 1 … 9 10 11 12 13 [14] 15 1 … 9 10 11 12 13 14 [15]
So, given these requirements, how to decide which links to show in the pagination control? The problem at hand is defined by three variables: the display width, the total number of pages, and of course the active page.
I wrote an algorithm that (as far as I can see) satisfies all constraints expressed above for all display widths of at least 7, since a display width of less than 7 items does not make any sense — the reason why is left as an exercise to the reader. (Hint: pagination controls are designed for navigating to other pages.) A quite clean Python implementation, which I hereby put in the public domain, can be obtained here:
Download pagination.py
Just run the script to see some example output. Porting this code to other languages should be trivial. Rendering nice XHTML out of the resulting list of numbers is very application-specific and hence left as an exercise to the reader.
With this approach showing back and forward buttons only if appropriate is trivial. If the current page is larger than 1, a ‘previous’ link should be included. Similarly, if the current page is smaller than the number of pages, a ‘next’ link should be shown. ‘First’ and ‘last’ links should not be rendered, since page 1 and the last page are always included in the output and extra links would not offer the user anything that the other links already offer.
theodp writes "While waiting to see if the iPad is a game-changer, this CS student continues to take class notes with pen and paper while her fellow students embrace netbooks and notebooks. Why? In addition to finding the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in her mind, there's also the problem of keeping up with the professor: '[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.' So, when it comes to education or business, do you take notes on a notepad/netbook, or stick with good old-fashioned handwriting? Got any tips for making the transition, or arguments for staying the course?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
bhagwad writes "Beginning January 28, Paypal has been reversing the payments made to any Indian provider of services. In addition, Indian users have been unable to withdraw their money to their bank accounts. As a result, a large number of Indian Paypal accounts have a negative balances running into the thousands of dollars. The worst part is that users weren't informed beforehand — the funds were just whisked away. Indian providers have gone ballistic, with over 2,000 posts on a thread on the reversal of payments and over 700 posts on this thread about the delay in transfers. Paypal hasn't given any explanation to this behavior other than they're looking into it. Although Paypal claims in the above blog post that payments made for 'Services' are not being reversed, this is not true. All payments not made for 'Goods' with a shipping address have been reversed — in fact, the Paypal e-mail tells the Indian sellers to encourage their clients to lie and claim that they're paying for goods with a shipping address instead."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
skatepark builder writes "David Prowse, the 74-year-old actor who has enjoyed a long and varied career filled with roles such as Darth Vader (Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI), is starting 2010 off with two major accomplishments. His victory over colon cancer earlier this month means he'll live to see his top billing in a film premiering next month at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The People vs. George Lucas is a documentary attempting a balanced examination of the love/hate relationship Star Wars fans have developed with the filmmaker and his work over the past three decades. Director Alexandre Philippe distances his film from the one-sided fan rage films that lambaste Lucas, even though the title would suggest otherwise. According to the trailer, The People vs.George Lucas exposes the full spectrum of opinions on Lucas, including those like Prowse, who still refers to him as a 'master.' Philippe captures these opinions through filmed interviews, but perhaps more interestingly, he crowdsourced the commentary by soliciting fan submissions over the internet. The clips seen in the trailer appear to be funny, highly inspired, and are probably more concise than the recently released 70-minute YouTube evisceration of Episode I."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
David Weinberger asks: "After press conferences, what?"
Imho: A hybrid of newsroom and press conference. And it must be open, unlike newsrooms and press conferences of the past.
A few years ago I wrote about an idea called Hypercamp, a way of distributing ideas and news that I felt would come into existence in what we now call the "rebooted news system."
The idea became real for me at a Microsoft press event at the Palace Hotel in 2005. Ray Ozzie introducing himself as the new CTO. After the event we all went upstairs to a small ballroom where there was all kinds of food and refreshment and a mix of bloggers, developers, reporters and Microsoft execs. The party went on for a couple of hours with people reporting live from the event out through their blogs.
The coolest thing was the collaborative writing that happened, that usually doesn't happen in the blogosphere because we all write holed up in isolated cubbies.
It dawned on me that this was a hybrid press conference and newsroom.
So imho what happens in the rebooted news system are open newsrooms. I'm not talking about virtual (online) newsrooms. A couple in SF, one for tech and another for biotech (different people, different issues). In NYC, you'd have an open newsroom for tech, and one for finance, fashion, perhaps sports. In every geographic center, you'd have one or more such facilities.
The idea developed -- let's put two podiums at either ends of the room with vendors paying to make presentations. There's an EIC for each open newsroom who can also give time to open source projects in all these fields (open source sports and fashion -- interesting).
Big high bandwidth pipes emanate from the room, all kinds of video flow in and out. It's a work place and an event space.
I called these open newsrooms Hypercamp and drew a diagram to illustrate.
I'd love to start one in NYC and/or SF. It has to be operated by someone other than me, I'm strictly editorial. Not good at the logistics involved in putting these things together.
In the age of realtime networked news this is the new CNN, video would flow out of these facilities 24 hours a day. If you have an event to host, you'd pay to put it in the appropriate Hypercamp.
Last updated:
February 09, 2010 06:31 AM
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