Yesterday was spent doing a company event (climbing trees in ‘el bosc vertical’) - I had to rub my eyes when I got on the bus to see the bus close to full, some 45 people leaving from the World Trade Center. We’ve come a long way.

I had a flight booked on Saturday morning leaving at 8:00 AM in a vain attempt to get to Christophe’s wedding on time. I wasn’t able to arrange for transportation getting off the plane (Kristien ‘working’ at the radio and other friends not going to the service) so I took the early flight for no good reason at all in the end.

There was also a birthday party last night, with food starting at 22:00 and, in Spanish tradition, with 30+ people attending, at least an hour between the ‘last coffee’ and ’standing outside’ moment - which was at 1.30

Does one cut his losses at 1.30 AM for a 6:40 AM wake up or just keep going ? I went with the latter and joined the group in going out, which, in Spanish tradition, involved people proposing various places, going to a few, and settling on something that actually has room in the area of some place we actually wanted to go but didn’t have room. We shook the booty until 4:45 AM - I wanted to give myself at least one full sleep cycle.

Woke up into a coma, dragged myself out of the house, kept myself awake with loud music in the taxi and in the waiting area, and continuously dozed off and woke up again when my head fell on the plane.

With the plane arriving 20 minutes early, I was able to get on the regional bus - without having to wait for it, and leaving just as I had gotten on - that leaves just outside the airport, takes 55 minutes to go to my house where it has a stop exactly in front of it. A rare trip where all elements align to make it a swift one, even if the conditions were less than ideal.

So, today’s best moment ? Figuring out for a second if there’s any way I can prolong my comatose state and attempt at dozing, setting my alarm to 40 minutes into the future, and then sprawling myself across the backseat, with The National on headphones, dozing off with the rumble of the engines, sunkissed by an October morning sun filtered into warming specks by the dirt on a window that went unwashed for a month.

Comfortably numb.

October 11, 2008 02:21 PM

• Occult Symbolism pages:
  • Part I (Egyptian symbolism: Mythology, Pyramid, All-seeing Eye, Obelisk)
  • Part II (Astrology)
  • Part III (Stars)
  • Part IV (Cross, Fasces, Arrows, Death, Satanism, Alchemy, Bell)
  • Part V (Masonic symbolism)
  • Part VI (Circle symbolism: Circle, Intertwined circles, Infinity, Energy spiral)
  • Part VII (Deities)
  • Part VIII (Colors)
  • Part IX (Alphabets: Runic, Ogham)
  • Part X (Animals)
  • Part XI (Plants)
  • Part XII (Sexuality)

Important note: The symbols on these pages are not intrinsically sinister by themselves. Much of the symbols are beautiful examples of applied geometry or elements of nature, and have cultural origins that are probably much older and more benign/spiritual than their prominent masonic usage by some organizations today.

However, it is clear some people want to associate those various symbols with their secret and subversive societies. Those societies use occult symbolism as a secret language of carefully hidden knowledge, and to hide their relations and agenda. Some (many?) societies may not be fully aware of the real esoteric meaning of the symbolism, since that often requires in depth knowledge of a lot of different topics: nature observations (astronomy, cataclysms, life cycles, human consciousness), early civilizations (mythology, shamanism, art), technological/political/religious history, etc.

So discovering the usage of these symbols does demand further research into:

• The occurrence of these symbols (and their variations) throughout time and space.
• The meaning(s) of these symbols throughout time and space.
• The organizations that utilize/utilized these symbols, and their possible masonic history, relations and agenda.

See also:

• Occult etymology
• Geometry and numerology
• Plasma cosmos

October 11, 2008 02:01 PM

"To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes: APIs can stay impenetrable longer than your schedule can stay acceptable." -- Knowing Java is not knowing much

October 11, 2008 01:46 PM

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.10.0.tar.gz

Differences with latest stable series (0.8.7) are quite interesting, you can see them all at the Poppler 0.9 Releases list of http://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html.

As a summary it includes:
* Initial JavaScript support
* JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Some crash fixes
* Better support of malformed files
* Some rendering improvements

So you should be all using Poppler 0.10 now to get a better PDF experience ;-)

October 11, 2008 01:41 PM

This is the part two of the post series discussing the status of the Openmoko community. The discussion is split in three posts to make it easier to read. The first post discussed the status of the community and the third will discuss one of the possible solutions to improve communication.

In this second part we will discuss the expectations people have for the software or simply what people want Openmoko to do.

What people want.. People always want something.. In this case there are not much people can demand Openmoko does. Openmoko has their own plans for the future and if they see that they can use community for something, I hope they’ll do it. If not then.. that’s life. But here are some expectations the community members have on Openmoko.

The comments without the e-mail addresses are from community mailing list, the rest from the comments of my previous post. Remember, these are only parts from the messages so please check the original posts for more details!

vasco.nevoa@sapo.pt <vasco.nevoa@xxxxxxx>     Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 6:42 PM
And for god’s sake, AUDIO must work as intended by default (it IS a phone after all). Only after OM guarantees these minimum requirements can it ask the community to go ahead and innovate…  Don’t waste your time on GUIs or eye-candy apps; give us a device with a rock solid subsystem and a command shell, and we will fill in the blanks and build from there.

t m <ttb.1001@xxxxxx>     Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 9:12 PM
So instead of bringing us everything, bring us less, but stable. That said, I still have confidence in the team and I’m sure we will see something amazing in the (hopefully) near future.

Hire <hiretto@xxxxxx>      Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 7:00 PM
For me the solution is “simple”: improve fso, paroli, tichy and say “goodbye qtopia”. The actual stack, om2008.* sux. I find it absolutely not functional.

Instead, it will be cool to see SHR on freerunner because merged the power of new framework with the old stack ( 2007.4 ) that seems to be almost stable.

t m <ttb.1001@xxxxxx>     Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:45 PM
Would be nice to have one basic image with a focus on these issues. Even if it slowed down development. I guess developers also need a phone, don’t they?

Steve Mosher <steve@xxxxxx>     Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 12:19 AM
That’s not the Goal of 2008.x The design philosophy is to create something clean and simple and then let end users clutter it up to their hearts content

I measure success in terms of profitability. At the current volumes and the current cost of operations we are where we need to be. ramping to grandma volume is a careful process that does not happen overnight.

We actually like the fact that there are competing distros. The one unique thing we offer is the freedom to choose your distro and choose your carrier

Having several (forked) distros around is okay if the fork developers really want to take a completely new direction. If the devels feel a need to fork because it’s in one way or another difficult to contribute (no SVN access or something), then I think there’s something wrong in the community and project management. I don’t know what’s the case in Openmoko. From what I know, FDOM was created to add all the community applications to the original Openmoko 2008.x so it seems to make sense though I don’t know if it has to be a distro and not a add-on package or install script to 2008.x but that was not the topic of this post…

October 7, 2008 at 7:47 am / mwester
Well said. Openmoko sold a vision, and found an eager audience.

Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to have any idea what to do with that shared vision — as a result, the community gradually dispersed and fragmented.

But all is not lost, by any means. As long as people complain about the situation, there is hope — they still care. Openmoko needs to look very closely at the data that only *they* can see:

Openmoko — how many are subscribed to your email lists? How many of them are active (i.e. have sent an email in the past 6 months)? Now, how many phones did you sell, Openmoko?

Openmoko — where are those thousands of missing phones? Are they in desk drawers? Cardboard shoe boxes in closets? Dust bins? More importantly, where are those thousands of potential contributors, potential ambassadors, your in-the-field sales force for selling both the vision and the phones?

The hardware and software problems are trivial in comparison to the loss of the community mindshare — and ultimately that goes beyond a vision and goes to the bottom line. Openmoko had better hire a community manager, not for the community’s sake (although we’d certainly welcome such a person), but for their own business survival.

Mwester said it better than I was able to. I might not be quite that pessimistic but I think that the community would be able to do more than it currently does if properly managed and empowered. This includes both developers and users, there’s no reason to make a division here!

Next post will discuss one of the possible solutions to the communication problem.

NOTE: The quoted texts are copyrighted by the original authors and therefore not covered by the licence this blog uses!

Tags: community, freerunner, opensource, planet-openmoko, software

October 11, 2008 01:37 PM

John Battelle has a blog post entitled When Doesn't It Pay To Pay Attention To Search Quality? which contains the following statement and screenshot

the top result is the best result - and it's a paid link.

In the past I've talked about Google's strategy tax which is the conflict between increasing the relevance of their search results and increasing the relevance of their search ads. The more relevant Google's "organic" results are the less likely users are to click on their ads which means the less money the company makes. This effectively puts a cap on how good Google's search quality can get especially given the company's obsessive measurements of every small change they make to get the most bang for the buck.

When I first wrote about this, the conclusion from some quarters was that this inherent conflict of interest would eventually be Google's undoing since there were search innovations that they would either be slow to adopt or put on the back burner so as not to harm their cash cow. However John Battelle's post puts another spin on the issue. As long as people find what they want it doesn't matter if the result is "organic" or an ad.

As Jeremy Zawodny noted in his post The Truth about Web Navigation 

Oh, here's a bonus tip: normal people can't tell the difference between AdSense style ads and all the other links on most web sites. And almost the same number don't know what "sponsored results" on the Search Results Page are either. It's just a page of links to them. They click the ones that look like they'll get them what they want. It's that simple.

even more interesting is the comment by Marshall Kirkpatrick in response to Jeremy's post

The part of your post about AdWords reminds me of a survey I read awhile ago. Some tiny percentage of users were able to tell the difference between paid and natural search results, then once away from the computer almost all of them when asked said that the best ways to make it clear would be: putting paid links in a colored box, putting them in a different section of the page and putting the words "sponsored links" near them!! lol

What this means in practice is that the relevance of Google's ads in relation to the search term will increase in comparison to the relevance of the organic search results for that term. John Battelle has shown one example of this in his blog post. Over time this trend will get more pronounced. The problem for Google's competitors is that this doesn't necessarily mean that their search experience will get worse over time since their ad relevance will likely make up for any deficiencies in their organic results (at least for commercial queries – where the money is). What competitors will have to learn to exploit is Google's tendency to push users to Adwords results by making their organic results satisfactory instead of great.  

For example, consider the following search results page which my wife just got while looking for an acupuncturist in Bellevue, Washington

The interesting thing about the organic results is that it is relevant but very cluttered thus leading to the paradox of choice. On the other hand, the sponsored links give you a name and a description of the person's qualifications in their first result. Which result do you think my wife clicked?

Now why do you think Google ended up going with this format for commercial/business-based search results?  The average Web user is a satisficer and will look for the clearest and simplest result which is in the ads. However the geeks and power users (i.e. people who don't click on ads) are often maximizers when it comes to search results and are thus served by the organic results.

The question for you is whether you'd consider this a weakness or a strength of Google Search?

Now Playing: Missy Elliott - Hit Em Wit Da Hee (remix) (feat. Lil Kim & Mocha)

October 11, 2008 01:32 PM

…It’s just easy as creating a Tomboy folder inside Dropbox’s Shares and do a local synchronization!

October 11, 2008 01:13 PM

Today, I have just pushed a patch that enables Growl support for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey (Growl runs on Mac OS X). Now when you get new mail, you can get Growl alerts like:

A big thank you goes to David Humphrey who supplied the patch.

There are some known bugs with the implementation and we welcome any help in resolving those.

Note for IMAP users: it seems that if you have a folder selected for offline use, then new mail notifications are not occurring as they should do.

October 11, 2008 01:00 PM

Just a reminder,  the Boston Summit is being held in the Sloan Building E51 (if you are at E52 it is right across the street on Wadsworth).  The some of the doors are locked but there is an unlocked door next to it so try them all.  Go in and take the elevator to the third floor.  The rooms are 315, 325, 335, 345.  We are printing posters right now to make it a bit easier to find.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

October 11, 2008 12:49 PM

To the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform project group, could you start looking at Eclipse plugin sets like the BugLabs in-development BitBake editor plugins? Yes, I do have my inquiry into get a hold of the plugins to try out and so I can begin a discussion with them to ask if they would consider donating that to Eclipse. They have not released it as public yet. Blog post with their screenshots are here.

October 11, 2008 12:12 PM

Yesterday I attended a lecture by professor D.J. Bernstein, best known for his products like qmail, owner of one of the coolest domain names in the world and for his often controversial but always interesting visions.

His talk focused on why the majority of internet traffic still is not encrypted. We protect our email passwords but the 95% of other things we do is completely unprotected from a sniffer. He then narrowed it down to DNS. The problems with DNSSEC are evident and it's still a question of whether it will ever be implemented (after 15 years the design is still in flux, let alone that it's properly implemented or actually used).

On a more constructive side he presented his own solution: DNSCurve: using elliptic curve cryptography to not only sign but also encrypt DNS traffic, and do so on the fly rather than the cumbersome precomputation approach of DNSSEC. Bernstein shows that the extra cost of on the fly cryptography is, even for root servers, very minor compared to the costs of the entire system, but it does significantly reduce the administrative burden compared to DNSSEC. As usual he has made an interesting case, a worthwhile read.

October 11, 2008 11:24 AM

Finally the new NVidia drivers (178.80) went gold, and they are impressive :)They perform extremly well over a broad range of RENDER operations and they don't seem to have any performance weaks the pipeline hits (except subpixel AA text on GF7 and below).One bug which affects TexturePaints shows up in some Java2Demo's, but I guess this small problem should be fixed soon.Furthermo ...

October 11, 2008 11:03 AM

Its been slightly more than 24 hours since I upgraded to the upcoming “bleeding edge” Intrepid Ibex edition of Ubuntu!

The Good:

• I am extremely happy about the Network Manager working flawlessly for me (until now ) even on a WPA2 system which I had troubles before.
• My WIFI LED is back indicating wireless connectivity and activity
• Love the New Human Theme. I rarely used any of the default Ubuntu themes but I like this one very much. Check screenshot here.
• The games that I play have got some major upgrades.
• Pidgin has undergone some cool development. One must use it to see and feel it
• Its a great feeling when you are using the latest and greatest of the Free Software world.
• Flickr uploader now allows me to add to groups and also set Privacy. That is cool!
• Lots more…

Bad:

• I have already seen quite a few bugs which could be annoying for most people. Like this firefox bug, this terminator bug.
• Still having troubles playing flash videos on Firefox. Either there is no sound or firefox crashes randomly while playing.
• The media Keys provided on the front of my wonderful M1210 Dell XPS laptop no more works. Which means I have to go to the volume control menu and pull it down using the mouse. Already reported the issue in Launchpad.
• Minor issues which randomly pop up now and then mostly related to firefox.

The Ugly:

• My Laptop fails to boot sometimes and hangs during loading of the iwl3945 driver. Really sucks that I have to hard power off and then again boot and then it boots. It seems a known bug but still very annoying!!!

October 11, 2008 10:32 AM

While I’m building-up my mental engines in Cao Chang Di (Cultural Industries) in Beijing, I received an invitation to speak at Gnome’s first Asia conference, aptly titled, Gnome.Asia in Beijing. I’m going to take a crack and speak about something I haven’t been directly been involved in hacking, promoting or developing, but have been using massively which is what I’m just calling Autonomo.us Open Software Services, particularly micro-blogging on Identi.ca. I want to zoom out a bit from Creative Commons licensing, Open Source hacking and postulate where computing culture is heading, and how FLOSS developers can surge ahead by looking beyond Gnome 3.0, Gnome Online Desktop, etc. The presentation is called “The Autonomo.us Open Software Services Evolution, featuring Identi.ca” and I start the statement with:

Who provides your e-mail service? Where do you post your photos? Do you download music still? When all of our data is spread amongst multiple devices between multiple locations – home, office, and mobile – then it becomes clear why on-line network services rule supreme over managing personal computers in providing synchronized capable services that don’t require us to update software or hack-in fixes. The modern person’s primary concern in using a computer is to get things done and stay connected with others globally in the most effective ways possible.

And continues…

This presentation looks at the landscape of services like Identi.ca which are adapting the Free and Open Source Software approach to on-line network services publicly championed from the Autonomo.us blog. This is timely because the personal computing shift from the desktop to the web is a hot topic with the Gnome Online Desktop and Gnome 3.0 initiatives. However, with long development cycles, arduous community learning curves and reliance upon cranky software languages, the simple accessible nature of web application development is thriving. This presentation instigates increased development on web services that protect user autonomy by commonly using the GNU Affero GPL 3.0 software license, creating free services to replace popular non-free alternatives, and by replacing centralized services with open distributed ones when possible. This presentation emphasizes the role of the Gnome Desktop to be a lean mean on-line desktop machine and what role Chinese businesses can play in accelerating this next dynamic wave of the FLOSS movement.

The complete description and location details are at the Gnome.Asia site. My presentation is at 3 PM next Saturday, October 18 in Beijing. I posted it up on my wiki with some basic research to get the talk together. If there is anything missing, or research I should jump into please do add to it.

Right now there are very few services committed to the Franklin Street Declaration and I want to use some brain power to investigate what services might be easily converted, services that should be created, with rankings for priority and level of difficulty for replacement. Identi.ca is mind blowing example of openness at its best. So, how can I help push this plan forward more?

I’m thinking a lot right now about my moves in both contemporary culture, art and technology. And, I want to most definitely keep pushing on the FLOSS side of things, but keep in mind the larger picture, cultural priorities, as well as personal priorities Yes, we all have those!

October 11, 2008 10:21 AM

SHR stands for 'Stable Hybrid Release' and is a community based distribution. It was created because the community liked 'Om 2007.2' more than 'Om 2008.2'. The 'Om 2007.2' had stable software, that did not crash that often. In the same period, FSO was hitting the road. It tripled the available distribution from 1 to 3. So some of the community wanted to build a hybrid release. They wanted the base of 'Om 2008.8', add the stable software of 'Om 2007.2' and port it to the handy framework of FSO. So a hybrid release that would combine the best of three.

But things has changed. Porting the 'Om 2007.2' applications to the framework is harder than just writing new applications. Also supporting absolute software, isn't that easy. And thirdly it's always more fun to write your own applications. So SHR will now combine the best of two. They will release images based on 'Om 2008.*' with the handy framework of FSO and make their own application that will be using the framework.

That's all history, what's new?
SHR has made his first image. Now you can taste what SHR will be. You can flash it onto your Neo FreeRunner. Also good news for the Neo 1973 holders, because there are also images for them. You can find all the images here

Install SHR

• Download the kernel and the file system image.
• Download Neotool and use it for flashing kernel and file system

SHR review
General

• The icons of the home-screen are to small
• The top bar is to small and almost not accessible without a stylus
• Nice background copy from the FSO distribution
  

Sms

• I can receive sms's, they will popup on front of everything
  
• The messages that I get don't appear in the inbox of the 'Messages' application
• I can't send sms's. That's because there's no application for sending sms's.

Phone

• Cannot call someone, because the 'Dialer' applications fails.
• Other people can call me and I can choose to answer, but the sound isn't working. So other people don't hear me and I don't hear them.

Conclusion
So the first images are hitting the road, but there are still many things to do. But for the first image, I'm even surprised it even starts. (And It feels like it starts faster than all the other images) So if you're interested into diving into the FSO framework and want to help the community in making a frontend, this is your chance.

October 11, 2008 10:15 AM

Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner, has an just published an interesting article noting the resurgence of interest in Smalltalk. He says that developers owe a tremendous debt to Smalltalk but the language itself has been relegated to a small niche of technology elites for several years now. He reasons that this was because it introduced so many new concepts that the developer community is only now coming to appreciate.

He suggests a number of catalysts for the sudden revival of Smalltalk:

• Open source Smalltalks encouraging less vendor lock-in.
• An understanding of the importance of Smalltalk to the designers of Python and Ruby.
• And of course, the excitement that Seaside has sparked.

Read the article for more details, and some very interesting comments.

      

October 11, 2008 10:08 AM

• OPEN WORLD FORUM Première conférence sur les machines ultra-portables à Paris le 1 et 2 décembre 2008 (tags: netbook)

October 11, 2008 10:02 AM

I wrote a post about my FBTrace Console extension a few months ago and as it turned out that the console is actually quite useful for exploring how Firebug works internally, it's part of the Firebug's code base now.

This new feature is integrated in Firebug 1.3X (still in alpha phase), where X means: the version with tracing enabled.

The primary purpose of the console is to display a list of tracing messages coming from Firebug as it runs. It's often tough to debug a debugger by another debugger and so, having the possibility to inspect logs is often really invaluable.

Notice that tracing-console is *not* the same as Firebug's Console panel. Console panel is intended to be used by web applications developers, while tracing console is for Firebug (or Firebug extension) developers.

So, move on if you want to see how it works...

(more...)

Bookmark to:

October 11, 2008 09:50 AM

As always, I’m a week late on this post. Shaastra, our annual techfest wrapped up on the 5th of October. This last week has been terribly hectic with all of our teachers catching up on lost time.

We handled three distinct “events”, namely a mini-FOSS conference, a HackFest, and of course the VC with Guido van Rossum. Looking back, we probably could have handled things better, but as a first attempt, I think we fared rather well. This is a retrospection of the event, in the hope that it will help others find out something that helped and a lot of things that didn’t.

FOSS Conference

Our motto for the FOSS events was to transform the passive user to an active contirbutor.

Talk 1: FOSS Foundry

Shreyas and I gave a talk, “FOSS Foundry”, that was aimed at teaching the audience how to approach developing or as Shreyas puts it, “scratching your itch”, and the various obstacles one faces along the way and how to tackle them. The talk was very ambitious, and modeled along the lines of AfC’s “User to Hacker in 90 minutes” that he gave at foss.in/2007. In that talk, Shreyas was AfC’s aide, and I was to play a similar role during this talk.  Unfortunately, there were a huge number of technical snags, ranging from projectors to failing internet connections, so the full awesomeness of Shreyas’ talk was compromised.  Shreyas being a very dynamic and entertaining chap still managed to pull it together and entertain the audience.

Slides

Talk 2: Luser to Superuser

Kapil Hari Paranjape gave a talk on a very similar set of topics as Shreyas’, only more oriented perhaps to packaging issues, etc. (Kapil is the 2nd Indian Debian Developer). Kapil’s wide experience with computing, and giving talks really showed, and his presentation was huge success.

Slides (I haven’t gotten them yet. I will put them up here once I do)

Talk 3: An Introduction to KDE development

The next day, Akarsh Simha gave a talk on how to get into KDE development. The talk was slightly delayed due to issues with a preceeding sponsor talk. Our sponsors, NetApp, were very generous to sponsor us, and it was heartening to see that the speaker himself (Kartik something) is a contributor to GCC. The focus of their talk was very centered around the technical contributions of NetApp (which were actually pretty impressive). Akarsh’s talk again was plagued by techincal issues, but luckily an ssh -X through my system saved the day (my laptop got a lot of air time through out the FOSS events. Apparently it was the only linux laptop that the projectors liked).

Slides

Talk 4: The FreeSmartPhone.org framework

The final talk, and definitely my favourite, was given by Sudarshan (Sup3rkiddo), on the FreeSmartphone.Org stack that he worked on during the summer. He showed off the simplicity of using python + dbus to control the phone. Later, during a one-on-one session with him (actually a two-on-one, Kirtika joined me in bugging Sudarshan), he taught me a lot of interesting aspects about sysfs and the “netlink” socket (which is a socket for kernel events).

Slides

Except for the technical snags, I was happy with the talks. While I would have loved hardcore techincal talks like Sudarshan’s, the aim of the conference was to convert as many users into hacker wannabes as possible. Judging by the number of “repeat customers”, and the number of people who had a good chat with the speakers after the talk, I think we achieved this goal.

HackFest

The hackfest was definitely the ambitious thing we’ve ever tried. While Akarsh had attended a KDE.in hackathon, I had never done anything like it. The closest I had ever gotten was one or two sleepless nights spent hacking along side Akarsh during foss.in and before the GSoC Bangalore meetup. Those were great times, but the scale of it was incomparable with those of the Shaastra hackfest.

I had naively assumed that the people coming would be able to immediately jump onto a project and start hacking. I also had foolishly assumed that the turnout would be restricted to 20-odd people. I had accordingly prepared a presentation outlining some “low lying fruit” to attempt, and planned for a highly interactive session with everyone, guiding them into contributing. I had trustingly thought that all the systems would work. I was so very wrong.

More than 50 people had turned up, many of which had never even used linux before. We had no filtering mechanism in place, and almost every single system utterly failed. For the better part of an hour, utter pandamonium ensued. We couldn’t make any head way until some groups decided to leave. Shreyas advised us to segregate the participants into two groups, one for complete novices, and another for those more proficient at programming. We tried to help the former category through makefiles. For the latter category, we started with a brief introduction to version control, and I began to walk them through Tomboy code. I regret choosing Tomboy as a hackable, because a lot of people saw the fact that it’s in C# as a mental barrier. I couldn’t think of anything else at the time though.

The second day was a lot more comfortable, with a much reduced, but very enthusiastic crowd. Akarsh gave a nice session on including DBus support into Mcabber, a terminal chat client (that I incidentally introduced to Akarsh). I continued my Tomboy sessions, and then broke away and fixed a bug or two in my program (Vimjuta).

Guido’s VC

Despite the success of the dry run, it seemed that someteing *had* to go wrong… Skype would transmit video, but audio would work. And the funky VC equipment we had would transmit audio, but video was broken. After about 15 minutes spent in vain, we just decided to make it an audioconference. I did manage to throw together a quick picture slideshow of Guido’s pictures :-P. The conversation between our moderator (Shankar Balachandran, a professor of the CSE department here at IITM) and Guido was very candid. We covered a lot of interesting topics. And of course we touched upon which editor he uses. Emacs.  *But* he did mention that he recommends vim to everyone and that emacs is saturated. He left off saying (paraphrased):

“Just go and do something you’ve never done before; something random and something you think you’ll never need in the future”

The Group + Organizational Structure

Officially, we just had 5 members working on the mash of events, with a very hazy line drawn between “coordinators” and “volunteers”. The five members were, Akarsh Simha (KDE, emacs-as-notepad user, core hax0r), Sanjeev Sripathi (responsible for contacting all the guest speakers, and keeping the adminsistrative hassle off our heads), Vikram S.V. (adminsistrative handler, and Debian point man), Kirtika Ruchandani (the always helpful extra hand) and last and I hope not the least, myself (GNOME dude, vimmr). Like any open source project, the work load was distributed on a volunteer basis, and this at times did cause delays when real life decided to rear it’s ugly head.

The Community

We got such great help from other GSoC students, project leads, and other members in the Indian FOSS scene (notably Pradeepto Bhatacharya, Arun Raghavan and Shreyas Srinivasan), without which we really wouldn’t have been capable of pulling the events off.. In many ways, I have to thank Google for their SoC program, because I got to know so many people through those hectic months, and the GSoC students who had come (Santhosh Vattam, Madhusdan, Sudharshan) really supported us. So to all of you, thank you! I tried to organize a hackfest around Tomboy, and was really grateful for Sandy’s help and encouragement. Sadly nothing came out of the hackfest, but atleast we tried.

At the end of this awefully long monologue, my only regret during the entire event was not having actually made a patch. I’ve been so guilty of not managing time well enough to hack on my SoC project, or anything on my growing wishlist.  We touched the topic of a lot of SoC projects being “completed”, but not complete and not usable. I don’t want my project to go down that road. I have exams this week, but I promise Vimjuta-2.0 will release next weekend (17th - 19th)

* Slides+Source for the GNOME Hackables here
** Akarsh’s blog post on the same topic here

      

October 11, 2008 09:36 AM

If a Republican tells you this race is about character, bring up this point.

In 2007, John McCain made $405,409. That's his own income, separate from Cindy McCain's millions. She filed separately.

Of that $405,409, $23,157 came from Social Security benefits. Here's a link to USA today that breaks it down.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-04-18-mccain-taxes_n.htm">
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-04-18-mccain-taxes_n.htm">http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-04-18-mccain-taxes_n.htm

A man who earned $31,771 a MONTH thought that wasn't enough and accepted another $1,933 a month in Social Security funds.

You and I are paying into Social Security while being told it will run out of money before we reach retirement age. People who will NEED this money and who have paid in all their working lives, won't have it. John McCain, whose personal income, not including his wife's millions, was 3, 4, or even 5 times the household income for a middle class family last year, takes it when he has no true need for it.

If John McCain loses the presidential race and retires at the end of 2008, he'd be entitled to a yearly pension of $132,160 in 2009.

Need proof? Here's the
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">Senate's public information page on pensions.

Now, the idea that senators don't pay into Social Security is false. They voted away that privelege under Reagan back in 1983 and started paying in at the start of 1984.

But the cap in 2007 was that you only pay in on the first $97,500 of taxable income. McCain likely paid in $6,045 in Social Security taxes on his Senate salary, but then collected $23,177 in Social Security benefits for a net profit of $17,132.

In high-school civics class, I was taught that Social Security was supposed to be a safety net, security in rough times. When you're making $31,771 a MONTH, you're pretty secure. How much more secure is $1,933 a month going to make you?

Even though giving up his $1,933 a month (or net of $1427.67 when you count what he paid in) wouldn't save Social Security, you'd think that while he was still earning 3 or 4 times the income of many middle-class families, John McCain would forego it as a matter of principle. He doesn't need it and the system is in trouble. It would be the patriotic thing to do.

Instead, John McCain, the self-proclaimed enemy of pork, pigs out on taxpayer dollars he doesn't need just because they're there for the taking; making sure they won't be there for the hard-working Americans who will need them in the future.

I can only assume Obama doesn't bring this up because he fears any mention of Social Security in a negative context will cause older voters to have a knee-jerk reaction and vote for McCain out of fear.

But someone has to bring this up. Republicans love to moan about "entitlement programs" and McCain's acting pretty entitled.

If the McCain campaign wants to make this race a matter of character, then this is a side of McCain's character that needs to be exposed. Why, when the Social Security system is in trouble and he's doing just dandy in his own right even without his wife's millions, is John McCain taking tax money he doesn't need out of Social Security and putting it in his own pocket?

The next time a Republican brings up character, you can be glad they did, because you can ask them to defend McCain taking tax money he doesn't need and putting it in his own pocket. Ask them about McCain's personal pork.

After learning about that, the only way I can use the word "character" in reference to McCain is when I say: "McCain... what a character."

October 11, 2008 08:27 AM

After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer.

In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least!

Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet...

I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware.

After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this.

Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!

October 11, 2008 07:50 AM

For those of you following the Firefox/Gecko platform development, or for those interested in helping out, this is a call for participation. If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty a bit and would like to help the Firefox accessibility team, now would be a good time to get involved!

The problem: The code that calculates the names for any created accessibles has been growing over time and became largely unmaintainable. New features suich as adding the aria-label property support requires code duplication for HTML and XUL, and in general the code has many stylish un-niceties.

So, our team has started a code cleanup and code refactoring series to get the code into better shape and maintainability.

As with any refactor, the result should be identical in output with what we started out from. However, as those of you familiar with software development know, the risk of regressions is there and should not be discounted.

While we do have test cases for many of these instances already, there may still be cases we’ve missed. So any help we get from the community will help make sure that the refactor goes smoothly, but also help fill in any possible gaps in our testcases.

So, how can you help? By downloading and installing the latest nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 for Windows or Linux, and testing the heck out of them. Use your favorite screen reader, use your familiar web sites, use it for day-to-day surfing. Obviously the most likely pages you’ll find differences on, if any, will be those pages you visit frequently, sites you know what the output should be.

If you find something that is different from what you know, you can download the last Windows or last Linux build before the refactor, unzip it into a separate folder, and compare your findings using that build.

If you find differences you did not expect to find, you have two main choices that will get the developer team’s attention:

1. File a bug in Bugzilla:
   • Component: Disability Access APIs
   • Version: Trunk
   • Platform: PC or whichever you use
   • OS: Windows or Linux, depending on where you found the bug.
2. Post a message on the mozilla.dev.accessibility newsgroup (Google Groups mirror).

In any case, your bug report should contain the URL of the page you are experiencing the difference with, the expected output of the element, and the output you’re now getting. Also, is that element a graphic, link, heading, form field etc.? Also, you should mention what screen reader you’re using. If posting to the newsgroups, it will also help to mention the operating system.

How to update the nightly builds to pick up latest code changes: The builtin Check for Updates feature, if invoked from a nightly build, will always grab an update to the latest nightly build and install it for you. So, you only need to download and go through the installation process once. You can then daily check for updates and get the latest code that way.

The first build to see changes will be the October 11 build, build ID 1.9b2pre/20081011.

Working with different profiles: If you don’t want to put your regular profile into the hands of the Firefox nightly builds, you can start Firefox.exe or the ./firefox executable with the -p option to bring up Profile Manager. You can then create a new profile and start Firefox with that profile. That way, your Firefox 3.0.x profile won’t be touched by the 3.1 nightlies if you choose not to. I’ve found, however, that the nightlies are very stable already, and I often flip back and forth between 3.0.x and 3.1 builds on the same profile without problems. The one thing that most certainly would happen is that some extensions may not work in 3.1 yet.

I’d like to thank all of you in advance who decide to participate in this effort and help everyone who relies on Firefox accessibility by testing out the code refactor. You can make a real difference because we obviously can’t test all of the web pages out there, and yours may just be the one we might miss out on.

October 11, 2008 07:49 AM

Keep Movin’, keep celebrating, keep working for your mother land, AAGAY BARHO…

October 11, 2008 07:31 AM

Two years ago Orna and I embarked on one of the great projects of our lives.

Two years later, it is going splendidly.

Happy birthday, Yael, my little princess. You fill our lives with joy, every single day.

October 11, 2008 06:56 AM

Assume the following code: public void foo() { C c = new C(); bar(c.baz); // assume that baz does not reference c } I was under the impression that HotSpot would not garbage collect c before the local variable went out of scope although it is legally allowed [...]

October 11, 2008 06:16 AM

I’ve got a Blackberry 8320. Its used more for checking email, IM, and twitter/identi.ca than actual calling. If it crashed and burned, I wouldn’t really care that much. But…it would be  nice to back up just in case. Barry is the open source solution out there and now the folks who made the PocketMac sync app are coming out with a Linux version. Of course, why they are calling it “PocketMac for Blackberry (Linux Edition)” is beyond me. If you are interested in beta testing the Linux version, go register.

Somehow I missed that Linus Torvalds is now blogging. He says its supposed to be a family blog and there isn’t much on it yet, but I hope to see some of his legendary commentary, like what he thinks of the OpenBSD crowd and the Intel e1000e hardware designer. You can read more of his choice words at Wikiquote.

October 11, 2008 06:06 AM

It has been a great two weeks out here in the office.  I've gotten to see a lot of people face to face and had some useful meetings about my projects.  I just kicked off another round of massive data loads to run over the weekend while I'm out of pocket. Hopefully they will run smoothly and deliver me high quality data.

There are some really exciting things coming up this quarter:

• I'll be working on one of the largest data sets yet, our AMO data.  We have several really cool mechanisms for visualizing individual extension projects hosted on AMO. The developer has control over whether to make the statistics public or not.  As an example, you can take a look at the statistics for Adblock Plus.  I'll be working on ways to be able to integrate data across projects so we can get a better understanding of the extension community that means so very much to Mozilla.
  
• I'll hopefully be blogging a little more about the complexities of processing the large amount of data that I have to crunch through.
• I'll be making several pieces of my Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle for those of you in the know) ETL scripts available in an open source repository.  It will help with the blogging, they might be useful to other people doing similar things, and who knows, maybe some people will even have suggestions for improvements!
• Later in the quarter, I'll be working on an exciting new project to take some of the aggregated data that Mozilla has, such as the number of downloads of Firefox for given time periods, and making it available publicly for the community to explore and visualize.  At the moment, I'm leaning toward trying to use the Many-Eyes project from IBM AlphaWorks.  If anyone has any better ideas, please let me know.
  

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October 11, 2008 05:56 AM

In Mark’s eighth roundup of HTML 5 land, he delves into the merging of Web Forms 2, which gives us fun things like: input type=”email” input type=”url” inpu type=”number” input type=”range” input type=”date” input type=”time” input type=”datetime” input type=”week” input type=”month” Then Mark discusses input type=”search”: Andy Lyttle wants to standardize one particular feature of <input type=”search”> (which is already supported by Safari, but not standardized): [...]

October 11, 2008 05:43 AM

Yesterday I was reading a book by Paco Underhill regarding buying trends at malls and retail stores (more on that in a separate post). And, I was wondering when was the last time I went out and ‘bought’ software. Some brain_cpu cycles later it struck me that the last piece of software that I purchased was this one, since the preloaded version that I got saddled with had come unstuck. This was after I had bought Red Hat Linux from FreeOS.

A strange sensation really. I use and consume software or, software as a service, on a daily basis. And, if one discounts the OS pre-loading on the cell phone, I have not actually gone ahead and bought software for around 10 years now. I do my bit for various FOSS projects, chip in with money to a select few or nudge-push-poke some projects to become better. But, living a decade and functioning fully without having to commercially purchase software is something that is totally jaw droppingly awesome. The software development model of FOSS and the collective collaboration that it spawns makes it possible.

And, then we wonder, why is it difficult for more people to really ‘get it’.

October 11, 2008 05:11 AM

As you may know the next series of ooffice (OpenOffice) is due out October 13th as outlined in their RoadMap. However, that date is typically the date where it is widely avaliable to everyone. I am actually quite please to annouce, you can actually find it NOW from most external mirrors Listed Right Here and Right Now.