Let's Push Things Forward

My employer, Collabora was very generous and bought N900s for the entire company!

Mine just arrived:


I was lucky enough to pick one up at the Maemo Summit in October as well. However, those have to be sent back to Nokia in a few months, so now I won't have to dread the deadline :)

In related news, I'm (slowly) working on a handy Maemo 5 app of my own. More details as soon as it's usable (and uploaded to Maemo Extras [Devel]).

Next week(end), I'll be co-presenting the Maemo 5 Address Book with Mathias Hasselmann

The entire Address Book team has put a lot of effort into this new release, and it really shows. It's very feature-ful, fast, and well integrated into the rest of the system. I think we're all proud of how it's turned out.

No shiny screenshots or screencasts here -- you'll have to come to the talk! :)

It'll be on Saturday, Oct. 10th at 18:00 in the "N900" room. Our talk will be followed up by drinks in the same room, so why not grab a seat early? ;)

To everyone I said "sorry, I can't tell you" in the last year or so, please believe that it was really hard!

...because this is what I had to not talk about:



And it's got a big list of nice features:

• Packed with Open Source Software (including Telepathy, GStreamer, and GTK+)
  
• Unlocked by default!
  
• Very nice 800x480, 3.5" screen
  
• Flash 9.4 support
  
• 32 GB of storage
  
• 5 MP camera with dual flash
  
• Fast (A)GPS
  
• Multiple, customizable desktops
  
• Mozilla-based browser
  
• Very slick UI with plenty of bling to go around
  
• Does both charging and data transfer over a standard micro-USB cable
  
• Oh, and it makes phone calls and SMSes :)
  
• Lots more!

I just can't wait until it's released :)

My last run on the dependency upgrade treadmill ended with me dist-upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. I'd been avoiding the upgrade because I'd read that the performance of Intel video cards (which I have) was terrible and there didn't seem to be a fix in place yet.

Sadly, there isn't a fix in place, and as far as I can tell, there won't be for the lifetime of 9.04. With the number of Linux users with Intel video cards, I can't believe this wasn't a release-blocking bug.

Anyway, there does seem to be a manual work-around. I followed steps A-C, and performance is back to good. Eg, I can again watch 720p flash full-screen (1920x1600 on my i965).


Back in 8.10, performance would usually gets a *little* sluggish with my usual assortment of programs running (probably something like 40 windows from 20 programs spread over 9 desktops). Given that it's an integrated card (displaying on a large external monitor), I was impressed that it could handle this load. I haven't been in this new package setup long enough to know for sure, but I'm holding out hope that it may be even faster than before (which is supposedly why pieces of X were rearchitected, causing this snafu in the first place).

I got to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Saturday night, so I didn't see Richard Stallman's talk. From what I heard, the Free Software portion was fairly good, but I heard several people recall his Saint Ignucius segment about how some women in the audience were "EMACS virgins" and should be introduced to it, etc. Lefty described it well in his own post, so I won't go into that detail.

Of course, Stallman's satire immediately reminded me of the FLOSSPOLS reports, which reference an earlier study showing that women were only 1.8% of participants in open source in 2005. I think things have improved slightly since then, but not nearly as much as I would have hoped.

While what he said didn't seem to be overtly sexist, it certainly creates a more hostile and uninviting environment for women in our projects. As the FLOSSPOLS reports suggest, it's important that we (Gnome, KDE, Free Software in general) make a point to emphasize that we do not support hostility against our community members. This is the reason why, for instance, Gnome and Debian have adopted Codes of Conduct.

Richard is of course welcome to think and say whatever he wants, but if he's going to claim some position of leadership, I don't want him lumping together unrelated and offensive material with his advocacy of Free Software. If he insists to continue, I'd like him to openly acknowledge that he doesn't represent many or most of us in the Free Software community that he claims to.

One of the highlights for me each GUADEC Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is FreeFA - the casual soccer tournament for geeks!

As of now, our roster looks a little short. If you're interested, log in, then register by adding yourself to the wiki page!

I'll see you on the field!

PS: we could probably use a couple volunteer photographers. I could only find about 10 photos on Flickr for 3 years of tournaments!

When it comes to security, I consider myself a moderate. On the modern scale from "I'll never regret posting these drunken photos of myself on Facebook, right?" to "I forge my own steel helmets because the government WANTS you to think tin foil is enough", I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't have a real problem with putting some personal information "in the cloud", since I trust the service providers to only display my phone number and mailing address to my friends (as I've requested). But I use different passwords everywhere and quickly replaced all my private SSH keys when I lost a USB drive that contained them.

(Though, admittedly, I'm fortunate in that nothing I'm interested in is illegal nor terribly controversial. So there isn't much beyond passwords, private keys, and private communications that I'd care about being out in the open.)

The other day, in an effort to reduce some clutter on my desk, I got some new, USB-powered hard disks for my personal back-ups to replace the big, loud, failing disks I currently use. So, knowing it's a privacy risk to dispose of hard disks without properly erasing them, I started some research into secure-deletion software. (Again, I'm not paranoid enough to incinerate the disks with thermite.)

The man page for wipe(1) brought up this little gem:

Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those [sic] days.
...

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

(Emphasis mine)

Well, I hereby speculate that the author of that section has a very warped sense of other peoples' interest in their personal data. Unless you're a celebrity or involved in some very shady dealings (or your government is in terrible shape), I don't think anyone cares much about what's on your hard drive. And somehow I doubt any of those apply to the original author.

I really wonder what it is about the software field that makes some people go off the deep end with respect to privacy and security. Maybe the fact that we typically have a greater degree of control within our own domain than those in other fields? Or understanding that, after the locks are opened, it's possible to have your privacy invaded very rapidly nowadays (regardless of how likely it is, especially with the right locks and all but the worst locking practices)?

At any rate, your security is only compromised when someone cares more about copying your data than you care to secure it. A tiny bit of security goes a long way to locking out attackers. And beyond that point, you have to accept that you can't prevent this scenario:



CC-BY-NC 2.5, XKCD

Update: just to clarify, I don't think most people actually do live up to what I consider adequate/moderate security practices. Eg, I'll bet most used hard drives (inside a computer or otherwise) sold on eBay aren't even reformatted, much less properly erased.

In a continuing effort to stay busy and/or away from home, a couple weeks after being in Australia, I'm going to FOSDEM!



If you know me, and you're going, say hi. If you don't know me, say hi and let me know what cool project you're working on!

I should arrive early enough to attend the beer summit Friday night and the Gnome beer summit Saturday night.

This weekend I got back from a great time in Hobart, Tasmania for linux.conf.au. Rob went into a lot of detail, so I'll just reiterate that meeting up with old and new friends is always a lot of fun.

This time I even got to have a friendly conversation with Linus Torvalds on the way to the Cascade Brewery for dinner Thursday night. He's really a nice guy in person (don't let the mailing list flames fool you), and he struck up a conversation without even knowing who I was. I think it says a lot about an industry when some of the most well-respected people are so approachable. (Forgetting for a moment how unapproachable some of the non-contributors are.)

Enough talk - enjoy the pictures and video!



Kangaroos love it. by Pierre-Luc.




I'll go out on a limb and guess that the Cascade Brewery is a little more lush than most.




A traditional Australian foodstuff: babies.




(All photos and videos in this post are by me unless otherwise noted.)

Update: Some feed readers, including Planet Gnome, swallow embedded video, so if you'd like to see the ones in this post, just click through on the title.

One day you're sitting at home, the next you're half-way around the world donating money to help out carnivorous marsupials and shave a 27-year-old beard.

It's a shame when life is this predictable.

Along with all of my friends, family, so many people across the country, and even more around the world, I'm thrilled that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. With the support of Democrat-controlled Senate and House of Representatives, hopefully he and the rest of our country can help undo the damage of the last eight years. And maybe even get us moving forward in areas we're still competitive in!

If you haven't yet, set aside about 20 minutes and watch his fantastic acceptance speech.

Like he said, it will be an uphill battle. It's a lot harder to build things up than tear them down and our economy, civil rights, and world standing need more than a little clean-up.

---

In other positive developments:

California (my home and current state) passed propositions to build high-speed rail lines between northern and southern parts of the state (the number everyone quotes is 2 hours and 40 minutes between San Francisco and LA, though the due date is the year 2030) and another to raise minimum standards for the treatment of farm animals.

The state of Washington approved a proposition allowing doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients with approval from 3 doctors, allowing them the dignity to escape a painful end of their life; Michigan approved a proposition to allow stem-cell research.

And California, Colorado, and South Dakota upheld women's rights to abortion.

---

Ironically and sadly, at the same time we made history by electing our first African-American president, Arizona, California, and Florida banned gay marriage (and Arkansas banned adoption of children by non-married couples, designed by the promoters to prevent adoption by gay couples).

I still don't see what's so hard to understand about equal rights. There's no difference between banning inter-racial marriage and gay marriage; in both cases, a privileged majority spent time and effort to make life less enjoyable for a minority causing absolutely no threat to their own happiness (they'll also both be legal, in time). It's the ultimate in selfishness and moral depravity championed mostly by the religious right (who have the gall to claim they're the models of ethical achievement).

On the other hand, with the exception of Florida's, these propositions just barely passed. So if equality hasn't won yet, it's getting much closer. And with any luck, the new Executive and Legislative branches of our government can help grease the rails for future progress.

Update: used a better link to the speech.

I'm not the only one to appreciate a great Nine Inch Nails concert.

Last Friday they played in Oakland, so I leapt at the opportunity. And they were amazing, as always (2 hours of intense, nearly non-stop music. I don't know how they do it). They sound better live than most bands sound in the studio and nothing compares to their visuals:



Wall of static - during the song, Trent was able to "punch holes" in the display, so you could see him as he moved around stage - he could even "throw" the hole. Hard to describe, but really cool.



Earlier in the set, when you find out the "black curtain" they brought down is actually a giant display (set up here to look like the performers are in the middle of candle flames).



Appropriately, they had mellow ambient backgrounds for the songs from Ghosts I-IV.

Even the technology they used was fascinating - a large part of the visuals were 3 LED curtains at different depths in the stage. The pixels that weren't lit up were black or nearly transparent, if there were strong lights behind them, which allowed for really cool effects. The performance seemed to even want to show it off - they showed touch capability (theoretically it could have been faked, but the timing between presses and reaction were perfect, so I kind of doubt it) and at one point, a stage hand "erased" arbitrary sections of the display with a wide beam of light.

I couldn't find any photos of it (or, unfortunately, any videos), but the coolest effect of the night was when they hid everyone behind the front curtain. It showed some blue mountain peaks (almost like 3D wave visualizations) which began rising and falling in time to the drumming, and slowly drifting. About half-way into the song, there suddenly was a giant yellow microphone overlaid, then Trent Reznor's face - they were taking a live night vision video feed and superimposing it.

I really hope they release a tour DVD :)

For an idea of what they sounded like live, check out this rehearsal video.

All photos licensed by Nine Inch Nails.

Federico,

git rebase -i has quickly become one of my favorite git features for all the reasons you state, plus one of my common work-flows:

1. refactor existing code (commenting out lines that I plan to remove). Check that it works. Commit.
   
2. cut commented code. Check that it works. Commit.

I tend to comment old lines instead of cutting them immediately, because I often realize I needed some of them or that my new idea isn't quite workable. With git rebase -i, I can squash those two commits together before pushing them to the mainline repo.

And, of course, it's nice to look like I can refactor hundreds of lines flawlessly in a single commit :) (I've done that in subversion, but it takes painfully long to ensure you haven't broken anything before you commit)


In other news, the Telepathy repositories are being converted from darcs to git. Score another point for git in the endless DVCS debate!

Wouter,

Vincent definitely got last place in the ice cream death match, but he's decided to change the rules:

Vincent denying his loss

For everyone coming to GUADEC in Istanbul, here's a little photo preview:









For everyone who can't make it: sorry!

What's better than a fresh release of Soylent? Two fresh releases of Soylent!

Soylent 0.1.8 - Tastes better than the original

This release is just a quick bug-fix that should make Soylent run better out-of-the-box.

Changes

• Fix the installation path of the glade file (Florian)

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.8.tar.gz
md5sum: 606792c4a090906f5249f08a39d3bf09

It's time again for a new release of Soylent!



Soylent 0.1.6 - Ready and rarin' ta go!

This release brings a lot of little improvements, most notably contact editor bug fixes, a few UI clean-ups, and a fantastic logo by Hylke Bons!



Perhaps most importantly, this release hints at a big push in the near future: libsoylent, which we plan to be a simple-yet-powerful way to integrate easy people-based interaction into your desktop application. The code in the 0.1.6 tarball is mostly stubs, and the API is far from finalized, but look forward to early previews in the following releases.

I'll be giving a talk on Soylent: Past, Present, and Future in a couple of weeks at GUADEC in Istanbul, Turkey. If you're going to be at GUADEC, make sure not to miss it!

Changes

• Added a Project logo (Hylke Bons)
  
• UI clean-ups:
  
  • Add a regular menubar
    
  • Move editing options from button bar to Edit menu to save space
    
  • Add presence-setting menu
• Install a proper .desktop file, so Soylent shows up in the Applications menu
  
• Clean up autotools config (Gilles Dartiguelongue)
  
• Squash lingering Person Editor bugs
  
• Code clean-ups in anticipation for libsoylent
  
• Initial libsoylent stubs (Sven Pfaller)

Warning

Soylent is still a work-in-progress. Though I don't think it has any serious data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install this release.

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README).

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.6.tar.gz
md5sum: e8f262f3edbf7ae53e5c522703c88f80

James,

I think you may be right that we may not switch to a single DVCS any time soon, but I don't think it's for lack of a clear winner.

The majority of Gnome developers pushing for DVCS seem to favor git (with bazaar at a distant second). Major open source projects (many related to Gnome) have already adopted git (most freedesktop.org projects, X.org, Linux, Ruby on Rails, OLPC), so there's plenty of experience both using git for large projects and migrating from another VCS.

At any rate, I think there are few people who disagree that DVCS of some kind could improve Gnome development (most interestingly, I think, is the possibility for changes that don't fit nicely into a few commits or a single release cycle).

I'm not claiming that I fully understand all sides of the argument (git is the only DVCS I've used), but the only arguments against git that seem valid are cross-platform issues (which seem to be less significant than they used to be) and migration issues (which we would have moving to any new VCS, and as Federico suggested, shouldn't necessarily be that bad).


I wish it were as simple as just providing mirrors or translation services to let developers use any VCS they like, but any translation between VCSes is going to be imperfect. So using x-to-Subversion really isn't ideal - especially when you're going from a DVCS to Subversion, flattening branches and commits and losing original author attribution in the process.

I know I'm not alone in saying that a migration to git would be a major step forward for Gnome and one that few contributors would regret.

Update 1: link to cgit.fd.o, as suggested by Daniel

Sven just posted the draft for the libsoylent API (the soon-to-be-rockin' "People library").

Basic design goals

• People cohesion!:
  
  • Consuming applications won't have to manually associate peoples' accounts on various protocols (which is actually a lot tougher than it sounds)
  
  
• Make it trivial to:
  
  • Read and (where applicable) write contacts' attributes
    
  • Start a synchronous or asynchronous communication channel with any contact
  
  
• Base around libebook's EVCard:
  
  • Gets us vCard's flexible support for arbitrary key/value pairs
    
  • Brings the benefits of vCard's wide adoption in software in general
    
  • Shares the standard Gnome addressbook with Evolution and the rest of the desktop
  
  
• Simplicity:
  
  • Should be easier to use than EVCard directly yet avoid EContact's inflexibility
    
  • Leverage Telepathy's power while limiting its exposure to the libsoylent-consuming app

We'd really appreciate any and all constructive feedback (preferably on the mailing list, but comments in either of our blogs are, of course, welcome).

If you work on an app that could be enhanced with simple, powerful access to people and their metadata, I've got some questions for you:

• Is the API missing anything that you would expect you'd need (convenience functions included)
  
• Do you see any fundamental design flaws?
  
• Does some function just plain look weird? Let us know! :)

Collabora headquarters. Well, that is, the view from HQ.


Last week I visited the main Collabora office in Cambridge, UK. Saturday, we were lucky to get some really nice weather, so we (and half the town, it seemed) went punting on the River Cam.



Alban's first attempt at punting ran us into a couple other boaters (Rob's face says it all), but they're pretty sturdy, so no harm done. For the record, my punting mostly looked like a tight zig-zag - more side-to-side than forward.




One of the 27 +/- 5 colleges in the University of Cambridge.




Don't dare cross under Daf's bridge.


Check out the rest of the set.