Cogito, Ergo Sumana

Travel Plans

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:09:06 GMT

I'm setting up travel plans for the rest of the year. I'm about 95% certain I'm going to WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin in late May, although I need to find someone to room with (anyone have some spare floor at the Concourse?) and buy tickets. I submitted a talk to OSCON (Portland, Oregon, July 19-23) and I'll find out next month whether that got accepted. (OSCON is right after HOPE in NYC, which I really should check out.) I'm also thinking about going to WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia in early September, because I have a number of friends and acquaintances there, and when else will I have time plus multiple reasons to visit Melbourne? Since DebConf in early August is in New York City, I'll probably be there at least for the social bits.

And there are a metric zillion other events I'm at least somewhat interested in, from LibrePlanet to the Netbook Summit to QuahogCon to Open Source Bridge and the Community Leadership Summit. So this coming week I have to suss out what's quality, think up some strategy, and prep a bunch of talk proposals. If you want to suggest anything, please email or comment!

Right now I'm in Washington, DC, visiting my sister and enjoying the snow. Yesterday & today I accidentally visited ShmooCon because various DC-area geek women inveigled me into dinner, then some sort of "party," then oh Metro is closing early because of the snow, oh look, this person's hotel room has an empty second bed! And then breakfast and more hanging out and it's afternoon already? In more short-term travel plans, I'm hitting various promising sites to help me figure out whether I can get back to New York City tomorrow.

Another Change

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:48:14 GMT

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.

Change of Plans

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:18:53 GMT

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.

Insta-RSS Feeds: A Case Study In Freedom

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:41:40 GMT

If you use Google Reader, now you can subscribe to any webpage as though it had a feed and thus automatically get alerted whenever it changes. When the Colbert Report free tickets page opens up new dates, or my slang dictionary adds items, you'll know.

Leonard started providing a version of this service years ago with his Syndication Automat. Now he only needs to use it to generate one feed: new publications from Dover. Sites have gotten sensical and started providing their own feeds. If you want something to run on your own server to make RSS feeds for pages that don't have them, you can use his free Scrape 'N' Feed code.

(I learned of this Google Reader feature via Matt Cutts, and his readers imply that there are paid services the change will undercut. Just another reminder that packaging up a free open source script with lovely UI can make you some cash -- for a while, until it turns up as a free feature in a popular app or OS. That's the S-curve of innovation, or temporal arbitrage.)

An RSS feed gives you data in an easy-to-mess-with format. For example, it would be easy enough to plug an RSS feed into a version control system so you could track diffs, reading the change history as easily as if it were a wiki page. Or you could use it in something like the Launchpad bug tracker's remote bug watch. You can enter a bug in Launchpad and if it's a duplicate of a bug in someone else's bugtracker, Launchpad uses that other bugtracker's API to keep an eye out, and lets you know when the remote bug's status changes. Enlarge your scope from software to something like MediaBugs (an RSS feed is basically the simplest possible RESTful API) and you can set up your system to automatically watch for particular journalists citing the same sources over and over, or calculate the proportion of an e-publisher's new releases that come un-DRM'd.

If you want to do forensic economics like Suresh Naidu, then the ability to get an RSS feed of any random webpage is especially cool. And do you remember the people who used Leonard's Beautiful Soup code to catch an international arms dealer? Quote from the lead investigator:

Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I've been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of these place all movements on the Web, but neither of them provide anything like an RSS feed, which is why I began scripting, in order to save checking them myself.

Whether it's deliberate or negligent, making a webpage without an RSS feed is a way of disempowering readers, and of making it slightly harder to vacuum that data into the market-flattening maw. It's like how certain archives will keep a controversial document in a room and only let people read it in that room, no cameras, no notepaper. Google plays nice with these kinds of restrictions, so site owners can opt out and then Google Reader users won't be able to make or read feeds for those pages. Not an antifeature, per se, but definitely a technical restriction on the user to enforce other people's whims. Scrape 'N' Feed has no such scruples, of course. If you don't want me to know what's on that page, don't put it on the web.

"Of The Other Insectoid Worlds, I Shall Say Nothing"

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:18:48 GMT

Just finished Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker after a year or two. I was reading it at about two pages a day. But more happens in two paragraphs of Stapledon than happens in most entire novels. Entirely ordinary example (Ch. 8, "The Beginning and the End," Section 2, "The Supreme Moment Nears"):

The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing.

Grace

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:06:36 GMT

Comfort music: Tally Hall's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, They Might Be Giants' "Thunderbird" (from Spine). There's a moment in "Thunderbird" that always snatches my heart and holds it up to the light -- Linnell's "am" in

Man oh man my throat is dry
Man are you thinking what I
am
well what about it then

Comfort TV: InfoMania, Rotten Tomatoes Show, Psych, Leverage. Eitan and I stood in toe-numbing cold for hours yesterday to get standby tickets to Colbert, and got in. You can hear me in the audience, the only one clapping when Arthur Benjamin reveals why 2520 was his childhood favorite number. I thought more people would be with me on that one.

N.K. Jemisin's third gripping sample chapter for her upcoming fantasy novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is up, my ex-boss is spreading the gospel that software testing is a neat career for nonprogramming geeks, Erin Ptah's "Castle Down" is highly entertaining magical Colbert/Stewart slash, and John Darnielle is (as always) passionate and enthusiastic about something:

Well, I stumbled across it somehow, I'm not sure how, and I watched it, and I had one of those experiences you have sometimes with a band you've never heard playing a song you don't know. One of those transformative reaffirming experiences, which you then get religious about, even if religious isn't exactly the word you'd use but trust me it's the word you actually mean: you start thinking, everything should be like this all the time, anything that's not like this is a ridiculous waste of time, I want peak experiences and only peak experiences because life is all about peak experiences and people who consent to have less than constant peaking epiphanies all the time are missing out, etc., etc., all infantile nonsense of course but as feelings go a bracing & pleasant one. The permanent reoccurring 19th summer is a nonstarter as a governing aesthetic stance, but as a tool in the kit it's not without some merits.....
...[the song] becomes a radiant source of self-regenerating power and wonder and lights start to go off in corners of the room where a guy didn't know there were actually any lights, and the guy goes, wow, this is so cool, I didn't expect to run across anything this cool today and I'm so glad I did, I'd really love to run across more things like this during my daily walk down toward the grave.

A Reminder

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:52:34 GMT

Amanda Marcotte, thinking about the phrase "pro-life" (the rest of the post is much more controversial):

...Life, for most people, is about being in this world. It’s about enjoying food, enjoying sex, having goals, making plans, creating relationships, loving each other, developing beliefs, thinking thoughts, learning, enjoying a good night’s rest, listening to music, enjoying drama, enjoying quiet, kicking your feet up and petting the cat, diving into your work, making a difference, helping others, selfishly hiding away and doing for yourself, falling in love, grieving a loss, the thrill of winning, the sorrow of losing, the ambiguities of the human spirit, the bright light of reason, the joy of discovery, the curiosity inspired by mystery, a walk in the park, a Christmas with family, a loud concert, a good book.

Tacky, Metacity, Encryption, tp-qt4, and Maemo

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:11:30 GMT

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.

Working And Thinking Together

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:01:13 GMT

Karl Fogel's essay on "the transformative effect that good tools can have on a team's ability to collaborate" informs my hesitance to respond to this Ask Metafilter question.

What is the point of thought experiments in moral philosophy? The violinist and the IV, the cable car and the fat person, the pharmacist and the sick spouse. One commenter calls them an intuition pump, which feels right to me.

Like A Focus Group, But Useful

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:18:57 GMT

Rachel, Kevan, Holly, other Londoners - Canonical will pay you to come by and test a chat program this week or next.

Turn Style

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:17:40 GMT

"Is that your MetroCard?"
"Yeah, it has 50 cents on it."
[examining magstripe] "Oh, I didn't know you could put music on these now."

Like The Producers Even Care What I Think

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:07:20 GMT

New season of Project Runway is happening. Last week's challenge (make a nice party look OUT OF BURLAP SACKS) provoked decent innovation, which pleases me. But I predict that no more than 20% of the challenges this time round will make the designers make clothes for real men and women with healthy normal bodies. As I've said before, that's just dumb.

I find the majority of clothes created on the show unwearable and ridiculous. Zillions of overly revealing skirts and dresses, nearly no pants, forget about pockets, and evidently menswear is some dark continent. On the rare occasions that designers serve as models, and therefore must create clothes for men, they and the judges commiserate over how rare and difficult it is. That sounds like utter crap. Please e-mail me if it isn't.

Here's an idea: just learn to make pants, and menswear. Then you'll learn a skill that no one else evidently thinks is as important as frippery for like 3% of the women in the US (much less the world), and you can carve out a niche as the magical wizard who can make clothes for the majority of humanity!

Upcoming FOSDEM & UK Travel

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:06:20 GMT

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.

Ask Your Doctor If Herring And Sweet Potato Pie Is Right For You

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:43:28 GMT

I actually knocked off work at a reasonable hour today, after some useful conversations with colleagues. Then I cleaned up a bit and decided to tackle a few clothes that needed minor mending. Beth came over earlier than I'd expected, saw my needles and thread out, and did some fixing of her own. Now I have two more pairs of slacks in my rotation and her coat is all properly buttonable. Lucian arrived, we ate Sac's pizza and drank wine and water and root beer, and we gabbed and watched Kiki's Delivery Service. Lucian hadn't ever seen an OK Go video (he's of my cohort, it makes no sense) so we showed him the treadmill dance, the side-by-side comparison with a high school talent show re-creation that's more faithful than a nun, "This Too Shall Pass", and "WTF?". And, for good measure, OK Go frontman Damian Kulash meeting Kermit the Frog.

They left, we played a bit of Puzzle Fighter, now it's bedtime. Before I retire -- this week I posted a new piece at the Geek Feminism blog: "FLOSS inclusivity: pragmatic, voluntary, empowering, joyous".

Tales of the Unexpected

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:52:05 GMT

Remember Thoughtcrime Experiments? A scifi/fantasy anthology that Leonard and I put together early last year and published in the spring of 2009?

The TE email address just received two submissions.

On the same day. About eleven months after the deadline.

I asked them where they'd seen the call for submissions, so I could go correct whoever needs correcting. One responded: the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

The SFWA Bulletin currently shows, as the only sample issue you're allowed to view, the February/March 2009 issue. About 1/3 of the three-page market report is a version of the TE call for submissions. It mentions a 2009 deadline. Either there's a more recent Bulletin that thinks we're open for business again, or the writer in question saw the market report, saw the date, and missed the year. I'm sure I've made that mistake before.

Anyway, I just thought this was odd enough to comment on. Kind of like the moment in the Amtrak station a few weeks ago when the escalator stopped with a jolt as I was walking up it. This is why they say to hold on to the handrail!

Thoughtcrime Experiments, published in 2009, is eligible for various awards; perhaps I should go through the criteria to figure out how people would nominate the various stories and art, categories we fit into, etc.