# (7) 23 Aug 2010, 09:45PM: Two Tips On Convincing Managers & Executives To Invest In Your Technology Projects: From a years-old job-advice email to a friend. The sort of knowledge that Rachel Chalmers or Karl Fogel finds obvious but that some of us still haven't quite integrated into our day-to-day communications and long-term strategies:

You need to be able to express your suggestions to your boss in terms of financial incentives and losses.

A few things I've picked up during a recent class in "Technology in the Business Environment" (when I was doing the master's in tech management at Columbia):

I) Management focuses on the things that drive the organization (directly making money), and tends to ignore things that support the organization's drivers. If you're directly making money, lowering the cost of producing the product/service, increasing management's control, increasing product quality, increasing the knowledge available to an important decisonmaker, or improving customer service, you can describe your work as a driver. Can you find a way to describe your high-level TODOs in one of those ways?

II) Here's a model of management's priorities for technology investment. The higher up this list you can get, the more attention you can grab from management.

1. Revenue. Guaranteeing a financial return. Not just cutting costs, but actually MAKING money from customers.
2. Increasing scarce productivity. If the demand for a product exceeds the supply, then this is attractive. [1 and 2 indicate that the company is growing, and interested in the future. A good sign!]
3. Cutting costs. More popular in a struggling company.
4. Competitive advantage -- this means the company is already behind its competitors and has lost first-mover advantage.
5. Tech for the sake of tech -- pizzazz and leadership.

So can you explain "creating system-monitoring scripts, streamlining processes, and installing and configuring new programs on the server" so that they're way up on that list?

Let's say a system-monitoring script would take your service from 95% uptime to 99.9% uptime. That's #2. Maybe one of the high-level tasks you do will make it possible for your company to serve twenty units instead of fifteen (#2) or even start a whole new line of products (#1). But "It's more elegant/technically correct" is #5.

I welcome comments, tips, examples, disagreement, and cake.

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# 22 Jul 2010, 03:11PM: Announcement: I've had a family emergency and will be intermittently away from the net for a few weeks. I will not be at GUADEC and I will not be part of DebConf.

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# 04 Jul 2010, 10:50PM: GNOME Journal: PHP-GTK, Shotwell, Nokia, & More: While I was gallivanting around to conferences, a new GNOME Journal came out, shepherded by new Editor-in-Chief Paul Cutler.

• Paul has his first Letter from the Editor.
• Stormy Peters interviews Quim Gil of Nokia.

  The GNOME community has been pushing plenty of brilliant ideas and concepts that now exist as key pieces of software in the free desktop stack. There is an ongoing consolidation process to establish the main platforms of the next years. We believe MeeGo will be one of them: what other strong alternatives are there closer to GNOME?

• I interviewed Elizabeth Smith, maintainer of PHP-GTK.

  PHP-GTK is generally best suited for situations when you already have a lot of developers (or a lot of logic) already tied up in PHP. It makes it easy to whip up a desktop interface to that business logic without the need to expose that logic via a service or learn a new language. Personally, I got involved in PHP-GTK just to learn desktop programming. I didn't want to learn a new paradigm (web to desktop) and a new language at the same time. I started PHP-GTK to learn desktop programming without learning a new language... and ended up learning C and being the PHP-GTK maintainer. Funny how that happens.

• Jim Nelson introduced and described Shotwell, a new photo manager for the GNOME desktop.

  This brings up one of the features we're most proud of, our auto-enhance tool. We considered various algorithms and performed qualitative testing of photos enhanced by different applications. After a few tries, we landed on an algorithm that gives great results most of the time. (We've yet to find an auto-enhance that improves every photo.)

  Our algorithm involves analyzing the photo's luminescence, dropping the outer points of the distribution and boosting the middle ranges to expand the contrast of the image, making it punchier and more vibrant. If a fair portion of the photo is dark, the shadows are lightened to bring up detail.

Enjoy! The Shotwell piece is useful (Shotwell now joins gthumb & F-Spot in my Apps menu) and the Gil interview is thought-provoking. I'll recuse myself from praising Paul's letter and my interview.

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# 24 Jun 2010, 03:40PM: The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits: At the excellent Open Source Bridge conference earlier this month, people seemed to enjoy my talk. The one-liner:

Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I’ll show you how to fix that.

My session notes are now available. If you were there, please feel free to clarify them and add your notes or links to your notes elsewhere.

The very short version: a company does not upstream its patches, even though it should for long-term practical reasons, because of problems in four general categories. The company might lack a FLOSS culture. There might be legal confusion about what employees are allowed to do, and how to get permission. The project management workflow and timelines might not allow time for proper engineering. And the external project might have a terrible UI for new contributors.

Once you abstract these categories away from the specific problem of accidentally hoarded code rotting away, you see that they also apply to other problems of the type "I really know I should be doing foo but haven't gotten around to it."

I also added notes from my lightning talk on Thoughtcrime Experiments, in which I inadvertently invented a new social media marketing technique.

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# (1) 17 May 2010, 04:40PM: Snort, Chuckle: So I was watching a bunch of DJ Earworm mashups and saw this on my screen:

What do you notice there? Perhaps this ad?

We love freedom of choice
Why we don't support restrictions on creativity and innovation.
www.Adobe.com/Choice/

Amusingly, if you actually go to www.Adobe.com/Choice/, you get a Page Not Found. "Choice" is case-sensitive, you see.

As I knew before I clicked, this is a Flash-related Adobe vs. Apple salvo. Sorry, Adobe, I remember Dmitry Sklyarov.

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# 10 May 2010, 10:06PM: Zaragoza GNOME Marketing Hackfest, Day 3: On Thursday, 6 May, the last day of the hackfest, we got so much done! (See Paul's photo). The "we" here came from three continents: Daniel Baeyens, Stormy Peters, Jason D. Clinton, Vincent Untz, Andreas Nilsson, Paul Cutler, Bharat Kapoor, Licio Fonseca, Ryan Singer and I came from both Americas and Europe for the GNOME Marketing hackfest. I'll quickly recount what we worked on that third day, though I know I'm missing some people and accomplishments.

On Thursday morning, Andreas, Paul, Licio, and Vincent worked on technical ideas for making it easier for people to demonstrate GNOME in live presentations; Paul will be writing more about that. Paul, Stormy, Ryan and I made plans to help GNOME community members learn to more effectively promote GNOME in their other technical communities (a simplification, sorry), and polished the wording of some key talking points for GNOME 3 (usability, accessibility, and apps). Thanks to the #gnome-hackers and #gnome denizens for telling us about apps and components users will love in GNOME 3, like gEdit collaborative text editing! Jason was laser-focused on video-making and giving other GNOME folks the information they need to make GNOME 3 demo videos.

Bharat spoke with me about brochure tactics (for example, every brochure should have a dedicated landing page on the gnome3.org website) and some branding issues (sometimes, multiple possible names are pretty much equally suitable, and the important thing is just to choose one and stick with it). He and I also discussed integrated marketing strategy. After all, marketing is a tool to get products or organizations things that they want -- such as sales, brand awareness, adoption, feedback, etc. -- towards a goal. Because this hackfest was pre-scoped as a GNOME 3 launch planning hackfest, we didn't rehash earlier GNOME discussions about goals. Still, at some point in the future (perhaps as part of the GNOME 3 post-launch review?), it might be nice to do some limited planning exercises to deepen our understanding of our goals and resources.

After lunch, we spoke about how to give Linux distributions the information they need about the innovations in GNOME 3, and the assistance they need to talk with their users about GNOME 3. We clarified and added to the GNOME 3.0 launch marketing schedule (feel free to grab one of those tasks).

As we wrapped up, we talked about continuing to work with the Zaragoza municipality and free software community; for example, since the area is doing so much work with accessibility, perhaps an a11y hackfest would be great for GNOME and for the local community. And we did a quick post-hackfest review of what we'd liked and what we'd like to improve next time. For example, using Gobby, the wiki, and IRC to document our discussions and work product as we went was good, but it would have been even better to use IRC more throughout (when possible) to let the larger world of GNOME and GNOME marketing know what we were up to, and to get their ideas.

Stormy finished the day by telling us that we'd gotten more done than she'd hoped, and that she was happy that people had stepped up to make things happen (once in a while she got to just sit back and watch!). She especially appreciated the Spanish people, such as Daniel Baeyens, Agustín Benito Bethencourt, and Ignacio Correas, who had taken so much time to work with us and show us the city. And Stormy thanked us for taking time away from work and home to come to Zaragoza.

That night we pub-hopped, and the next day I got on the train back to Madrid and flew back to the States. You'll see some more details pop up over the next week, on blogs or over on the wiki or the mailing list. I still have to write up some details from our notes. But for now I want to thank the hackfest's sponsors:

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# (1) 10 May 2010, 10:29AM: GNOME & Conference Planning & Writing: I'm back in New York City. Big priorities this week include:

• Preparing to move to a bigger apartment here in Astoria
• Getting the GNOME 3.0 launch marketing machine up and running
• Organizing the late May release of GNOME Journal
• Preparing my Open Source Bridge talk, The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits.Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I show you how to fix that. (Business track, date & time TBA)
• WisCon prep. I'm helping with food for the vid party and I'm speaking on four panels:
  1. Let's Create an Online Business Model That Works. I'm moderating this one: Sat, 10:30-11:45 pm with Jennifer K. Stevenson and an anonymous participant. What makes Facebook games very, very profitable, while online SF/F magazines are usually struggling? If the money from subscribers and from advertisers isn't enough, then where does the money come from? Is the word "magazine" holding some of these ventures back? Let's put our collective knowledge of fandom, web 2.0 and visions of the future together and see if we can't come up with something great.
  2. Must Pleasures Be Guilty?, Sun, 10:00-11:15 am with Vito Excalibur, Lesley Hall, Sumana Harihareswara, John O'Neill, and Sonya Taaffe. Why are we ashamed of the books we love? Critical acclaim recognizes some SF/F as serious literature, works one might recommend to a non-genre reader who thought it was all talking squid and ray-guns in space, to demonstrate what the genre can do. But are these the books you love and reread over and over again, especially when feeling low? And if not, why not? What is the difference between love and admiration? And why is pleasure so often constructed as "guilty" or embarrassing to admit?
  3. Once Upon a Time, Sun, 1:00-2:15 pm with Vylar Kaftan, Terry Bisson, Richard Chwedyk, Sumana Harihareswara, and Ellen Klages. Pro writers use the card game "Once Upon a Time" to tell half-baked fairy tales for laughs. Find out what happens when four panelists play tug-of-war on a story, trying to bend it towards wildly different endings.
  4. Facebook and Its Discontents, Sun, 4:00-5:15 pm with Cat T. Rambo, Kater Cheek, Sumana Harihareswara, Penny Hill, and Alena McNamara. Have your friends abandoned their blogs and LiveJournals for Facebook? How does writing on our friends' walls differ from commenting on their posts? How do you navigate privacy on a system that forbids anonymity? Is "liking" someone's update the same as commenting "This!"
• Submitting a couple OSSPAC talks
• Figuring out other GNOME stuff like GUADEC attendance and applying for Foundation membership
• Wouldn't it be nice if I finished blogging the marketing hackfest and QuahogCon sometime this week? It would.

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# 06 May 2010, 09:30AM GMT+1: GNOME Marketing Hackfest 2010, Day Two: On Wednesday morning, starting around 9:30, we broke into small groups to work intensively on video, GNOME Ambassadors, and the website. For example, Bharat, Vincent, and I started a business card template for GNOME Ambassadors, and Licio, Ryan, Stormy, and Bharat worked on the Ambassador brochures and website.

I had planned on starting some group discussion and knowledge sharing when the momentum lagged in the late morning. But it never did! So our first real break happened when Jose Felix Ontanon and Juan Jesús Ojeda Croissier joined their fellow Seville technologist Lorenzo Gil Sánchez to talk with us about accessibility work in the Andalusia region of Spain.

We did make a lot of progress in the morning: a GNOME 3 website mockup, a marketing brochure template, four video scripts, Ambassador website text, preparations for the 5-minute topic presentations, and other useful discussions and writing/communications.

After a lunch with them and with local officials and community, we heard a presentation from the city regarding their Digital City initiative. Some interesting facts:

• The proposed Art and Tech center will include four Fab Labs (as part of a hackerspace/business incubation strategy)!
• About a third of Zaragoza's university students are doing technical degrees.
• Open broadband plans include a Wi-Fi mesh network with free access in strategic public places, plus WiMax for municipal use.
• Additionally, a low-cost citizen's card will give Zaragoza citizens access to more Wi-Fi, plus city bicycles.

I believe another hackfest participant will be linking to that presentation pretty soon. After that, Paul & Stormy met with the Spanish a11y mavens to talk about how GNOME can help the community & municipality get the publicity & feedback they need to make their FLOSS a11y & GNOME initiative a success, and talked with Vincent and the local municipality about similar possibilities. (Whew!) Jason tackled some screen-recording issues. Andreas designed an SMS fundraising card for Bharat's proposed SMS fundraising initiative, and began designing the brochures that Bharat, Vincent, & Ryan continued writing, and Licio is writing GNOME Ambassadors material. I turned the next 2 months of GNOME 3 launch TODOs to http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/MarketingRoadmap and people who want to grab ownership of or ask about a task should pipe up on IRC or the mailing list!

So our afternoon was pretty full. Even though the hackfest was supposed to end for the day at 7pm, people stuck around till the building closed 90 minutes later! I threw together some plans for tomorrow; we still need to have certain substantive discussions, and to make certain execution plans.

The Zaragoza and Aragon governments kindly picked up our lunch and a dinner at Birosta. The three vegetarians in the hackfest especially enjoyed a meal full of vegetables and free from anxiety.

I again want to thank all the organizations that are sponsoring this event: the Zaragoza Municipality, the Aragon Regional Government, the GNOME Foundation, the Technological Institute of Aragon, ASOLIF and CESLA. Also, the GNOME Foundation covered much of the cost of my travel here. So, thanks!

More reportage tomorrow...

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# 05 May 2010, 07:49AM GMT+1: GNOME Marketing Hackfest (Zaragoza, Spain), Day One: Yesterday we officially started the GNOME Marketing hackfest, centering on planning the release of GNOME 3.0 on 29 September 2010. Paul Cutler started us off by talking about goals for the week. He wants us to blog about what we're doing, and to take care to recap action items and follow up after this hackfest to execute them well.

Stormy Peters noted that we have a great, diverse set of skillsets in the room. The last hackfest did a lot of groundwork and generated a lot of ideas and action items. This time, we want to get a lot of immediately useful things *made*.

(Then we did introductions.)

Paul recapped the November marketing hackfest, which Jason Clinton and Stormy Peters blogged at the time.

• What's GNOME 3? (more details below)
• Our marketing for GNOME 3: concentrating on existing users. We're talking to our base.
• We wrote talking points on the wiki.
• Lesson learned: make sure all our marketing assets have a blank space for downstream distributions to put their assets.
• We created FAQ text (but need art/design for it), wrote brochure text, and created a presentation template; we need to wrap all that in a GNOME Ambassador webpage.
• We need our own community to buy in to GNOME 3 and spread the word that it's useful and a great upgrade. Module maintainers, GSoC students, etc. already are spreading some word, but is it a positive message? Virality would be great, so we should make the assets rebrandable, do the videos and disseminate HOWTOs.

I asked for a reminder of the GNOME mission: accessible, free, localized. We offer free desktop (technology) to everyone. We say "technology" these days because of mobile, cellphones, and so on, but mobile is not really what we'll talk about this week. For instance, the GNOME Shell team isn't targeting mobile handsets as a platform.

So, in that light: GNOME 3. What's in it?

• GNOME Shell (less interrupty UI with clearer control of desktops, notifications, and launching apps), help (topic-based), possibly performance improvements on login time (gconf-to-dconf switch, if it makes it into the release), Evolution autoconfig (probably),
• GNOME Shell is NOT slower than old UI. It might be faster, which would be nice! And Vincent Untz (of the Release Team) says that about 98% of existing users shouldn't have hardware blockers to switching. As Jason Clinton notes, Red Hat is working all-out on fixing the possible software (driver) blockers so we basically assume that'll be fixed in time.
• What about GNOME Activity Journal? Shell & GAJ aren't really integrated, teams might be working at cross purposes. GAJ team has submitted a module. We have a meeting next weekend for the release team to decide what to do. GNOME wants something consistent. Right now, GS & GAJ seem too different from each other.
• Accessibility improvements. The GNOME 2 accessibility framework was GNOME-specific, but GNOME 3 a11y is cross-desktop...KDE, small devices, Qt, Nokia, etc. can and will use it. The new stack is useful for a11y, desktop testing, and other purposes. For example, Stormy told us that there's an HFOSS tool that turns audio alarms into visual alarms. This is great for the hearing-impaired -- and if you're in a meeting! Remember the curb cuts principle; accessibility improvements help everyone.

  A few notes about the a11y changes: speech synthesis will probably be ok. The first iteration of the onscreen keyboard may functionally be a step back. The current one is basically unused, since it's not very good. (For an example of low distribution uptake: Ubuntu currently uses a different one they coded, which is simpler but has different bugs.) The new one may not be ready by September.

• A lot of housecleaning (paying off technical debt) to make it far easier to develop and maintain GNOME apps and core going forward
• Tomboy online. By the way, Tomboy is big on other OSes! Andreas Nilsson shared his experience: he went to a neighbor's house and installed a couple of GNOME apps on their Windows machine, including Tomboy. The next week, they'd switched entirely to GNOME on Linux!
• Streamlined appearance: less chrome on some apps, symbolic icons in tray....clean & lean experience/appearance

(One issue to address is GNOME panel applets. Everyone Vincent has talked with uses about three applets (out of about 20 available ones), but everyone uses a different set of three. So we need to work with the community to find a way to bridge that experience gap for GNOME 3.0.)

So here are some notes towards our marketing message for GNOME 3:

• GNOME 3 is about UI. Performance work, GNOME Shell, help, the streamlined appearance, and GAJ all make the user experience better and more responsive.
• Accessibility. We are the best free desktop in terms of accessibility,
• We want to talk more about the ecosystem and applications, especially since we don't generally spotlight that enough. People don't realize that GNOME is a suite of apps as well as the core desktop. Paul blogged to ask for names of applications that are adding new features for GNOME 3.0. What apps and desktop components/tools are adding benefits? True, the platform/components story targets developers rather than users, and we're primarily concentrating on the user message in this hackfest and in the GNOME 3.0 marketing overall, but we do want to invest some in marketing to developers, because they'll evangelize.
• GNOME 3.0 is iterative. We continue to evolve every 6 months. This is the beginning of GNOME 3; we're starting a new cycle. For example, GNOME 3.0 lays a foundation to do better geolocation, desktop testing, and integration with social networking sites. We should specify this in our message to developers: "We added foo so we can add bar next year" -- and to users: "We added foo so you can do bar." The post-September roadmap will be clearer after GUADEC, but even now we can start on "Come to GNOME 3 and this is what we'll take you to..."

(As we talked about highlighting GNOME apps, we reminded ourselves of long-term marketing ideas, less for GNOME 3.0 than for future marketing work: a cross-platform App Store that senses your OS and shows you free GNOME apps to download. Another: tie together About boxes on apps to Friends of GNOME. Make it easier for users to realize that they can give back via cash donations. Store what app inspired them to give cash, and feed that app's About box with specific users' names, once donations pass a certain amount.)

In a sense, our list of audiences (in order of priority) is:

1. current users of GNOME 2.x
2. GNOME developers
3. the accessibility community
4. distributions (such as OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva)

And a home for our GNOME 3 marketing message: gnome3.org. This will be a small, product-specific site that goes away (that is, redirects/moves to gnome.org) six months after the GNOME 3 launch (approximately). We're building the sitemap for it this week.

By the way, Paul and Vincent are going to coordinate on the improvement of the gnome.org website; evidently there's a relaunch in the works! Plone is involved somehow.

Stormy then led us through deciding what we'll do this week in the hackfest. HIGHEST priority:

• GNOME 3 website sitemap
• GNOME 3 roadmap/launchplan calendar
• Talking points: GNOME 3 message, making apps/components story, localizing tagline

ALSO:

• Pilot demo video (per Jason's script) and a template for future videos
• Developing GNOME Ambassadors materials and putting together a coherent suite of those resources
• Distro messaging
• Thoughtleadership around a11y & usability, and outreach to find/make/convert those thought leaders and GNOME 3 evangelists

And we roughly scheduled it as follows:

• Tuesday morning: talking points and launch roadmap
• Tuesday afternoon: further work on launch roadmap, and then ambassadors, website, & video template discussion starts
• Wednesday morning: lots of work on website & ambassadors, maybe video work
• Wed. afternoon: can continue videos & thought leadership
• Thursday: buffer to cover what we didn't work on earlier in the week; film video

So Tuesday morning we worked on those talking points (soon to come to the wiki) and the launch roadmap (ditto).

After lunch, we finished our rough roadmap, then spoke about some various other topics before diving into website and Ambassador work. Bharat Kapoor suggested that we think about SMS fundraising at conferences, and about corporate sponsorship/involvement with Ambassadors.

As a group, we roughed out some ideas for what GNOME Ambassadors is (materials/collateral that anyone can use to evangelize GNOME) and for the website. One question re: the website: will it be a Plone site? There are some dependencies here regarding the existing website infrastructure and a delayed reboot; Ryan and I will talk about getting a project manager to do the CMS relaunch. In any case, we're going to go forward assuming that it's a Plone site that we can localize, and that the marketing team will own the responsibility for coding it and getting it up.

Then we broke into smaller groups to get more specific on the website and Ambassadors (to get wikified when we have time -- this week, I hope!) and developed some TODOs for the work session on Wednesday.

We also met local representatives who told us about the free software scene in Zaragoza and in Spain overall. We're so grateful to them for their hospitality and support!

(And throughout the day, we captured some other TODOs that we'll do after the hackfest...)

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# 04 May 2010, 01:18AM GMT+1: Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully GNOME: I am in Zaragoza, Spain for the GNOME marketing hackfest. One thing that came up over dinner: People who have heard about GNOME 3 may have heard about GNOME Shell (a new UI that makes work less interrupt-y) and topic-based help. They might not have heard that the switch from gconf to dconf will significantly reduce applications' and the desktop's response time and OS login time.

Tomorrow the hackfest starts in earnest. Weird hotel mattress sleep, here I come! (It's 2:19am, regardless of NewsBruiser's attempts to make me look like I'm going to bed at a reasonable hour.)

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# (5) 27 Apr 2010, 10:55AM: Importing iCal .ics Files to N900 Calendar (Maemo 5): I have a laptop running Mac OS 10.4.11 and iCal 2.0.5 (ancient and proprietary, I know, that's why I just got the ZaReason Hoverboard running Ubuntu). I decided to move my calendaring over to my Nokia N900. iCal, select calendar in sidebar, File, Export, name it filename.ics, use Petrovich to send the file to the N900 over Bluetooth [Yay Petrovich! So great not to have to break out the USB cable], open the file upon receipt, Maemo Calendar automatically opens and imports, right?

Wrong. Only a few of my calendar items imported. I tried exporting a much smaller calendar in case it was choking on the number of items: nope. I tried diffing the file on my Mac and the file on the N900 in case it had gotten corrupted in transit: nope. And a hasty visual inspection didn't tell me the pattern of what had imported and what hadn't.

Evidently there are different versions of the .ics standard! vCalendar, iCalendar. Since I just wanted to move the content once and didn't need to set up a permanent sync solution, I started looking around for a simple clean-up importer. But then I ran into GPE Calendar, an alternative calendaring app that does properly handle iCal .ics files, before getting around to installing or running a standalone converter script. So I ended up doing this (thanks, talk.maemo.org):

1. Install GPE Calendar ("GPE PIM Suite calendar application") from the App Manager on the N900
2. Within GPE Calendar, hit Import from the main menu and import the .ics file
3. Verify that GPE Calendar handles the import perfectly (behind the scenes, it moves the .ics data into the GPE database)
4. Open a Terminal and type

   gpe-calendar -e export-from-gpe.ics

5. Move export-from-gpe.ics to MyDocs/tmp/
6. Open File Manager and open tmp/filename.ics to get Maemo Calendar to import the file
7. Verify that all events have imported by checking visually against iCal
8. Uninstall GPE Calendar via the App Manager and bask in the pretty UI and integrated alarms of Maemo Calendar

I know, installing another calendar app just for the sake of its import and export seem like overkill. I am uncomfortably reminded of "Excel as a database". But it worked.

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# 23 Apr 2010, 07:16AM: Out the Door: Off to QuahogCon in Providence, Rhode Island. Say hi if you're there! I have some free time this afternoon and welcome sightseeing advice.

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# (3) 18 Apr 2010, 11:16PM: A Few Tech-ish-Related Observations: New Work City is a Manhattan coworking space/group that charges $25 for a desk for a day.

Floatleft: an international two-woman Drupal consulting firm that provides web development services to NGOs and nonprofits. Neat!

A similarly focused webdev firm is looking to hire.

KML or Keyhole Markup Language: an XML variant you use to mark up Google Earth or Google Maps.

Hierarchical Data Format: a file format that acts like a filesystem, for use with large & complicated datasets.

Unfortunately, when you do a Google search for [gnome source control] or [version control gnome], instead of git.gnome.org, the first hit is the obsolete Subversion site (although it prominently calls itself OBSOLETE and directs you to git).

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# (1) 07 Apr 2010, 02:49PM: Yahoo! Labs Research Presentations, February 2010: Two months ago, Maritza Johnson organized a trip to the NYC Yahoo! research labs for Columbia's Women in Computer Science. As a Columbia alumna, I snuck in. (Something like fifteen or twenty high-powered CS undergrads and grad students attended. Always great to be in a lobby full of smart geeky women.) I heard about some pretty keen things there, so here's my writeup.

Ken Schmidt, director of academic relations, told us about some of Yahoo!'s academic relations work. For example, academics can get a bunch of useful datasets for research via the Webscope program. Yahoo! hosts university hackdays alongside its other worldwide hackdays. The Faculty Research Engagement program provides funding, datasets, and visits. The Key Scientific Challenges program gives grad students money, secret datasets, and collaboration. And Schmidt noted that there's an active Yahoo! Women in Tech network, and that they'll be at Grace Hopper this year.

At Yahoo! Labs, you choose your office location based on what's convenient to you, and then collaborate with other people in your discipline across offices. I didn't get a chance to see their videoconference meeting rooms but I get the sense they're great.

Following are some idiosyncratic notes on the presentations we got from Yahoo! Labs researchers. We also got to talk informally with Duncan Watts, who thinks a lot about experiments, social dynamics and behavior, and Sergei Vassilvitskii, who is taciturn.

Dan Reeves has spent four years at Yahoo! Labs and works on a mix of things. He talked about Predictalot, the Yahoo! prediction game for March Madness (the US college men's basketball tournament). Reeves, who doesn't know much about the NCAA, showed us some sample bets and kept getting dismayed that they were coming up at 100% or 0% potential, until actual basketball fans pointed out that his randomly chosen bet put up a rinky-dink conference against a heavy hitter. Domain knowledge is useful sometimes.

A few lessons: running quintillions of simulations (in the web browser, when the user selects a bet to make, I think) is hard, and thus programmers took "ridiculous shortcuts." The programmers made it possible to make "weird bets" (like, math involving the sum of the seeds that would make it to the Final Four), and not too many people have taken advantage of that, which is a little disappointing. And though the prediction market is very flexible, it doesn't give you more accuracy than you get already from crude, already-known variables.

But we already have an efficient and computation-assisted prediction market, and it's called gambling. Millions of dollars change hands every year as people bet on college basketball, and metrics for success and failure are clear, so I don't find it surprising that we're already very good at predicting outcomes from known variables. Perhaps a prediction market would lead to a greater increase in accuracy in a lesser-known sport.

That same slight disappointment came up in Sharad Goel's results. Goel thinks about homophily vs. influence, which seems intriguing to me, as does his "Anatomy of the Long Tail: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Tastes". To our group he spoke about what search can predict. That blog entry has all the details. Some key points:

You can use data from people's search queries to "predict the present." For example, people are all gaga about Google Flu Trends partly because it works around lags. GFT gives you results with a tiny lag, maybe a day; the CDC can't tell you results till it's been a week or two.

But can you use search to predict the future? And how well would that compare to alternative prediction methods? Well, you can check queries in the weeks leading up to a movie release and that'll give you pretty accurate predictions for its box office numbers, but "more mundane indicators, such as production budgets and reviewer ratings, perform equally well at forecasting sales." Specifically, there's already a Hollywood Stock Exchange. Again, where there's already a well-honed prediction market, you're not going to be able to swoop in and compete all Moneyball-style right off the bat...

Sihem Amer-Yahia researches social data management. She spoke with us about relevance algorithms for social surveys. You can construct implicit networks based on shared data preferences -- for example, rankings on delicious -- or shared behavior. (Yeah, remember, Yahoo! owns The Web Site Formerly Known As del.icio.us. Over and over in these talks I was reminded that Yahoo! is making a lot of hay from their datasets: Flickr, delicious, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Sports (including fantasy sports), Yahoo! Mail....)

How alike are two people, based on what they tag or rank? Well, it's hard to systematically check this sort of thing via tags, because tags are sparse (whooo, folksonomy). Researchers looked at tags on Yahoo! Travel, like "family" or "LGBT." They parsed the tags and their usage to create "concepts" and to build "communities" around those concepts.

As I've known since Leonard created the Indie Rock Peter Principle, recommendation systems suffer from an overspecialization problem. As Amer-Yahia puts it, how can you incorporate diversity into the system's recommendations without hurting their relevance? Well, they have a lot of heuristics. One: use a greedy algorithm to pick the first K most-relevant results. Find which of those K results has the most similarity to that set. Then compare that most-similar result to the K+1th result. If the K+1th result is less similar, then swap it in. Continue to trade off diversity against relevance till you reach the lower acceptable bound of the relevance range (a range whose threshold you may have to discover empirically). It's a species of affirmative action.

Once you personalize recommendations (especially based on social networks), the indices you create and have to deal with get huge. I have a note here about "Storing like things together" and "Returning a composite of relevant items, validating with user's network" -- I assume those are partial solutions to the performance problems.

Another fun thing Amer-Yahia worked on: take Flickr photos and turn them into itineraries (longer paper at author Munmun De Choudhury's site). (Factoid: about 10% of Flickr photos come with automatic geotag stamping, and about 40% have semantic user-added tags that you can use to get some geographic data.) As the abstract says, "Our extensive user study on a 'crowd-sourcing' marketplace (Amazon Mechanical Turk), indicates that high quality itineraries can be automatically constructed from Flickr data, when compared against popular professionally generated bus tours." Oh yeah, the researchers love Mechanical Turk!

Amer-Yahia also spoke on homogeneity in structured datasets with strict ranking. Her demo used Yahoo! Personals as an example, which led to many subsidiary guffaws.

Basically, it's the diversity vs. relevance problem again. If you say you want to see college-educated white women aged 25-34 within 5 miles of New York City, you'll get a big dataset ordered by some characteristic. You can either rank by distance, or by age, or by level of education, but in any case you have like 100 nearly-identical results on the first several pages before you get to the first difference. It's hard to explore.

So instead we have subspace clustering, which sounds AWESOME. You cluster combinations of attributes in a rank-aware way, label them, and make sure that your resulting clusters of results have adequate quality, relevance, etc. Amer-Yahia explains this as dimension reduction to help users explore [results] more effectively.

John Langford works on machine learning. He pointed out a bunch of spots where Yahoo! sites use, or could benefit from, machine learning. He works on a "fast, scalable, useful learning algorithm" named Vorpal Wabbit. Langford demonstrated it and indeed it seemed plenty fast, although I haven't any baseline for comparison. Key phrases I noted include "linear predictor," "infrastructure helps it go & learn fast," and "plug in different, lossy-or-not algorithms?" and I assume interested folks can go check out the tutorial. A niche tool, but sounds invaluable if you're in his target market.

Jake Hofman showed us some more machine learning goodness. His tool (an implementation of vbmod, I think) scrapes the To: & CC: lines from your email to see who gets emailed together, and from that constructs a pretty graph showing the nodes & clusters in your social network. He tried it on a colleague's real mail, and indeed five distinct clusters sprang up. "That's my soccer buddies...that one's my in-laws...that's my college pals..." You can use this to have the Compose Mail interface auto-suggest recipients you might have left out.

I talked with Hofman a little after the presentations, whereupon he revealed that he hearts Beautiful Soup and Mechanize for screen-scraping login-protected or otherwise complicated websites. Evidently he got into Bayesian fun as a cell biologist getting software to automate the tedious task of classifying images from microscopes, slides, etc. Oh, there it is on his resume: "Applied machine learning and statistical inference techniques for high-throughput quantitative analysis of network and image data" and "Developed software platform to automate characterization of cell spreading and migration". Cool!

Siddharth Suri researches social networks and experiments and data mining. He presented his "Behavioral Study of Public Goods Games over Networks." He did an experiment on Mechanical Turk. Econ professors would challenge him on how representative of the population that sample is, to which he would rightly reply that they tend to experiment on university undergraduates, who aren't exactly hella representative either. Boo-yah!

Suri asks how we might get people to change or sustain socially beneficial behavior in a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. For example, how do we encourage energy conservation, discourage littering, and encourage donations to charity? I appreciate that it's a tough and important problem. However, he also said that the same question applies to online communities: how do we get people to upload photos to Flickr or write Facebook updates so everyone can enjoy them? He then investigated via a social dilemma game/experiment via Mechanical Turk, where strangers had the option to give or keep amounts of money, sometimes a "subject" was a plant who moved norms towards selfishness or altruism, etc., etc.

I find this question and approach a little bewildering. People write and share and upload online for many of the same reasons we knit scarves as gifts, host and go to birthday parties, and gossip and volunteer in the physical world. These are interpersonal, social actions that we do to bond or amuse ourselves or gain status within specific communities that have meaning to us. Experimenting on this phenomenon with strangers exchanging money on Mechanical Turk -- because that's where you can get experimental results -- seems weak.

Since this experiment was an initial pilot project, we suggested that future iterations allow the subjects to make friends with each other, or get pre-existing groups of subjects to join (e.g., have an experimental group composed of coworkers). Another attendee worried aloud that these measures might allow a "false sense of community" to arise and throw off the results. But who are we to call any sense of community false? And community is the answer to the social dilemma, anyway, isn't it?

Overall, a thought-provoking and enlightening way to spend a few hours. Thanks to Johnson and Schmidt for setting it up. I also thank Yahoo! Labs for the lunch, USB drives, pen gadgets, and fleece scarves. Let me know if I'm wrong about anything!

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# 31 Mar 2010, 01:41AM: GNOME Video Site, Mysterious Bugzilla Upgrade Patron, Mallard, Acire/Quickly, An Interview & A Goodbye: I'm an editor and the release coordinator for GNOME Journal, which just released its 19th issue.

This issue has six articles:

• Will Kahn-Greene introduces the GNOME Miro community, a website that brings GNOME-related videos to users.

  In November 2009, I released GNOME Miro Community. I'd just had a hard time finding GUADEC 2009 session videos, and Participatory Culture Foundation had just released the Miro Community curated video collection and search platform. So I decided to create a Miro Community focusing on GNOME-related video, so the next person will have an easier time finding things....

• My article describes why and how Canonical paid tens of thousands of USD to upgrade the GNOME bugtracker.

  GNOME bug-wranglers can now enjoy Bugzilla's per-product permissions, duplicate prevention, localization, and myriad enhancements from the last few years. And Bugzilla users will get to enjoy several features that started with GNOME's modifications. The browse.cgi view gives you a dashboard view of a project's outstanding bugs and patches. Users can indicate the status of an attachment to a bug (e.g., "accepted-commit_now" or "needs-work"). Everything Solved also developed a stack-trace parsing extension, traceparser, for Bugzilla 3.6. All in all, Everything Solved upstreamed more than forty features or bugfixes.

• Stormy Peters interviews an Igalia cofounder and member of the GNOME Advisory Board.

  Sometimes we the small open source consultancy companies can be seen as working right in the middle of two very different worlds: the evil empire of companies wanting to make profit, and the pure and ethically oriented free software community. But at the end there are a lot of shared interests and huge potential for the win-win. The main challenge is to find the people in key roles of big corporations or institutions that really understand how free software works, the dynamics of the community, and the right way to approach a project and have influence (as opposed to control) in its future.

• Jono Bacon describes Acire, Quickly, Ground Control, and the whole toolset for whipping up quick one-off Linux desktop apps.

  While most GNOME developers know that Quickly makes it easy to generate GNOME projects and package them for Ubuntu, Quickly actually has a template-based system, which means you can write any kind of application in it (this could include KDE applications and packaging for other distributions). What I like about Quickly is that it automates much of the repetition surrounding software development and it ultimately allows you to deploy software to your users. This instantly allows opportunistic developers to feel a sense of success around their projects as they can develop with ease--and deploy to real users with ease too.

• Shaun McCance explains Mallard, a new XML syntax for writing user documentation and help.

  A Mallard document is a collection of pages. Each page stands on its own. This is different from traditional documentation formats, where a document is a linear sequence of chapters and sections. The idea is not new. Encyclopedias have been organized around self-contained topics for centuries. When the idea is applied to documentation, it's called topic-oriented help. Users can read what they need without reading an entire manual.

• Jim Hodapp writes his last Letter from the Editor.

  Well, it is a sad day for me to say that I am leaving the leadership role of Editor-in-Chief; my ability to devote the time and energy to bringing the best content to the GNOME Journal is currently not possible. But it is a happy day that I’m passing on that role to Paul Cutler.

Paul, Jim, the authors and I put some hours into this and I think it's worth it. Check it out.

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# 28 Mar 2010, 11:41AM: Angie Martin: Last week, bloggers commemmorated the annual Ada Lovelace Day. It's a day to honor influential and inspirational women in technology and science. To quote one participant,

We are not Unicorns. We are everywhere. But our history is easily submerged, discounted and dismissed. Too easily forgotten.

Following the Women in Free Software blog aggregator today showcases how many women, living and dead, deserve this honor. Please excuse my belated post; this was hard to write.

Last year I listed some of my influences; now I'm realizing that every year I'll have the chance to celebrate at least one person in depth, so I'm going to speak about someone I deeply wish I'd gotten to know better.

mySociety core developer Angie Martin changed her name from Angie Ahl a few months into 2009, when she got married, and a few months before she died.

I'd met her on the Systers email list in October 2007, when she'd mentioned that she was up for a job with a UK org that created systems that helped facilitate government-public interaction and democracy in general. She doubted any Systers outside the UK would have heard of them, so of course I emailed her asking, TheyWorkForYou/mySociety? She got the job, and was "so chuffed": "I've been grinning for about 48 hours now," she told me, her morale sky-high that she'd impressed these people she respected so much. And she'd beat out an all-male field for the job:

Who says girls can't compete.

This was after she'd worked several years as one of a two-person web design firm, which was after hostmaster work at an ISP.

I mentioned that I knew Danny O'Brien, who was also in the UK digital-rights/participatory-democracy-tech scene. "...small world - I know him from years of reading need to know. I was jokingly going to wear my old battered NTK T-shirt to the interview... I should have done ;)", she replied. We talked a bit back and forth over the next few years. I'd hoped to meet her on a trip to London, but she lived in Cumbria (in the Lakes Districts), so we never met up.

She migrated the mySociety website to WordPress even while ill. She went on an org retreat, and got an Ada Lovelace Day shout-out from her colleagues.

Angie is mySociety through and through. A born perl hacker, never happier than knee deep in some grungy regular expressions, she's also gifted with an inate understanding of the possibilities of technology for democratic reform. At interview I asked her what change she'd like to see happen from the government side of our sector, and she replied that she thought the biggest possible win was to publish Bills in parliament in a proper format. You might have heard all this before, thanks to Free Our Bills, but Angie was commenting several months before we ever discussed the idea for the campaign with anyone else. She'd just looked at the world and the obvious problem had jumped out, clear as day.

She was eager to see Open Rights Group grow, and to see fair usage rights in the UK established properly. She loved the idea of Quinn's Symphonic Conundrum and wished it could be done. She loved Perl and jested that a bone scan that briefly turned her radioactive might give her superpowers.

In February 2009, Ahl learned that her cancer was terminal. She got married about a month later -- about a year ago. (Her widower, Tommy, is a photographer, and he loved to photograph her.)

Martin died of cancer in July 2009, having only begun the mySociety work she'd passionately wanted to do. Her partner, her colleagues, and friends and peers grieved their loss:

Angie was one of the true pioneers of the Lasso community.

Her contribution to the Lasso community was absolutely immense.

Angie and I often talked offlist about ways to move our programming ahead - about how to bring levels of functionality into reality that no one else was doing yet. Her level of understanding of the most abstract concepts, and how turn them into code was absolutely astounding.

She pioneered the error.lasso method, which so many people use today. She was also the first to figure out how to build search engine friendly URL's with Lasso. She contributed a ton of innovations, too many to list. Her contribution to the Lasso community is immeasurable.....

The fact that Angie was talented enough that she could have walked into a very high paying job with virtually any company in the world she wanted to work for (and could have named her own price salary wise), but chose to use her skills and her time to help a not for profit organisation like mySociety, speaks volumes about the immense depth of her character....

Given her habit of plain speaking, it is pointless to pretend that Angie was able to make the contribution to mySociety’s users or codebase that she wanted to. What she achieved in terms of difficult coding during recovery from chemotherapy was incredible, breathtaking – but she wanted to change the world. It now falls to the rest of us, and our supporters, to live up to the expectations she embodied...

What's that saying about the last full measure of devotion?

I hope this remembrance helps us appreciate all the tough, brilliant, geeky, dedicated women in our community, and work in memory of the ones who have left us, like Martin.

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# (2) 14 Mar 2010, 10:18PM: Web: About eleven years ago, I saw a link from Slashdot to a geek humor site called Segfault. I started reading it, then started reading the homepage of one of the editors. Leonard Richardson. He posted something new nearly every day, like a diary. (I didn't know the word "blog" in 1999.) He shared funny lines from his friends, his mom, his colleagues. I kept reading.

About ten years ago, I started reading Joel on Software. Just a few years previous I'd discovered Gerald Weinberg, specifically his The Psychology of Computer Programming, and loved it. So this Joel guy was talking about things I found interesting, and was introducing lenses, metaphors, models that immediately spoke to me. Fire And Motion. Ben & Jerry's vs. Amazon. The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Managers as the developer's abstraction layer (I later heard the synonym "windshield"). Smart and Gets Things Done. The iceberg problem in software development. Five Worlds. Architecture astronauts. I could go on.

Almost exactly nine years ago, I saw a funny line ("Those guys are gods of applied physics!") in an article on SFGate, decided that Leonard guy would appreciate it, and sent it to him. He and I started corresponding, and then hanging out. I went down to Bakersfield with him one weekend to help his mom move. Eventually we started dating.

About four years ago, I saw another pivotal blog post. I was living in San Francisco, in my third year working for Salon, and realizing that I'd like to go into management, and this Joel guy announced that his company was looking for me. Well, for someone who wanted to lead geeks, not necessarily a programmer. I saw that post, then woke up at 3am the next day, thinking, "I have to apply."

I applied, thinking I hadn't a chance in hell. Joel phone-screened me. I'd been told to prepare a short lesson ahead of time, on a topic of my choosing. So I came up with my stand-up comedy lesson plan, which I still use today. He asked whether, if accepted, I could move out to New York the next month. I hesitated a second or two, then said sure. They flew me out for an interview. I got an offer and said yes. Fog Creek paid handsomely to relocate my household. Leonard, who had left Collabnet to work on Ruby Cookbook, came with me. He'd never seen New York before we arrived in January of 2006.

Leonard and I were unhappy that we were moving so far from his mom. Frances had been fighting HIV for more than a decade, and had lived far longer than the doctors had ever predicted, but her health was still perceptibly declining. So I told him he should fly back once a month to see her. But he didn't get much of a chance to do that, because her health started getting much, much worse a few months after we moved. Leonard flew back and spent several weeks with her as she died. I took some time off to go be with her; later I discovered that Fog Creek had quietly, kindly given me those days for free, and not counted them against my paid time off.

Of all the job perks I ever got at Fog Creek -- relocation, half a Columbia Master's paid for, lunches, Broadway tickets, unlimited sickleave, Metrocard, a great library -- that one sticks with me most.

Oh man, this thing is getting long. Anyway. I learned a lot from Joel, before, during, and after my time at Fog Creek. I appreciate his decisiveness, his straightforwardness, his species of eloquence and encouragement, his financial generosity, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his insight. Sure, it wasn't all roses and sunshine, but he changed my life, mostly for the better.

A few days from now, Joel Spolsky will retire from active blogging, ten years after he started. Leonard and I are married, and still live in New York, and will for the next year at least. We still miss Frances terribly. Segfault's been gone for nine years. My Fog Creek salary subsidized Leonard's work on Ruby Cookbook, then RESTful Web Services. I have a master's degree in tech management and am looking for my next job in that field. Fog Creek was 6 or 7 people when I arrived, and now it's thirty or more. All those articles of Joel's are up on the web, ready for us to reread or brandish or rip to ribbons.

And so are my archives, and Leonard's, and Frances's.

It really is a web, isn't it.

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# 14 Mar 2010, 03:20PM: QuahogCon and Open Source Bridge: In the US style, the date is now 3/14, which makes it Pi Day. Happy Pi Day! (I'll have to remember to celebrate Mole Day on 23 October; I always forget, despite Mr. Marson's success in making me love chemistry.)

More calendrical news: I'm going to QuahogCon in Providence, Rhode Island, April 23rd-25th. They have infosecurity and DIY/maker tracks. I'm especially interested in a few talks:

• Joan Pepin's Gender Hacking
• Jason Scott's TBD ("Jason gave us a blank slate to work with. We're going to come up with a crazy topic and have him speak on it.")
• Dan Kaminsky's New Research TBA
• Beginner Lock Picking

but of course there's way more advanced stuff about SQL injection and WiFi vulnerabilities and bone-chilling madness, &c., &c. Let me know if you're going; I'm interested in splitting a hotel room with another woman. WILL YOU BE HER?

I've also nearly decided to go to Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon, at the beginning of June (right after WisCon, which may be a bad idea). I've submitted a proposal for one talk ("The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits"), and plan on submitting one or two more.

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# (2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change: I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

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# 03 Feb 2010, 04:18PM: Change of Plans: Image nicked from Leo Antunes. (I thought about creating some sort of Belgian-waffle-with-a-NO-sign-on-it but this services.)

I'm not going to FOSDEM this year; change of plans. Perhaps next year.

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# 26 Jan 2010, 06:11PM: Tacky, Metacity, Encryption, tp-qt4, and Maemo: A few things Collabora folks have been working on recently (along with the constant stream of Telepathy-related releases):

Daf Harries released tacky, a simple python-based paste web app. Basically it's like a simpler version of pastebin, and you can install it on a private server in case you're talking about something confidential in private chat/IRC.

Thomas Thurman is looking for new contributors to mentor to help with Metacity (a window manager).

Cosimo Cecchi posted his TODO list for "a Telepathy implementation of the XTLS protocol, an end-to end-solution to crypt communication over XMPP". Cosimo and Eitan Isaacson are both working on encryption; Eitan has been plugging away at interactive certificate verification.

Andre Moreira Magalhaes is blogging to raise awareness of Telepathy-Qt4, a convenience library for people who want to use the Telepathy framework in their Qt applications.

And we've all been playing around with our N900 devices (Collabora company gifts). Tollef Fog Heen provides scripts & procedure to move SMSes and contacts from iPhone to N900, Felipe Zimmerle wrote an inclinometer, Jonny Lamb released a file transfer app and extra goodies to help you chat with people on lots of networks, and Thomas asks for testers for his new version of robotfindskitten.

Because we're hacking around, some of our apps you won't find in the default software repositories in the N900's applications manager. Here's a short guide:

Maemo Extras contains quality-controlled applications written by the community. It's installed on the device, but disabled by default.
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu, find "maemo.org", and untick Disabled.

Maemo Extras Testing contains the applications developers are preparing to update. There are lots of applications here and all need help in testing and validating. People can vote good applications up by visiting the application list; once enough people do that, an app moves to the regular Extras repo.

Still, these are not quite ready for prime time, so be cautious! One colleague offers this tip: "if you want to just find good quality applications within Extras-Testing, review this packaging list and find those with the most QA votes."
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu. Click "New" and add the following details:

• Catalogue Name: Maemo Extras testing
• Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing
• Distribution: fremantle
• Components: free non-free

("Fremantle" means Maemo 5, the version of the Maemo operating system that the N900 runs. "free non-free" tells the manager that you want both open source and closed source applications; change this if you want.)

Maemo Extras-Devel: contains untested and wildly variant applications that might harm your system. Use this repository sparingly since the applications are unstable.
To enable: follow directions on the maemo.org wiki.

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# (2) 24 Jan 2010, 11:06AM: Upcoming FOSDEM & UK Travel: I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, the first weekend in February. (Something like twenty of my Collabora colleagues will be there, including some I've never met before.) I've been to England & to Russia, but you can waffle around as to whether those are really Europe. But FOSDEM is in Brussels, Belgium! Very European, and makes its own waffles. I'll be arriving in Brussels a day or two before the conference proper. After it ends, I'll ride the Eurostar train (!) to England and see my Cambridge colleagues for about a week.

This is a management discussion trip and a seeing-people trip; as helpful as occasional facetime is for developers, it's essential for a manager like me. So, if you live in a bit of Europe or England such that it's easy for you to visit Brussels or Cambridge, I'd love to see you. And if you're giving a FOSDEM talk I absolutely must see, let me know! I'm interested in checking out:

• the Mozilla folks - I've mentioned the work Collabora's doing on Firefox for Mobile, and I'd like to learn more about WoMoz
• the Jabber/XMPP developers' room, including talks like "The Extraordinary, Magical Powers and Possibilities of XMPP", "PubSub Gone Wild", and of course "Multi-User Jingle: Voice and Video Conferencing with XMPP" by my colleagues Dafydd Harries & Sjoerd Simons
• Introduction to the GNOME Bugsquad
• My colleague Daniel Stone's "Polishing X11 and making it shiny"
• A variety of talks on optimizing performance -- MySQL (my previous notes on the subject), sysadmin tools Flapjack & cucumber-nagios, identi.ca, and Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, Scribe, and Thrift. I like learning about systematic performance monitoring and optimization.
• "Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company"
• Smuxi, "an advanced IRC client that solves the 'always available' problem in a graphical environment"
• "Hidden Pearls": "uniquely useful" code OpenOffice has that other projects should consider reusing
• "Tor: Building, Growing, and Extending Online Anonymity"
• Defending the development of no-future alternative OSes using insights drawn from queer theory
• Lightning talks on GNU Savannah (sort of a Launchpad competitor?), OpenERP, and the Kaizendo customizable schoolbooks project. I'm also oddly compelled by the mysterious "Open-source software: Blaming the unknown, or a constructive approach to technology".
• The Linux distributions developer room: "How to be a good upstream", "Mobile distributions and upstream challenges", a study of how Nokia and community folk govern the Maemo project together, and most excitingly, personnel management within Linux distributions

(I'll have to put together a list of all the Collabora talks soon.)

Family continuity note: Seven years ago, Leonard went to Belgium for the European Python conference. I helped him brush up on his French, he hung out with Jarno Virtanen & Taina Prusti, etc., etc., etc.

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# 14 Jan 2010, 03:49PM: Some Recent Collabora Open Source Development: Has it been three months since I provided a snapshot of Collaborans' open source work? Too long! Here's a taste of our work from the end of 2009 & the start of this year (and there's a lot I'm leaving out, like a bunch of Maemo work, because otherwise this entry would go on forever! I'm already several days out-of-date):

• Felix Kaser & Guillaume Desmottes hammered at the accounts user interface in our chat client, Empathy, to make it more intuitive and full-featured. In general, they did lots of Empathy fixes, triage, & chatting, on the way to Empathy 2.30. Speaking of which:
• We released version 2.29.4 and version 2.29.5 of the Empathy chat client. From the release notes:

  2.29.4: Empathy is now able to start SIP video calls using the new "New Call" dialog. It also indicates whether an incoming call contains video or is audio only. The contact list can now display the protocol used by contacts, and the accounts dialog shows the accounts' status (enabled/disabled, available/busy/away/offline, etc.).
  Thanks to K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy, Empathy gained icons for 4 protocols.

  2.29.5: The contact list has been improved to make it harder to accidentally call a contact when you just intended to select a row. The accounts dialog has been reworked to reduce the number of steps when adding a new account.
  Thanks to Thomas Meire, a new contributor, the nick auto-completion has been improved in rooms.
  We also fixed a bunch of crashes and a regression when starting a video call.

• Collabora continued working on Fennec, a.k.a. Firefox for Mobile. Specifically, Collabora is helping re-architect Firefox to be multi-process, via the "Electrolysis" project. After Electrolysis separates out processes in Firefox, each window/tab will live in its own process. If it crashes or needs to be killed, then it won't take down the rest of your browser with it. Plugins will also live in their own process, which also improves your security: Electrolysis puts them in a sort of sandbox, so a badly written (or malicious) plugin can't hurt you too badly. You might have heard of this innovation in Google's Chrome browser. (Chrome is based on the WebKit engine, and Firefox is based on the competing Gecko engine.) So Electrolysis will make the UI more responsive in Firefox for Mobile, but it's not just for Firefox Mobile -- once this separation gets implemented in Gecko, your desktop Firefox will get those stability and performance improvements as well.

  Frédéric Plourde is working on Electrolysis for Collabora. Check out our notes, the Electrolysis team status board, and the Firefox For Mobile discussion board.

  

• We published a bunch of useful blog posts, especially Maemo 5 sample code from Danielle Madeley & Jonathon Jongsma, syndicated to the company planet (metablog).
• Gustavo Noronha is working on buildbots for the Telepathy real-time communication framework and the WebKit browser engine, to automate the building and testing of those codebases.
• Dariusz Mikulski & George Goldberg are nearly nearly done implementing Telepathy-based desktop sharing using Kopete (a KDE chat client).
• Dariusz also started on a Tubes-enabled multiplayer chess game for Maemo 5.
• Youness El Alaoui handed over his first design & implementation of Teamgeist to the Zeitgeist team. Zeitgeist introduces automatic activity logs and pervasive search to help you remember, research, and collaborate.
• David Laban and Simon McVittie started on the telepathy-fargo project, which will allow anyone to set up a server with an XMPP gateway to facilitate people calling each other over the Internet. "telepathy-fargo is an XMPP server component allowing XMPP users to sign in to a SIP account (in the future, any other account supported by a Telepathy connection manager) and use it to call other SIP users." Look for more developments in telepathy-fargo in the next several weeks.
• Eitan Isaacson (eeejay) started at Collabora. He's been investigating metacontacts (having Empathy know that your friend Leela on AIM and your friend Leela on GTalk are the same person), and working on certificate verification in Telepathy (for encrypting your conversations and keeping them private).

• We released telepathy-gabble 0.9.3, with several bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for details). Telepathy-gabble is the Jabber (XMPP) connection manager for Telepathy. The development version of Gabble currently uses Wocky, a new XMPP library we're developing that makes it easier to provide more modern XMPP features. Sjoerd Simons's, Vivek Dasmohapatra's & Mike Ruprecht's recent work on multi-user Jingle (Muji) includes a lot of work with telepathy-gabble -- we're working on multi-user chat support that'll eventually allow multi-user video chat right from your desktop. Sjoerd and Vivek especially have been getting Wocky multi-user chat code into telepathy-gabble and are quite excited about it.
• Olivier Crête released Farsight2 version 0.0.17 to support packet time (the duration of a voice packet in milliseconds, a.k.a. ptime), and a corresponding update to telepathy-farsight, version 0.0.13. Farsight, also known as Farstream, is an audio/video communications framework that lets apps work with lots of different protocols, and the telepathy-farsight library lets Empathy use it. Olivier says that in the new release, "Farsight 2 was updated to respect the ptime requested by the peer. This can dramatically improve the quality of audio calls when interoperating with certain broken gateways."
• The Telepathy mailing list saw discussion around encryption & immutability, partially toward the goal of helping users keep their conversations private.
• Ian Molton now has a working reimplementation of AF_UNIX as AF_DBUS, towards an goal of implementing in-kernel D-Bus, and Will Thompson hacked on the D-Bus specification and daemon. D-Bus is an inter-process communication system that applications use to communicate -- Telepathy among them -- and getting D-Bus running in the kernel will help performance by avoiding context switching. At the moment, AF_DBUS changes are fully buildable and operational, but lack a bus topology.

The photos here are all from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year, which was warm and fun. January (here in the Northern Hemisphere) is a good time to remember how nice that was.

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# (6) 19 Dec 2009, 07:54PM: Everything I Knew (About Battery Care) Was Wrong: Today I learned that I've been working from an obsolete understanding of how to keep my cellphone and laptop batteries from losing gobs of capacity over time. A simplistic summary follows for your benefit.

The batteries in my phone and my work laptop are lithium-ion batteries. Check yours -- the "Li-Ion" abbreviation means it's lithium-ion. As detailed sources explain, charging/discharging battery care for lithium ion batteries is the opposite of the conventional wisdom I had in my head, left over from the old days of nickel-based rechargeable batteries.

It used to be that you'd want to run batteries all the way down before starting to charge them again, because otherwise the capacity might get messed up. That's not true with lithium-ion batteries; it's recommended that you only rarely let an Li-Ion battery run down below 10% of its charge.

Lithium-ion batteries lose capacity, in the long run, if they sit overcharging a lot, or if they run hot a lot. So don't let them sit plugged into a charger all the time, and if you usually run your laptop plugged into AC power, think about removing the battery and setting it someplace cooler.

The moment a lithium-ion battery gets manufactured, it slowly starts losing capacity. So buying a primary battery + a spare battery simultaneously might be a worse decision than using a primary battery, then getting the spare battery years later, when your capacity has substantially degraded.

This came up because I assumed I should let my new N900 run down completely (on the partial battery charge from the factory) before plugging it in, and I was annoyed that plugging in the USB-to-microUSB cable to transfer files meant it was getting juice while the battery hadn't totally discharged. But I was wrong to worry! Thanks for straightening me out, Sjoerd.

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# 23 Nov 2009, 06:03PM: Can't Play Tour Guide Without A Map: GNOME Journal just published my Telepathy overview, and my colleague Danielle Madeley's "Telepathy, Empathy and Mission Control 5 in GNOME 2.28".

I'm not a developer, but I can at least help create accessible documentation. Telepathy world domination depends on accessible documentation: like the Telepathy book, but even more so. Newbs likely have trouble finding comprehensive overviews of some aspects of Telepathy: design issues, misconceptions, and the status of various efforts. They come to #telepathy (on irc.freenode.net) and ask us questions, or just drop the idea of developing with Telepathy, or struggle in silence and make mistakes.

Danielle's book and article will help. I hope my article helps. I've made a small list of areas where I think a concise "here's the deal as of today" blog post or article or mailing list post (or wiki page clarification) would be cool. Basically, they're what I've had to learn to grok the direction & momentum of the project. I hope to create, improve or encourage friendly overviews of the following (in my Copious Spare Time):

(a) the major connection managers & their state of readiness/stability
(b) the up-&-coming CMs and their potential promise (e.g. yafono)
(c) mobile, Moblin, maemo-extras
(d) encryption/privacy/OTR/SRTP issues
(e) Muji/wocky work
(f) expanding our reach to KDE
(g) testy stuff like telepathy-ashes & echobot
(h) Teamgeist
(i) Python bindings

Anything to add to that list?

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# (8) 10 Nov 2009, 01:26PM: Here It Comes: The Queen has approved Leonard's dependent partner's visa, so it's now official: in about a month, we'll be moving to Cambridge, England, so I can work side-by-side with colleagues at Collabora headquarters. Many more details to follow.

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# (3) 20 Oct 2009, 05:51PM: Collabora Open Source Development Overview, 4-20 October 2009: Collabora, my company, does open source development. We don't just build on top of open source frameworks; every day, Collabora developers are hacking in the open on multiple projects.

I decided to blog about some of what we've done in the last couple of weeks.

First, our flagship project, Telepathy:

• David Laban's new echobot helps test text and audio chat in Empathy.
• Mike Ruprecht got the telepathy-haze connection manager to do audio-video calls successfully; people on more and more networks and protocols will be able to use Empathy for audio and video chat.
• Andres Salomon backported Empathy to debian-stable (lenny).
• Will Thompson, Rob McQueen, and Sjoerd Simons drafted a Telepathy spec for encrypted channels and how that works for off-the-record conversations.
• Siraj Razick, Simon McVittie, and Dariusz Mikulski worked on cleaning up some Telepathy-on-Windows code; Dariusz is making sure the contributions the RealXtend developers have made can make it upstream.
• In the oFono world, Olivier Lê Thanh Duong shepherded an oFono patch through, and Andres uploaded oFono 0.8 for Debian.
• Jonny Lamb uploaded new Debian packages of Empathy and telepathy-gabble (Telepathy's Jabber/XMPP connection manager, which can handle single- and multi-user chats and voice/video calls), in addition to lots of other Empathy work.
• Vivek Dasmohapatra worked on telepathy-gabble and wocky (XMPP library).
• And several Telepathy components saw new releases:
  • Empathy 2.28.1. Many fixes and updated translations.
  • telepathy-gabble 0.8.6 and 0.8.7. Improvements in the stable branch.
  • papyon release 0.4.3. Bugfixes in the library behind telepathy-butterfly, Telepathy's MSN connection manager.
  • telepathy-butterfly 0.5.2. Adds support for chatting with contacts who are offline, or who have marked themselves invisible.
  • telepathy-qt4 0.1.11. New API, API changes, enhancements and fixes to Telepathy's high-level binding for Qt 4.
  • telepathy-glib 0.9.1 and 0.8.1. Bugfixes for Telepathy's GObject binding, unstable & stable branches respectively.
  • telepathy-farsight 0.0.12. Bugfixes in the Farstream library that Empathy uses.

Collaborans also worked on Tubes, Teamgeist (part of Zeitgeist), Maemo packages, GStreamer, Farstream, and other projects. Just a few items, because it would be exhausting to cover everything:

• Will hacked together a proof-of-concept for showing ongoing conversations in the Gnome Shell.
• Gabriel Millaire has started implementing SRTP support in GStreamer (with guidance from Olivier Crête and a little advice from Sjoerd Simons).
• Abner Silva got contact list group support and file transfer in Kopete, the KDE chat client, merged to upstream.
• Helio Chissini de Castro did a few Qt and KDE patches and fixes, Gustavo Noronha did a great deal of WebKitGTK+ and GNOME Shell hacking and packaging work, and Thomas Thurman worked on CSS-on-window-borders in Metacity.

Collabora also encourages its staffers to go to conferences to talk about open source. Last weekend, participants in the GNOME Boston Summit and the Amsterdam Maemo Summit led several discussions (Marco Barisione's Telepathy on Maemo slides are especially valuable).

And more FLOSS conferences are coming up soon: Gustavo will be at a WebKitGTK+ hackfest in Spain in December, and Helio will be at Latinoware 2009 later this week in Brazil.

Sorry to those I left out or didn't link. This list is obsolete even as I hit Post...

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# (4) 08 Oct 2009, 11:44PM: An Oversimplified Cliffs Notes To Telepathy:

Lots of people have never heard of my company or its projects -- even fairly plugged-in geeks often say "who?" or say "Oh yeah, the Subversion people." (No, that's Collabnet, where Leonard used to work.) So this post is specifically for my friends, to help explain one thing my company is doing that is cool. I'm going to simplify a lot so I hope my colleagues and other hard-core geeks don't wince too much.

It is annoying to have to log in to a bunch of different chat services to reach all your friends. MSN, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Bonjour, blah blah blah. You may not think this is related, but it's also annoying that if I want to work with someone on a document and we're at different computers, I can't use my regular word processor, I have to load up a web browser with Google Docs. And it's annoying to have your cell phone text messages (SMS) in a different place from your other chats.

These are all aspects of real-time communication. As my colleague Danielle put it,

The Telepathy project is helping solve all these problems. Telepathy is a project aiming to give desktop applications (like word processors, jukeboxes, CAD programs, and games) a way to painlessly integrate instant messaging and VoIP (voice over IP) telephony features. In more technical language, in Telepathy, Collabora aims to develop a real-time communications framework for the desktop and embedded devices.

My boss, Rob McQueen, was one of the Telepathy inventors, and I work for Collabora, the company he co-founded. We hope programmers will use Telepathy to improve your computer and cell phone and get rid of the annoyances I mentioned above, and create neat applications and services. We've already gotten started.

Here's one way of viewing the Telepathy framework. It has three essential parts:

1. a bunch of Connection Managers, each handling the interaction with a protocol, such as Google Talk, XMPP, various VoIP (internet phone call) services, or AOL Instant Messenger
2. Mission Control, managing accounts and channels (the individual protocol-bound pipelines that your messages go through)
3. a specification, telling all the parts how to interact (very technical)

This design gives Telepathy a lot of flexibility. If a new interesting service comes along, like Facebook chat, we can just write a new Connection Manager for it and bam, anything that uses Telepathy can now interact with it. And there are a lot of text, voice, and video chat networks! Who knows what other interesting collaboration or communication networks might hook into Telepathy someday?

Another important aspect of Telepathy's architecture is D-Bus. Telepathy is primarily a project for the open source Linux operating system. It's built on D-Bus, a piece of Linux infrastructure that lets applications, frameworks, and low-level system components talk to each other. So that means Telepathy can act like a wormhole, not just between two different people's computers, but between unassuming regular ol' apps on their desktops. You and a friend can collaborate on writing a paper together right in your word processor, or play a game against each other. And you can do it without having to deal with a slow, limited web app in a web browser.

In case you are a geek and find this interesting: There's an entire online book with more detail, and a system overview with a pretty graphic. And of course we're an open source project and you're welcome to join us.

In the real world, even regular folks like you and I are getting the benefit of Telepathy with (for example) the new N900 smartphone. Evidence of Telepathy's awesomeness is in the addressbook -- it combines your friends' various text chat, phonecall, and other contact info in the same screen, rather than making you use separate programs.

I use Telepathy every day, because I use the Empathy chat program to talk to my AIM and Google Talk friends all in one tidy window. Telepathy has made some other cool applications possible; I wrote about them for the new Collabora website, and if people want, I'll post a little about those.

Note to self: in future posts, explain GStreamer, Farstream, WebKit, Electrolysis, and how we make money.

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# 08 Sep 2009, 11:24AM: Three Great Marketing Moves:

1. Leonard and I attended a preview screening of the Coen Brothers' film The Man Who Wasn't There and got a promotional comb. We still have and use it, several moves later.
2. I was chary of jumping into Battlestar Galactica without seeing the miniseries and all the episodes in order. Then one day, at the cash register at Midtown Comics, I saw a stack of free DVDs. Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far. The iTunes store gave it away for free, too. I watched the clip montage summary and got sucked in, and from then on watched each new episode
3. My colleague Thomas Thurman is blogging a tutorial on developing applications for the Nokia N900 smartphone.

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# 03 Sep 2009, 05:30PM: First: I'm in Boston for a couple of days, co-working with my colleague Andres Salomon, a.k.a. dilinger. He's been hacking on oFono on Collabora's dime, and last night's 0.4 release included work by Andres to add support for HTC G1 (the Dream) modem devices.

The oFono project is trying to be a well-designed interface to all the cell phone goodies -- texting, making cell phone calls, etc. Developers will be able to integrate their applications with the oFono architecture. With Andres's work, oFono now has its first working full-featured (voice calls + SMS) driver on a handset.

In case this interests you: Andres has uploaded a Debian package for oFono -- you should see it wend its way to the public soon. The future will also include a Telepathy Connection Manager for oFono; stay tuned.

Update: package accepted.

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# (1) 29 Aug 2009, 09:22PM: Blog Move And Thunderbird Tip: I've now moved from my old webspace at the Open Computing Facility (at the University of California at Berkeley) to space on a server that Leonard controls. So this is a test post to mark the divergence of those old archives and this now-canonical space for the blog at harihareswara.net (redirecting from brainwane.net once the DNS propagates, etc.).

Let's have some useful content to keep it interesting: let's say you're using Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client, perhaps on Ubuntu Linux, and let's say you want your email replies to include the date of the email you're replying to. I found this tip helpful:

1. use the Edit: Preferences dialog box
2. go to Advanced
3. click the advanced configuration editor
4. type 'reply' into the filter box to search for configuration entries that include the string 'reply'
5. click on the reply header type line
6. double click that
7. change 1 to 2
8. close/OK all the windows, you should be set

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# (2) 20 Jul 2009, 07:45AM: Found Poetry: Inadvertently lyrical lines overheard at the virtual water cooler:

and if that package doesn't build, I'll need to give it another poke

and when we get the screen, we test and choose

I'm back in New York City.

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# (3) 17 Jul 2009, 11:34AM: More Notes From The Office: Sure, it's usually true that a job interview is going well if the conversation goes swimmingly, with no 90-second interruptions for explanations. But not if I'm interviewing a Brit. What's a second-class degree? What's a "supervisory" in this context? And so on.

From today's IRC conversation, after I pointed people to IKEA tumbler hacking:

* sumanah kills the entire company's productivity; secretly working for [competitor]

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# (1) 14 Jul 2009, 10:15AM: Obvious Tech Talk Q&A Prep: A certain species of tech talk goes like: "Here's a product/methodology/tool I hack on, here's what it's good for and how/why you should add it to your toolkit." It's an honorable and useful presentation topic. As you prepare your talk, think about the questions your audience will have in the back of its head. If you can address them in the talk itself, great. If not, prepare answers for use in the questions-and-answers session.

Common questions:

• How do I get started using it?
• Why should I use this instead of the competition?
• Security implications?
• Performance implications? ("Yes, but does it scale?")
• Who's using this in real life?
• Where's the project going next? What do you need help with?
• What language is it written in?
• Why did you name it that?

The most important question is the one you hope no one asks because the answer is embarrassing. What would your smartest enemy ask?

(List developed while helping Youness practice his libnice talk last week.)

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# (1) 14 Jul 2009, 07:13AM: The Home Office: I am finishing some berry tea from a ninja-logoed mug. I am in an office a few floors above the ground, across the road from King's College. I see English summer light and the college spires through the open window. We laugh out loud when someone says something funny on IRC, and then laugh again at someone's one-upping reply. It's Tuesday, so we're going to eat pizza at the two-for-one Tuesdays pizza place. The noon chimes just rang. I have a huge TODO list. Two of those items are making proper TODO lists from meeting notes.

I am happy.

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# 10 Jul 2009, 11:39PM: My Standby Joke: A few times in the past year, I've taken the risk of leaning over to an English-speaking stranger in the airport, one who's wearing a suit or the like, and saying, "Ah, the glamor of business travel." It hasn't yet failed to get a laugh.

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# 30 Jun 2009, 07:57PM: Gran Canaria Talks by Collaborans: I think this is the complete schedule of talks that my colleagues are giving at the Desktop Summit this year.

Sat. 4 July
"QtScript bindings for Telepathy" - lightning talk by Ian Monroe, 15:30-16:30

Sun. 5 July
"The location-aware desktop" by Beaudoin, Pierre-Luc with Henri Bergius: 11:30, Room 2

"Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs" by William Thompson: 12:30pm, Room 1

"Integrating VideoConferencing into Everyday Applications" by Olivier Crete: 12:30, Room 4

Tues. 7 July 2009
"Let's make GNOME a collaborative desktop" by Guillaume Desmottes: 11:00 - 11:45

"How to play libnice-ly with your NAT" by Youness El Alaoui: 15:00

"Pitivi Video Editor" by Edward Hervey: 15:45

Thurs. 9 July 2009
"Introduction to GStreamer development Tutorial" by Wim Taymans: 15:00

Fri. 10th July
"Tools for Authoring Awesome Docs" by Davyd Madeley: 11:00

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# 29 Jun 2009, 04:15PM: Getting (Irrelevant) Things Done: I am bikeshedding my own yak-shaving. This should win an award.

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# 29 Jun 2009, 03:04PM: Travel Schedule: I'm going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. Developers, managers, and other free software enthusiasts in the GNOME and KDE communities get together on the Canary Islands, which are technically part of Spain but sit off the coast of Africa. Then I spend a week in Cambridge, England, working alongside my fellow Collaborans. Yup, it's all for work, and I won't even think about bringing a suit (other than a bathing suit).

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# (3) 16 Jun 2009, 02:30PM: On Dentistry: I went to the dentist last night, specifically at the NYU College of Dentistry. I actually prefer the dental school experience to many private practice dentistries. The wait in the waiting room is shorter (2 hours per appointment actually spent in the chair, rather than an hour in intermittent waiting plus an hour in the chair), I get treated by eager-to-learn dentists in training rather than bored, laconic hygienists, and the student dentists are thorough and communicative. And they offer a 6pm-8pm slot. Very few private practices do.

Young student dentist Stringer was the one to phone me up to set up an appointment. He was more deft, gentle, and patient than several DDSes I've patronized. "Oh, you build up a lot of calculus here, because of your salivary gland. I have that too," he confided. He checked in with me about whether the ultrasonic cleaning dealie was running too hot and hurting me. "I don't like to use it, I don't think it's gentle enough," he said. He handed me the suction wand: "Raise your hand if you need me to stop so you can suction."

In further stereotype-demolishing, Stringer does not play World of Warcraft (nor does he wear Ira Glass glasses). My cousin-in-law-in-law Aaron, husband of Kristen, is on the road to full Dentistdom and enjoys WoW-style games. [pun about grinding omitted]

I told Stringer what his last name means in journalism; in retrospect, he has a new occupational surname, like Smith or Cooper.

I get curious about others' occupations. Firefighters, CAD designers, directors, transcriptionists, silversmiths, pastors, teachers, full-time caretakers, taxi drivers, deli owners, X-ray technicians, soldiers, construction workers, dentists. How does doing your job change the way you interact with others?

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# 25 Apr 2009, 07:56PM: Translation Of A Truth: I reread much of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon a few weeks ago and found this passage:

"We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.

"I don't understand."

"If you want to understand, look out the window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here--" he points to his head "--in the intelligence of the people, and here--" he holds out his hands "--in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

--p. 858, paperback

"Our wealth is work," the man said.

More decade-old Stephenson analysis coming later tonight.

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# (4) 23 Apr 2009, 06:45AM: Learning: In the last two weeks, I have learned rather a lot about configuring and troubleshooting usage of Empathy, Telepathy, Synaptic, PPAs, git, TeX/LaTeX/dvi, gtimelog, IRC and bip, RSA SSH, and XMPP. Well, it was a lot to me.

I've also learned that if I want to get up around 6am consistently, I have to go to bed around 9 or 10pm consistently, and that if I work in a windowless rented office then I won't know till I leave that it's raining. So I'll just be making a cameo at the io9/Tor.com shindig tonight, and I'm trying to pay attention to the weather symbols in the clock gadget in my taskbar.

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# 18 Apr 2009, 08:04AM: Ramping Up: In my first week at Collabora, I've learned that I can stand to poke at .conf, .rc, and similar files for at most two hours out of my working day. I've also learned that the Ubuntu version of Firefox doesn't give me a warning if I hit Back after typing form data on a webpage; not sure how to fix that. The Lenovo x200 ThinkPad is light and small, and I'm adjusting well to the nub-mouse, but there's a dedicated Back key right where my fingers think the left arrow key is, which gives me a few "arrghs" a day. I may dedicate some fiddling time next week to disabling that key. And I renew my grief that IRC is not a common feature of every office environment.

As lead project manager I'm to keep on top of all the work we do, for clients and for the community in general. So this week I've been drawing diagrams of technology stacks and who's doing what, and memorizing thirty real name/IRC nickname pairs. If I were Juanita from Snow Crash I would be developing face-based avatars for all my new colleagues, but since I am not perhaps I should get a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons figurines and set them up on a campaign map representing VoIP, embedded Linux, mobile, etc., etc.

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# 11 Apr 2009, 07:50PM: This Retrospective, In Retrospect, Has A Theme: An abbreviated diary of the past few days, mostly for future Sumana's use:

Wednesday I went to Supper and the Sci-Fi Screening Room with a journalist who opines that it's his God-given right to drink scotch at his desk when he's on deadline.

Thursday I saw Tim Wu, Stuart, Jena, and Hailey as we hashed out next steps and plans for AltLaw. I stopped by Midtown Comics after; Hal had put aside the new Ambush Bug compendium for Leonard.

Friday night: Matt Weinstein, an old Berkeley pal, came to town, so I met him and some friends of his at The Silent H, a shockingly good Vietnamese place in Williamsburg. At Queensboro Plaza on the way there, I talked to a guy who was reading Cryptonomicon on the platform, and envied aloud that he's on his first reading. At the restaurant I met a Captain-Hammer-shirt-wearing friend of his who cemented his worth by trading Cryptonomicon references and quotes with me for twenty minutes.

This morning: breakfast and The Met with Anne and her sister Sarah, Anne being a woman I met online when I sought WisCon attendees who'd let me sleep on their floors. We got along great and I'm sure I'll learn a lot about scifi fandom from her. At my place, this evening, I did some career coaching with my friend Rebecca and helped her improve her LinkedIn profile.

In conclusion, dorkiness got me everything I adore in my life.

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# (3) 02 Apr 2009, 08:35AM: If You Read This To The End You Get To See Inside My Marriage: I watched the interview Jon Stewart did with Jim Cramer a few weeks ago. If you're the kind of person who loves Jon Stewart's work, you probably heard about it.

Stewart's key critiques of CNBC:

Financial news that focuses on short term profits and stock tips is an unhealthy market force. Financial reporting has a responsibility to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true profits and investigate companies and trends that produce them. Finance experts who know about a house of cards have a responsibility to tell the public. It's irresponsible to cheerlead unsustainable bull markets, persuading laypeople to invest in "responsible" retirement plans, then blame evil CEOs and weak regulators after the inevitable crash. Saying people can get wealth without doing work to create value is disingenuous and possibly criminal.

Salon followed up on many of these substantive critiques, not just following the blast and noise of Media Titan Confrontation. "On "Mad Money," Cramer back to normal": he was contrite on the Daily Show, then the next day he minimized the whole thing and kept on doing his normal schtick. More insidiously, "There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer: The mindless complicity in disseminating false claims is not aberrational media behavior; it is, as they acknowledge, the crux of what they do." Greenwald compares recent finance reporting to prewar Iraq reporting.*

Stewart's most controversial point, and one that hasn't been discussed as much in the mass media, is in the last part of my summary: cheerleading unsustainable bull markets, and encouraging investment rather than work as a way to wealth, is wrong. His words:

But isn't that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don't have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we're workers and by selling this idea that of "Hey man, I'll teach you how to be rich," how is that any different than an infomercial?

"Our wealth is work...we're workers." I asked Leonard to help me figure out why, when a political candidate praises work and workers, it sounds like cant, but Stewart's phrasing felt subversive. He pointed out that the word "workers" and identification with the working class remind people of Marxism. Oh yeah, that. Also, "wealth" usually means earnings and/or capital -- cash, real estate, securities, some financial instrument or an item that can be sold in the open market for cash. But Stewart is saying that our wealth, the prize that we've earned, isn't money, but our ability to earn money. Our asset is the ability to create assets.

Again, identification with the working class. But it's a short step from that to rabble-raising populist demagoguery, which Stewart and Colbert make fun of. A lot. Possibly while engaging in it.

'You say ... I want to keep this homicidal fury forever!' [side-annotation: Hysteria, Our Only Growth Industry] 'But, Stephen, your Thunderdome idea will kill all the CEOs, and there'll be no one left to force through the man-sized paper shredder!' But I say: we will never run out of scapegoats. Because if we focus on pitchforks and vengeance, instead of the fundamental problems that got us here, soon, we'll have plenty of new criminal banks and irresponsible CEOs to start all over again. And we can cry 'Off with their heads!' -- and we'll never have to keep ours.

I get annoyed that the TDS/TCR audience cheers so loud, gilding the lily at every punchline. But sometimes their silence is a tell. When Stewart tossed off that key phrase, "our wealth is work," and when Colbert made his point about scapegoating, the audience was too stunned to clap. This reminds me of a similar moment from Colbert's interview with Daniel Gilbert, happiness expert, June 27, 2007, about 3:45 into the interview:

DG: "It turns out that kids have a very small effect on people's happiness, and the effect tends to be negative. But you'd be happy to hear-"

SC: "Wait wait wait..."

DG: "Well, it means that people with children tend to be a little less happy than people without them, and the more children they have, the less happy they turn out to be."

SC: "Now, are you confusing happiness with the feeling of the sublime? Because children are a pain in the ass. Okay, I'll grant you that. But the feeling that comes with children, I have found, is a feeling of -- that is superior to happiness."

DG: "Yeah, of course."

SC: "That is the sublime feeling. And the sublime comes from beauty."

DG: "The happiness that children give you is a little like the refrigerator light. Every time you look, it's on. Every time you think about your kids, you're happy. The problem is, they're a pain in the ass more often than you're thinking about them."

SC: "Well, that's interesting."

So this is a big shaggy dog story where I end up trying to convince Leonard, who enjoys Colbert but doesn't like to watch the interviews, to start watching the whole show. Because sometimes stuff like that comes out, where you see the real Colbert peek through, this witty improv-loving geek with a background in Catholicism and Tolkien. Basically, it's the Brendan Leonard show!

* Salon, ProPublica, New Assignment, and similar ventures are trying to do good journalism that avoids the inherent blindspots of traditional mass media. In a similar vein, I'm fond of Fred Clark's suggestion that a Work section replace the Business section.

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# (7) 01 Apr 2009, 09:17AM: New Awesome Work: Martin and I are co-founding a new firm to produce the PoTeaTo, a food-and-beverage convergence device targeted at the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simply drop the PoTeaTo into a small pot of boiling water and watch the seam split, revealing two pre-blanched potato halves and one strong teabag! Boil them together and you'll have a meal and the drink to go with it.

Just kidding. Actually, starting in a couple of weeks, I'll be working at Collabora, an open source consulting firm. I'll be managing projects and helping them develop awesome tools like the Telepathy framework and the Empathy instant messaging/IRC/VoIP/video chat application. Yes, people are using the phrase "Skype-killer."

I'll get to telecommute (casual day every day!), advance the cause of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, and facilitate the work of dozens of geeky colleagues around the world.

Exciting! The PoTeaTo shall have to wait (in a dry, dark, cool place).

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# 01 Apr 2009, 07:40AM: The Long View: Throughout Jody Procter's memoir Toil: Building Yourself, a diary of his work helping build one specific house in a small Oregon city, Procter aches for the weekend, feels hopeful and buoyant working through Friday afternoon, and buys himself little treats at the 7-11 on the Friday drive home. The rhythm of building tension and weekly release thrums over and over again. The end of the March 17th entry:

I have been taking my watch off or leaving it in the car to try to keep from looking at it. 10:56. 2:05. Seeing those dead hours in the middle of the day demoralizes me. Now, this afternoon, I put my watch on, the better to savor the slow pace of the last hour and a half of the week. The sun has disappeared. The clouds rolls in. A few sprinkles fall and the air is cool and fragrant with the budding flowers of spring and the moist, freshly cut grass of the golf course. I am happier and happier as the final minutes of the work week tick by.

On my drive home I think, if you could only bottle that Friday after-work feeling and sell it to people, you could make so much money you could stop work and then you would never have that Friday after-work feeling again. Unless you indulged in your own product. And probably, after a while, you'd get addicted to it, it would lose its kick, it would turn out to have negative side-effects and all would be lost and in ruins. You would lose your fortune and have to go back to work and then some Friday you would be driving home and you would have that Friday after-work feeling all over again.

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# 28 Mar 2009, 02:33PM: A Book Review About Leadership: I mostly wrote this book review in the fall of 2008.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

by Norman Dixon

1976

On The Psychology of Military Incompetence is 400 pages long, and worth savoring. Its fundamental question: Given that information is the reduction of uncertainty, how do leaders of different temperaments react to information? The author limits himself to cases of British incompetence in battle, but of course you can extrapolate from that.

Dixon clearly but steadily builds his case against the prewar British military. The one-line summary is: culture stagnates into convention, which drives out the unconventionality you need to succeed. More nuances ahead.

From Skeleton to Prison Cell

Dixon shows that to advance in the British armed forces, in peacetime, demanded rule-following and an authoritarian mindset. But the mission of a military is to win wars, and that requires fluidity and a willingness to take risks -- and offend superiors.

So, what happened when peacetime promotions hit a war zone? Disaster -- in the Crimea, in southern Africa, all over Europe in the First World War, over and over again. Soldiers' courage and tenacity get their generals out of the holes they dig.

In general, institutions get the leaders who fit into those institutions and succeed at the unstated goals (for example, avoid retreats at all cost, impress politicians, keep civilians uninformed and complacent). If the unstated goals don't line up with the institution's stated goals, then leaders will tend to do the things they've been rewarded for in the past, especially in moments of high stress and low certainty. Therefore, in battle, bad commanders freeze up, wait for orders, ignore new information to appear "decisive," give panicked and contradictory orders, lie to maintain their personal reputations, and so on. And disaster happens, over and over again.

In Dixon's view, the British military suffered from groupthink and valued particular upper-class traits over merit. It's astonishing that military personnel would need to be told that the map is not the territory, the signifier not the signified, but indeed they cared more about the signs and forms of morale and professionalism (such as clean clothes and polished brass) than about warm clothes, edible food, and working equipment.

Narcotic Assumptions, Lenses & Blinders

I'm in India as I write this and dealing with my own need for shiny appearances. I often forget, once I return to the States, that I find -- for example -- hermetically sealed bathrooms reassuring. My parents live in a home where the plumbing and electrical work aren't consistently hidden beneath stucco and sideboards, and it surprises me how much that bothers me. I haven't seen any marked crosswalks in their city, either; we watch for a lull in the bicycles, mopeds, and rickshaws, then rush over the dusty, rocky street. No accidents yet.

I consciously desire function over form, but that only works if I can convince myself to rely on an ugly-looking system to work.

I calm myself with a fallacious appeal to statistics: if something's wrong, it would have broken already. If other people depend on similarly rickety-looking setups, then they must be dependable. Or I just go straight to infantilism and believe my parents wouldn't put me in danger.

Seth Godin recently wrote about the "edifice complex". He reminded us that, in times of uncertainty and stretched budgets, when we can least afford the "organized waste" of facades, we find them most reassuring.

In good times, insecurities and rationalizations like mine are a luxury. In battle and competition, they're delectable poison.

British commanders, similarly, clung to the false clarity of their chain of command, "masculinity," pride, and privileges when they faced the mess of battle. They feared shame more than they minded losing men, and they scorned the "motherly" chores (or retreats) that would ensure troop survival and readiness.

Valiant forays are masculine, but feints and retreating are girly? Again, ideology got in the way of success, as when insecure commanders pooh-poohed nonwhite adversaries, self-improvement, and new technology.

The lesson: Real self-confidence doesn't need ideology as a crutch. The flipside: if you see someone leaning on received assumptions, and repeating them rather loudly, it's because without them he wouldn't know who he was.

Leaderships

The argument above takes up most of the book. In an aside, Dixon suggests that "senior commanders have often to fill a number of incompatible roles": heroic leader, military manager, and technocrat, plus politician, PR man, father figure, and therapist. This is of special interest to me.

I've learned models describing styles of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and whatnot. These days I'm more interested in the balance among managing up, down, and sideways. Reading these books and thinking aloud about them helps me get perspective. What leg of that tripod have I been shorting?

Works thematically related to On the Psychology of Military Incompetence: Dilbert, the Harvard/NASA case study on the Columbia shuttle disaster, and John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama.

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# 27 Mar 2009, 02:46PM: Ada Lovelace Day, Belatedly: I am abashed and thankful that Rachel and Danny thought to mention me in speaking of women in tech on Ada Lovelace Day. I offer a sidelong glimpse into a short list of my influences Right Now Today:

A woman, my manager at Exodus, a history major or something, whose career path reassured me that CS wasn't the only way into interesting tech jobs. I thank you, Jed, for making a similar point -- QA, tech writing, education, design, sysadmin, and management are damn cool.

Marissa Mayer at Google might be, among other things, Google's Steve Jobs, and inspired me to think more about product design leadership.

Rachel Chalmers, of course.

Mel Chua, who reminds me to learn about how I'm learning, and that my default answer should be "yes, I can do that."

And all my Systers. I thank them for daily popping up in my inbox, being the friendliest forum for questions stupid and subtle, and reminding me that we are legion, diverse, wage slave and entrepreneur bare-metal hacker and CIO and everywhere in between and sideways.

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# 09 Mar 2009, 04:13PM: Lego Learning: When I was rejecting submissions for Thoughtcrime Experiments, I told many writers that I'd give them suggestions for improvements if they wanted them. Some replied and took me up on the offer. Today I'm working on some of those critiques. Suddenly I am interested in litcrit theory and practice, because now that is a tool I can use to help people.

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