# (0) 04 Nov 2009, 12:22AM: Near-term Travel Plans: I'm going to be in Salt Lake City tomorrow night through Saturday evening visiting John & Susie. Then on Saturday the 7th I start a Bay Area swing, then return to New York City on the 13th. I'm hoping to work full 7-hour days the five weekdays that I'm in San Francisco/Berkeley/Mountain View, which means I'll unfortunately have to limit the number of friends and mentors I see. Perhaps the incredibly short notice will act as a first-pass filter so I don't overschedule.

If you are reading this and live where I'm going to be, I almost certainly want to see you! Please tell me so we can attempt scheduling! The Bay Area is, however, home to so many people I care about that a proper visit would take a month; my apologies to friends I'm inevitably going to miss.

# (1) 31 Oct 2009, 08:36AM: More brainwanage: I decided to pony up my $5 and join MetaFilter. So far I seem to be answering a lot of questions about technology. You'd think I was a geek or something.

# (2) 26 Oct 2009, 09:27PM: Seemlier Sumana: I use Ubuntu Linux for most of my computing these days; it's what runs on my work laptop. Each version of Ubuntu has a codename consisting of an adjective and an animal name (e.g., Breezy Badger, Intrepid Ibex, Dapper Drake). The upcoming release is 9.10, "Karmic Koala", and I don't care for the adjective. It continues an unfortunate tradition of using "karma" and derived words in completely nonsensical ways. And it's certainly not as positive as previous adjectives (Edgy, Dapper, Jaunty, &c.).

The Ubuntu Release Name Generator has better suggestions, such as Kindly, Keepable, and Keyless Koala. It also suggested "Seemlier Sumana" and "Localizable Leonard," which are fun.

All kidding and grousing aside, I am looking forward to Karmic, which hits the streets on Thursday the 29th. My colleagues who have beta-tested it find it an easy upgrade (with a few exceptions). And it comes with Empathy built-in as the default chat client, which gives me a little hometown pride since Collabora's Telepathy is the engine behind Empathy.

And with all the uncertainty in life recently -- health care reform, the should-we-move-to-England discussion, new and challenging tasks at work, even small decluttering choices about what items to discard -- it's nice to anticipate something about which I can be unabashedly enthusiastic. Three days till Ubuntu 9.10!

# (1) 24 Oct 2009, 10:41AM: Foremost: Leonard and I have been together for eight and a half years, and today was the first time he took me through his high school yearbook. (Triggered by me reminiscing about various unusual academic experiences in my schooling, triggered by others' hyperlexia and dealing with disbelieving or frustrated teachers.)

Evidently Leonard was the male voted both "Most Likely to Succeed" and "Most Disorganized" by his high school classmates. The latter surprises me; the former does not.

Update: Leonard reminds me that he was also Most Likely To Be Famous. He's probably the most Internet Famous of anyone in that graduating class.

# (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...

# (1) 18 Oct 2009, 06:22PM: Happy Deepavali: As Leonard suggests, celebrate by reading Jeff Soesbe's near-future scifi story, "The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram."

I'm surprised at how much it meant to me, emotionally, that President Obama personally celebrated Diwali this year. (My family calls it Deepavali; regional variation.) They got a nearby Hindu priest, whom my dad very well might know as a professional peer, to come chant mantras. Obama lit a flame. They partook of a ritual I grew up with (even if I don't give it that much attention as an adult). Is there a more universal ritual than that of lighting a flame to ward off the darkness?

Is this what it's like for a Christian to hear him say "We worship an awesome God"? "...and nonbelievers." "I will be your president, too." Goddamn, but pandering works on the ears and the heart and the throat. And now I understand -- what you call pandering, I can now call healthy inclusion.

# 17 Oct 2009, 11:06AM: My Go-To New York Tourist Attractions: It's a cross-blog event! Leonard took Will to museums on Thursday and yesterday I took him & his friend Martin to the New York City Transit Museum and Roosevelt Island.

At the Transit Museum, they practiced how hard it was to leap over, duck under, or otherwise fare-avoid different turnstiles throughout history. We saw tiny exhibits about Miss Subways, slugs and washers pawned off as fare tokens, and the Brooklyn [Trolley] Dodgers. And I got to explain to them where the word "commuter" comes from.

The Transit Museum now has a whole new room with On the Streets: New York's Trolleys and Buses, a cool timeline of ground transit in the city, starting with a privately-run horse-drawn omnibus in the 1800s (capacity: 12). In the words of the museum, the "gallery dedicated to surface transportation presents, in nine complementing segments, a history of above ground mobility for the last 175 years - from the early 1800s through the 21st Century." Buses in NYC were segregated until the 1870s, but the subways never were, which is comforting. A cute touch:

The central element of the exhibition is a simulated traffic intersection complete with traffic lights and coordinated walk-don't walk signs, parking meters, fire hydrants, and an array of other "street furniture."

In other words, your kid who always wants to play with the newspaper vending machine can finally do so in a safe and controlled environment.

I recommend the London Transport Museum to anyone who enjoys the NYC Transit Museum, and vice versa. Sadly, the London museum is not in a disused subway station.

If it had been a nicer day, we might have walked the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan. Instead, we took the A or F to West Fourth, ate at John's NO SLICES pizzeria on Bleeker and the ice creamery next door, took the F to Lex and 63rd, and walked to the funicular stop a few blocks away to get to Roosevelt Island. The tramway gives you such a nice view, and costs only a swipe of the MetroCard instead of whatever usurious prices the Empire State Building or Top of the Rock charge.

I think next time I'll skip walking the northern half of the island, despite the lighthouse, Octagon, etc.; the real attractions on Roosevelt Island are the views of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the ruins of the smallpox hospital, and the completely empty park-to-be grassy bit at the extreme southern tip. I've finally found a schedule that gives me more hints on when the gate to the hospital and Southpoint is likely to be open (although I can't tell whether that's a 7-day or weekday schedule). Relevant authorities have already started stabilizing the ruins and are planning a Serious Park at Southpoint: read, "aww, it's not as indie and desolate as it used to be, and soon it'll be all tame and boring." So go soon. With Will & Martin, if you can manage it.