In case you don’t know who James Howard Kunstler is, allow me introduce you. Mr. Kunstler is a very interesting man. I’ve been casually reading his stuff for the better part of a decade. And he’s notoriously cranky. Bruce Sterling included something that he wrote in a post on wired that includes some pretty awesome stuff:

Some big questions for the week: will the Euro survive as a currency? Will the rush into the U.S. dollar continue even as the U.S. financial system dematerializes in a Fibonacci fever of accelerating de-leveraged infinitude? Will the remaining Big Boyz, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan succumb to the counter-party hemorrhagic fever? Will great rows of lesser banking dominoes now start clacking onto their faces? Will all fifty states follow the leads of California and Massachusetts and line up at the U.S. Treasury’s hand-out window. Will the entity that calls itself the civilized world be left at week’s end with anything resembling money?

I’m certainly don’t believe all that Mr. Kunstler says, but I always enjoy the way he says it.

And now, because you’ve been so patient, here’s Mr. Kunstler talking at TED a few years ago. Some really great commentary on the American landscape. And it’s really funny.

Note: his first book, The Geography of Nowhere is actually a really wonderful read. He wasn’t quite as cranky back then.

What things am I talking (writing?) about?

First, of open source software : Howard Chu of openLDAP fame stumbled on ekiga and found its LDAP support too bad for his taste (to my defense I would say it didn’t work that bad with ekiga.net which itself isn’t a real LDAP ). So what do you think he did? He reported the problem. And how did he do it? He checked for already existing reports — and found them. And then? Well, then he provided nice patches, asked for help on the source organization, made better patches, got them included… and now we’re ironing out the few problems with the new improved code.

Second, since almost all LDAP clients are broken, ekiga’s LDAP code is now a good example of correct code, which others should study.

I can’t help to be sad that ekiga only came after that many softwares on the list of things he tried : it’s been around and working since years! Let me repeat : gnome has had working VoIP since years!

PS: I hadn’t blogged since long… the site has been updated and the preview just opens a blank page : I hope the layout will still look good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comfortably numb.

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

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

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

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

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

Berliners, you might want to attend this rally! It's tomorrow (hmm, or actually today considering it's already past midnight), October 11th 2 pm, Alexanderplatz.

I drove out to a Barnes and Nobel and picked my book up off the shelf, Ruby Phrasebook. It's a little angst-inducing to hold a book in print with your name on it. While it's my first book and it's not exactly a huge accomplishment, it's still the sum of a lot of work. Anyway, if you know someone in the market for books on the Ruby programming language, tell them you know someone who wrote a book on the subject. I would especially appreciate any reviews--I'm not aware of any out there, yet.

Rich Johnson (nixternal) on listening to the completed Severed Fifth album Denied By Reign:

“Oh yeah…this is the kind of shit I want to listen to before I break into someone’s house and rob them.”

Denied By Reign. Released Oct 21st.

I’m going to be at Tommy Doyles in Havard tonight around 9pm.  The Josh Dion Band - a local NY band my friend just got me into - is playing a two set show for free.  Best of all it is around some favorite hacker haunts such as Grendels Den and Charlies Kitchen.

So, as Havoc had already pre-announced, we just released the 0.1 version of Gjs, the javascript bindings with which we’re doing all the crazy stuff at LiTL. The code is in GNOME svn. We’ve created this really dummie wiki page now. Feel free to test it and send us cool patches to improve it.

well, I failed at blagging each day of the User Experience hackfest, but mostly because of the sheer amount of discussions, designs and work done.

during the first common session on monday we all decided to split off into four groups:

• file management
• window and application management
• widgets/gadgets/applets
• effects and animations

I decided to work on effects and animations, along with Eve, Neil, Matthew and Andreas¹. the wiki page of our group lists most of the stuff that came up in the group discussions and brain storming². when not in the effects and animations group I was hanging around with the window and application management guys. since Tomas, Robert and Matthew have been working on a Clutter-based compositor for Metacity, I decided to give it a spin and work on some of the “animation tenets” that came up during the hackfest — like showing the direction of the workspace switching and provide a visual cue to the user that the windows are not going away forever, and are just being moved in another area of the screen. I know that Compiz is probably going to have these kind of effects some ten levels deep in the configuration manager, but the configuration UI always makes me want to carve my eyes out with a melon spoon while being bludgeoned to death, and the defaults are usually so bad that I develop seasickness after 15 minutes of continuous use — hence, the usage of the Clutter-powered Metacity.

the other groups did an awesome job as well: a lot of the ideas floating around will require hard work and time in order to be implemented, but they all contain a refreshing view of the desktop and challenge some of the fundamental tenets of the user interaction, based on the feedback from users and designers — and especially without resorting to something completely new or alien that will require years to get right for developers and to adjust the workflow for users, or just announcing new frameworks with the usual jingoistic tones common to open and closed software projects alike.

1. who’s totally getting married — just as vuntz is expecting a baby [↩]
2. or idea showering [↩]

With all the bad news that threatens to overwhelm us sometimes we need a little good news for a change. Here’s a fun, if somewhat corny video of the SpaceX Falcon 1 Flight 4 launch set to music. Relax, stop worrying for a moment and just enjoy the thought of private space travel.

Any idea why mono apps write/update ~/.wapi/shared_* files every 40s ? These files are mapped and their timestamp change even when sleeping... Please help

• Bindings: Although the more bindings we have the more worlds we can conquer but what we definitely need is bindings for most popular languages in GNOME/Maemo world, namely C#/mono, Java and Python. If you are interested in helping with this, I strongly suggest you take the g-i-r route. Also if you are only interested in C# bindings, I suggest you talk to Jerome Halton who already have a half-baked solution.


• Integration: GUPnP can't possibly become the standard UPnP framework of the GNOME world until we have:
  
  
  
  • plugins for Totem, Rhythmbox and Banshee enabling these apps to browse and search contents on UPnP MediaServer (MS), export playback control on the UPnP network by implementing a MediaRenderer (MR) and to redirect playback of contents to other MRs.
    
    You might notice that I didn't mention sharing of contents on the network, the reason for which is that I believe (and Jorn agrees) that that should be the responsibility of a dedicated MS (gupnp-media-server) as part of the desktop session. Having a dedicated MR OTOH hardly makes any sense.
  
  
  
  • GVFS backend for UPnP, allowing the GIO world to browse, copy and move contents to/from UPnP MS as if it was just a local filesystem.
  
  
  
  • PulseAudio integration: Wouldn't it be nice if I could redirect all audio output of my laptop/internet tablet to my cool UPnP-enabled speakers or my desktop machine running Totem, Rhythmbox, Banshee or better yet PulseAudio itself (which would mean p-a implements both an MR and an MR control point (CP)? This is actually part of Lennart's great plan to conquer the world so I thought I mention it here in case someone does it before Lennart gets the time to do it himself.
  
  
  

• Up early, experimented cycling H. to school before punting that to J. hmm. Baby-sat a bit, and onto compiz - Beta3 should be in rather good shape, osc down so filed bugs variously. Poked at yast2.
• Prodded at boot charts; it seems on my machine, Jon's sexy new gdm - complete with nice a11y features, speech and so on, appears to start an entire session before noticing it is in auto-login mode & tearing it down again, poked at that.
• Lunch, sidetracked by an interesting OO.o crasher. Poked at gdm again; halfline pointed me at daemon/INTERNALS which is somewhat helpful, but these async, multi-process, intensive IPC designs are still hard to grok; bother.

It turns out we've not been really effective in communicating what's going on in the User Experience Hackfest that's going on right now in Cambridge. It's kind of good and bad at the same time: bad, because it's important to keep everybody in the loop; good, because it means we've been quite good on focusing on work :-) So here's a short summary of things, and hopefully more will come (especially a few mockups/whiteboard pictures that people are working on right now).

First, a big thanks to everybody involved -- artists, designers, hackers: we have some good range of skills represented here. Also a big thanks to the companies involved, who accepted to let their people come and actually even pay for the travel and accomodation. We have people from Canonical, Imendio, Intel, Novell (who is also hosting the hackfest) and Red Hat here, which is quite awesome. That's quite an investment from those companies, and it's really cool to see them step up like that. Novell has also sponsored a dinner for all participants on Tuesday; it was funny to have a seafood-lovers table and a vegetarian+others table ;-)

On Monday, we started by discussing the current status of GNOME, where we're good at, where we're lacking, etc. We then started focusing on a few topics. Those topics turned out to be well adopted and that's mostly what we worked for most of the week; more details on them in a few sentences. On Tuesday, we had some great presentations from Dave Richards and OLPC people, and both were quite helpful in different ways: getting closer to our users, and thinking out of the box. They definitely had an impact on what we did afterwards.

So, since Wednesday, we're working on the three topics that emerged during the first day: desktop shell, access to documents, and adding effects/animation to the desktop experience. I won't detail everything here, but I think we've ended up with some good stuff:

• effects/animation: this focused on adding the tiny touch that makes a difference for the user. This is actually quite useful to make things more understandable and intuitive for the user. People had some nice ideas there, some simple, sand sme less simple...

• access to documents: broad topic here, and I wasn't there for most of the discussions. I think many people liked the OLPC journal (hrm, can't find a good link for that with screenshots), and there's some kind of will to at least hide the hierarchical directory structure. A time-based view of the documents, some tag-based search and various other approaches were discussed, I believe. As was adding more context to documents (at least according to the whiteboard I'm looking at right now ;-)) -- the typical example being this document was attached to a mail from Jane received on Tuesday. I didn't look at the mockups, but it all sounds good to me, and I hope that having some of the right people talking together here will help make this all happen.

• desktop shell: this has been the topic I've been following. We started out by thinking about window management, workspaces, applets, sidebar and notifications. Many things :-) And we now have some good mockup which is quite different from what exists and also quite familiar -- probably because it makes a lot of sense (to me, at least). Some highlights are: making workspaces actually useful and discoverable for all users, fixing the way we find and launch applications, having a central piece of the shell in the form of a panel which makes it easy to access what's important, etc. It's quite hard to explain all that without the mockups, but we're re-doing them so they are in a publishable state ;-)

I guess it's quite hard to get a good feeling of all this right now, but once the wiki page will be a bit more filled, things should get clearer. We still have a few hours ahead of us, but I already feel like it was a good and productive week, with great results. And I'm getting really excited about what we'll do in the next 1-2 years!

As I have mentioned in 15 earlier blog posts, my current project is putting together an accessibility API comparison framework specifically for browsers, and help weed out substantial differences in implementations.

The challenges I have faced, and still sometimes face:

Windows

I was surprised to learn that Windows is still by far the most popular platform in the world. Interesting. Since it isn’t very POSIXy, I have had a lot of dillemas as how to distribute software for it. The usual autotools, or distools does not have all the advantages it has on Linux or Mac OS X. On any other OS, you could safely assume that Python is installed. Not on Windows. In the last few releases I have been experimenting with py2exe. It gives you a bit of a DOS feel to your package: unzip and run the first EXE you see. Easy, but unelegant.

Selenium

One of the first things that turned me on to Selenium was that it was platform, browser and language agnostic. What better way to provide users with absolute freedom in choosing their language and platform? Originally I subclassed Selenium’s Python client class, and added all of the accessibility functions to it. But I decided it would be awesomely cool if this were added to the Selenium server itself, so that the integration with accessibility would be tight and native, and language agnostic. After installing a couple dozen dependancies, and reading Selenium’s developers guide more than once, I finally made the proper changes in Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control to support accessibility tests. This created a huge overhead for anyone who would want to build the entire solution from source who is not me. They need to check out my git versions of Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control, figure out how to build them, fail, try again, etc. Selenium has many advantages, but building it is a real pain.

While Selenium is great, I have had a hard time interfacing with it’s community, besides a few individuals. The changes I made to selenium only made sense if they somehow landed upstream. I don’t see that happening any time soon, so folks who want to use my solution are doomed to using a fork forever. Unacceptable!

So I decided that in the next Speclenium release, I am going to go back to the simple approach of subclassing the Selenium Python client. This will hopefully simplify the setup overhead since we could instruct people to just go to Selenium’s website and download an unmodified binary. The downside, is that tests could only be written in Python, and not in Ruby or PHP. I think that is an acceptable loss.

I already have a branch with the appropriate changes. There will be some dramatic file renaming going on too, not for the first time.

Selenium vs. Windmill

Since I started work with Selenium, I have been called attention to Windmill more than once. For one thing, it seems like Windmill will be the tool of choice for Firefox QA. With components such as MozMill, and Gristmill Firefox QA could do some automated chrome testing action. Recent real-world cases have come up in the Firefox world in which such in-app interaction would be beneficial. Currently the Selenium setup is specifically targeted at the document frame, and nothing above it. This has been the choice since ultimately we are looking for browser independance.

Windmill is written entirely in Python, which would compliment my project well.

So why not switch to Windmill just yet? For one, it would be a distraction, I am pretty far along in the project, I would hate to suddenly switch the whole toolset. Second, I have a feeling that Windmill does not have the same wide support for browsers as Selenium does. For example, Selenium already has the proper bits for automating Google Chrome. I am repeatedly impressed by how easy it is to launch and automate obscure browsers using Selenium.

I know that Windmill has been under intense development this summer, so it might get really good soon. Nonetheless, I think that this accessibity testing project might eventually benifit from a side-by-side approach of support for both Selenium and Windmill.

That is my brain dump for now. Aren’t you glad I don’t do that often?

Couldn’t wait until Sunday (Which we celebrate the children day here in Brazil)

PackageKit has always had a log viewer, but I would be the first to admit that it looked shite, and wasn’t really useful for anybody.

I’ve spent a couple of hours, adding more columns and adding a filter facility so that you can narrow down the results to something useful.

Use cases for this tool:

• Something in yesterdays automatic update broke firefox. What was updated?
• Did I update firefox last week?
• (for backends that support rollback) Take me to the snapshot before I installed XFCE

Comments welcome.

A recommendation for a cheap PCI card which Just Works with Ubuntu Intrepid: MSI PC60G-F. I fully expect it to work with other distributions as well, but I am generally looking for solutions which would work with at least an Ubuntu live CD.

In Serbia, you can get it for 1400 RSD.

I bought some shares in Sun a while back when they were pretty cheap (pre-reverse split, around $4) - I really liked their product line, and liked the noises I was hearing around their free software strategy. For a while, the share did well, at one stage I was up about 50% when the share went over $6.

But then there was a series of things that seem to have shaken confidence - the ticker name change to JAVA seemed about as gimmicky as McCain “suspending” his campaign, the reverse split sent completely the wrong message to the market (another cosmetic change, but one that sends a message that you think the price might be going down), and from the heady days of 2007 when we had 5 straight quarters in the black, Sun’s back in the red for the last couple.

With shares now down to pre-split levels, Sun’s lost 80% of its market value in the last year, which leads me to think that one of three things are true:

• Sun is going down the tubes, and the market is singing their requiem - in which case I should sell at a loss, take whatever I can get and call it quits
• Sun is a prime acquisition target - I should probably hold onto my shares in that case and get a little more than current market value
• Sun is a company that will survive and thrive again, and it’s currently undervalued due to the crisis - in which case, I might consider doubling down

Obviously I’m no market expert, and how the share price goes over the next month or so will depend on earnings announced at the end of October - the way things are going, you have to expect those results to be bad. I’m not one to ask for advice like this usually, but I’d appreciate people sharing their insights on Sun’s prospects.

What is success ?

Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads ? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed ? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers ? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success ? is the pace of change important ? Does successful QA exist to create process to slow and reject changes, or by accelerating inclusion of fixes improve quality ? Is success having complete, up-to-date and detailed specifications for every feature ? Is success getting everyone to slavishly obey laborious multi-step processes, before every commit ? Alternatively does success come through attracting and empowering developers, who have such fun writing the code that they volunteer their life, allegiance and dreams to improve it ?

I encourage people to download & use OpenOffice.org in one of it's derivatives. I'm pleased when people file bugs, help with the QA burden, promote the projet etc. However, in a Free Software project the primary production is developing and improving the software - ie. hacking. So the question is: how is OpenOffice.org doing in this area ? Are we a success in attracting and retaining hackers ? Is the project sufficiently fun to be involved in that lots of people actually want to be involved ?

As we are finally on the brink of switching away from the creaking (22 years old) CVS (provided by Collab.net), to an improved Sun hosted Subversion (sadly not a DRCS) - Kohei and I created a set of scripts to crunch the raw RCS files as they go obsolete. They reveal an interesting picture.

Caveats

As with any measurement task, we believe these numbers are fairly reasonable; and we try to make them meaningful. On the other hand perhaps there is some horrendous thinko in the analysis, bug reports appreciated. It'd also be nice to see if the internal Sun statistics match these.

Firstly - the data is dirty; since we're analysing RCS files; so - when files are moved to the binfilter, or even renamed they have been simply re-committed - causing huge commit spikes. Similarly license changes, header guard removals and various other automated clean-ups, or check-ins of external projects cause massive signal swamping spikes. We have made some (incomplete) attempts to eliminate a few of these. In recentish times all work happens on a CVS branch, which is later merged release engineers (who appear to have done ~50% of the commits themselves), so we filter their (invaluable) contribution out by account name (cf. rt's oloh score).

Secondly - another distorting factor is that we chart only lines added: in fact when you change a line it is flagged as an add and a remove; so the number is more correctly lines added or changed. This of course fails to capture some of the best hacking that is done: removing bloat, which should be a prioirity. In the Linux kernel case this metric also gives extra credit to bad citizens that dump large drivers packed with duplicated functionality, and worse it rewards cut & paste coding. I don't often agree with Bill Gates but:

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Thirdly - release cycles cause changes in contribution patterns, clearly frantic activity during feature development lapses into more bug-fixing later in the cycle. Thus we expect to see some sort of saw-shape effect.

Fourthly, working on OO.o is infernally difficult, getting code up-stream is extremely and unnecessarily painful - this results in many contributors leaving their code in patches attached to bugs in the issue tracker, and we make no account for these; these changes (if they are committed at all) would appear to be Sun commits. Thus it is possible that there is at least somewhat wider contribution than shown. Clearly we would hope that full-time contributors would tend to commit directly to CVS themselves.

Magnitude of contributions

This graph is more meaningless than it might first appear, the raw data still shows noise like individuals committing obvious sillies copying chunks of OO.o to the binfilter eg. To some extent it is further distorted by us trying to clean this up for the past couple of years before giving up:

So the data is not that useful. Is it more useful to look at an individual to see if they are contributing something ? If we threshold the data we can at least approximate an activity metric / boolean. The graph below shows two developers - the Sun developer Niklas Nebel, and the Novell hacker Kohei Yoshida. Both work primarily on calc, and you can see the large bar when Kohei committed his solver to a branch at the end of 2006.

It seems clear that we can at least approximate activity with some thresholding. More interesting than this though, we can see a most curious thing. Despite Calc (apparently) being the relative weakness of OO.o, and Niklas being the maintainer of the calc core engine, and the calc "Project Lead" (with special voting privileges for the 'community' council), in fact he hasn't committed any real amount of code recently. That jumps out in the comparison with (vote-less) Kohei in the last six months. It is very sad indeed to all but loose Niklas from the project, though at least we'll see him at OOoCon. Verifying this counter-intuitive result with bonsai reveals the same picture.

Activity graphs

Extending this metric to the entire project we see perhaps a more interesting picture. By thresholding contributions at one hundred lines of code added/changed per month, we can get a picture of the number of individuals committing code to OO.o. Why one hundred ? why not ? it's at least a sane floor. Clearly we get a metric that is very easy to game, but luckily that's hard to do retrospectively.

It is clear that the number of active contributors Sun brings to the project is continuing to shrink, which would be fine if this was being made up for by a matched increase in external contributors, sadly that seems not to be so. Splitting out just the external contributors we see some increase, but not enough:

Novell's up-stream contribution appears small in comparison with the fifteen engineers we have working on OO.o. This has perhaps two explanations: of course we continue to work on features that are apparently not welcome in Sun's build cf. the rejection of Kohei's solver late in 2007, and much of the rest of our work happens in ooo-build, personal git repositories, and is subsequently filed as patches in IZ.

A comparison

So, it should be clear that OO.o is a profoundly sick project, and worse one that doesn't appear to be improving with age. But what does a real project look like that is alive ? By patching Jonathon Corbet's gitdm I generated some similar activity statistics for the Linux kernel, another project of equivalent code size, and arguably complexity:

Graph showing number and affiliation of active kernel developers (contributing more than 100 lines per month).
Quick affiliation key, from bottom up: Unknown, No-Affiliation, IBM, RedHat, Novell, Intel ...

There are a number of points of comparison with the data pilot of active developers aggregated by affiliation for OO.o.

Similarities: both graphs show the release cycle. Spikes of activity at the start reducing to release. Linux' cycle is a loose 3 months, vs. OO.o's 6 months.

Conclusions

Crude as they are - the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.

Does this matter ? Of course, hugely ! Everyone that wants Free software to succeed on the desktop, needs to care about the true success of OpenOffice.org: it is a key piece here. Leaving the project to a single vendor to resource & carry will never bring us the gorgeous office suite that we need.

What can be done ? I would argue that in order to kick-start the project, there is broadly a two step remedy:

• Kill the ossified, paralysed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat. This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers. Once they are attracted and active, listen to them without patronizing.
• Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.

Unfortunately, the chances of either of these points being addressed in full seem fairly remote - though, perhaps there will continue to be some grudging movement in these directions.

A half-hearted open-source strategy (or execution) that is not truly 'Open' runs a real risk of capturing the perceived business negatives of Free software: that people can copy your product for free, without capturing many of the advantages: that people help you develop it, and in doing so build a fantastic support and services market you can dominate. It's certainly possible to cruise along talking about all the marketing advantages of end-user communities, but in the end-game, without a focus on developers, and making OO.o truly fair and fun to contribute to - any amount of spin will not end up selling a dying horse.

Postscript

Why is my bug not fixed ? why is the UI still so unpleasant ? why is performance still poor ? why does it consume more memory than necessary ? why is it getting slower to start ? why ? why ? - the answer lies with developers: Will you help us make OpenOffice.org better ? if so, probably the best place to get started is by playing with go-oo.org and getting in touch, please mail us.

Finally - we invite you to repeat the analysis, the raw spreadsheet data (for data-miners) is here: ooo-stats.ods linux-stats.ods and the RCS parsing scripts parse_rcs.py with dependants in that same directory.

I’m almost sure I will forget
However, for the guys like me that usually miss meetings today there’s our art meeting at 20:00 UTC [0]
As always, channel #gnome-art on irc.gimp.org!

The Agenda so far is:

• Introduction, News
• Discussion of the Roadmap Draft by Hylke [1]
• Miscellaneous

If I won’t be online/in front of the PC, these are the three things I would like to see implemented as soon as possible:

1. RGBA xsetting/environment variable (whatever gtk+ devs decides) to test also RGBA bugs inside applications. This could start in gtk+ 2.x and be complete for 3.0.
2. Colorscheme support continuing the work of giusef (Giuseppe Fuggiano)
3. Give the us the ability to theme the panel (with widget_register?)

Hope to see you!

[0] World Clock (check your local time)
[1] GNOME 3.0 Roadmap by hbons

Libgda is reaching the point where its API will be declared stable, I expect the next version to be tagged “API stable” in a week or two (depending on the API feedback I get).

I encourage people using Libgda to migrate to this version as it has many bug corrections (and many improved features compared to the V3).

Also for the first time, I managed to create some Win32 ZIP archives (MSI files can be done on request but take more work to do because they can’t be done from Linux). These archives are with all the other Win32 Gnome’s archives at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/.

The new Thundertab has (partially) landed in the nightly builds of Thunderbird.  You’ll need to get Lightning installed to see all this and it’s not too pretty yet, but we’re making lots of progress.

But there’s no time to lose!  We’re already talking about how to handle tab session restore to keep all your opened mail tabs around for future sessions.

I’ve put up a partial mockup already, but it’s still early.  As always please leave comments below!

As received in an email from Scott. Awesomeness.

Discuss.

• While Scott is working on all sorts of awesome, Gabriel and I are hard at work in mostly bug-fix mode to prepare for Banshee 1.4, to be released on November 10^th.

  Tomorrow we will release Banshee 1.3.2, the third release in the development series leading up to 1.4.

• Currently I am finishing up the new collection indexer API that allows other applications to index or monitor the Banshee library over DBus. Alex Launi is patiently acting as a guinea pig - implementing support in GNOME Do!

• Check out the new Banshee Calendar that we'll try to keep up to date and relevant, with new release information being added hopefully well in advance of actually making releases.

• Mono 2.0 has finally been released - and the web site got a huge, long over due face lift!

• And of course this weekend is the Boston GNOME summit! See you there!

Vincent is a filthy liar, I’m not getting married.
Might be that he’s nervous because he’s going to be a father next month so that his mind plays tricks on him.

I was curious where most time in libinfinity, Gobby's infinote implementation, is spent. Not because it was too slow or something, but just because I wanted to know. So I used valgrind's callgrind tool to gain some profile data while running libinfinity's main test for the concurrncy control algorithm. When I displayed the result in kcachegrind (there is still no GNOME equivalent, no?) everything looked as I would have expected, until I noticed this line:

This means that 14.5% of the overall program time is spent in g_type_instance_get_private(). This is because libinfinity uses g_type_class_add_private for every class to store its members into, so it is easy to extend functionality later without breaking ABI. However, this also means that for every function that needs to access a member, g_type_instance_get_private() is called. I didn't expect such a huge impact, though.

To fix this, I added a simple gpointer to the public instance struct, and let it point to the private field in the instance_init function. So this means one call to g_type_instance_get_private() per instance, instead of roughly one per call to a function operating on an instance of the class in question. After doing this for the five classes suffering most from this, g_type_instance_get_private does no longer show up anywhere near relevant in kcachegrind.

I'd like it if improving performance was always as easy as this.

Mandriva Linux 2009 was released this morning and is already available on mirrors or bittorrent. As usual you will find the packages and iso images (Free containing only Free Software and One which is a live CD with proprietary drivers). Commercial edition (PowerPack) is also available with proprietary software like LightZone.

Amongst a lot of changes, it contains GNOME 2.24 (and KDE 4.1), and a new design for the installer and the control center which had not changed over the last few years.

Some work has also been done to improve again boot time (we had not worked on that for a few years and it was more than time to improve it again).

Another point which should not be visible for most people is tcb integration and the use of pam_tcb instead of pam_unix.

To read more about what's new in this release, you can follow the Release Tour.

For GNOME summit attendees we're buying some coffee, dessert, and snacks on Saturday afternoon from a local French restaurant. litl's founder John Chuang plans to drop by as well to meet people and learn.

This isn't a talk or a big announcement (litl will still be in stealth mode post-summit) - the idea is to say thanks to the developers behind GNOME and introduce ourselves.

The litl devel team will be around all weekend, doing some hacking. As you may have guessed we have quite a bit of code written in JavaScript, with a C/C++ core. We've invested a few weeks splitting the JavaScript/gobject-introspection bindings out of our codebase and rebasing to newer gobject-introspection. By Saturday we hope to have it compiling and posted, so we can hack on combining our work with Alex's gscript API among other things. We might also sign up for a technical talk about the bindings if people are interested in learning more.

On last Saturday I investigated make check failing in glib on my GNOME build slave. One of the tests was segfaulting so I was about to use gdb but as I did not want to install and I heard that Nemiver has libtool support, I decided to install it.

I started it and... the test did not crash. Then I started the test again in the shell and it did not crash either. Just installing Nemiver was enough to fix the bug!

OK, the real explanation is that installing Nemiver pulled in desktop-file-utils which was needed for this test.

Anjuta start-up is really quite slow, taking about 5 seconds even if no session is loaded. So, I tried to find out what happens and why it is slow, using Frederico’s tools:

1.5 seconds => ld for linking about 80 libraries (will be improved by removing the deprecated bonobo/gnomeui/gnome-vfs stuff)

1.5 seconds => gtk_icon_theme_get_default()

2 seconds => loading the plugins

So, I think there is not much to improve for linking other then to remove some dependencies. For the plugins loading I hope to make some improvements but these are pretty big libraries so it might be difficult. But what annoys me is that the loading of the icon cache takes so long though it should actually get a shared object from the screen. Or am I wrong here? This is no cold start-up, the GNOME Desktop was already fully up. Any chance to shorten this time?

Update: alexl points out that it is because of the gtk-icon-cache being out-of-date and indeed running gtk-update-icon-cache on several directories fixed the issue. Anyway, I wonder if gtk+/gnome/something else should check for an up-to-date icon theme in the background and update it when idle.

For a long while we had discussions here at Collabora Multimedia about how to push Pitivi forward at a more rapid pace. While Edward has been working on it as time allows, we came to the conclusion that if the Linux desktop was going to have a nice and easy to use video editor any time soon, we needed to do something to increase the pace of development significantly. We have several efforts under way to achieve this and I will announce the first one today:

We just hired Brandon Lewis for the sole purpose of doing Pitivi development. Brandon has been working on Pitivi for a long time now, having gotten involved during last years Google Summer of Code. He brings a lot of python development skills to the table and will let Edward focus his currently limited Pitivi hacking time (we hope to change this too soon on Pitivi related improvements in GStreamer and Gnonlin.

Brandon job will be making sure all the features available gets exposed in the user interface and that the user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

So Brandon, welcome to the team and lets make Pitivi rock!

As part of GSoC 2008, Shishir Goel added Service Pack functionality to PackageKit. To explain what a service pack is, it’s best to show a few use-cases.

1. You have seven desktops you’ve just installed with Fedora 9. Each one needs to have 204Mb of updates installed.
2. You have a laptop that needs network drivers before it can download updates, and you have a similar up to date laptop with internet access nearby. The network drivers require a ton of dependencies, and other packages to be upgraded before they will install.
3. You frequently install Linux on other peoples computers. You carry around a live-cd and a pendrive with a single 204Mb file “Fedora-updates-SP1.servicepack” which contains all the updates since last week.

Now, you may or may not know, that you have been able to install .servicepack files since PackageKit 0.3.2 — but creating them has always been tricky. Yesterday I spent a few hours rewriting some of the client code, and making the pkgenpack command line options more sane.

The pkgenpack is a command line tool for creating service pack files. You can find out more information about how it works by reading the man page.
Yes, I know the man page formatting sucks, suggestions on how to fix (and patches!) welcome.

Internally, the pack file is just an uncompressed tarball, with the packages and a single metadata.conf file inside. The metadata file is just the distro_id (name, version, arch, etc) and the time of creation. This ensures you don’t try installing a fedora-9-i386 service pack on a ubuntu-intrepid-ppc machine. In this case you also get a nice error message telling you what you did wrong.

Now, command line tools are all the rage these days, but what about a GUI? I mocked this up in glade yesterday, and wouldn’t take too long to turn into an actual program.

Comments?

Runa went to the puja at Rohi Villa Palace, on 7th Lane at Koregaon Park, Pune and took a couple of nice photos.

For those of you who don’t read news.gnome.org, here’s a new Metacity post: should double-clicking the menu button close the window?

Rio’s teacher claimed, when she spelt a word with a “zed”, that “zed” wasn’t “proper English” (though it wasn’t unreasonable to ask her to use the same terminology as the other kids) and when Rio apologised but said she’d been brought up speaking British English, her teacher told her she wasn’t British.  She was a bit upset about that, so we went over.  Her teacher said that she’d never noticed that I was British, and that she loved my accent and that I look like Paul McCartney.  I wonder whether she thinks all British people look like Paul McCartney.

I went to the bank.  They claimed that SWIFT is only a European thing and that they had no SWIFT number.  This is obviously untrue, since I’d sent money from England to that very branch myself.  I think I may find another bank.

Rio says there should be a Barbie doll which says “Calculus is fun!  Let’s go shopping!”

I’ve not yet had time to blog about the Maemo Summit and I’m already going to another summit!
The Maemo Summit was very good and with many more people than I expected so I had a lot of interesting conversations. I think that my talk on Telepathy went pretty well (but you are free to contradict me in the comments and suggest me how to a better talk next time) and finally I put the slides online, but probably they are not so useful without somebody explaining them.

Telepathy presentation at the Maemo Summit 2008 (PDF, 611KB)

Tomorrow I will fly to Montreal and from there I will go to the Boston Summit with some other Collaborans, see you there!

A long post on (very liberal) firedoglake about Obama’s local-level organizing techniques. Very long piece but worth reading regardless of your political orientation, as it seems likely to define how campaigning will be done in the future, and doesn’t delve (much) into the politics behind the candidates/movements themselves.

Key take-away: the campaign is trusting volunteers to take roles that would never have given to volunteers in the past, and using new communications technology (and training) to help coordinate them. Result: vastly increased reach and increased levels of participation and ownership. Parallels to self-organizing (potentially fragile?) open peer production communities will be self-evident to anyone who has participated in one of those. Money quote: “Movements aren’t built on individual people—they are built on relationships.”

Things I like about Dropbox :

• They have a native Linux version, properly packaged for a wide variety of distros.
• Nice integration with Nautilus
• It Just Works
• It sychronises the local Dropbox folder, meaning it’s usable offline, and you can access files at native speed
• Web interface is pretty decent, with some nice touches, like offering folders for downloading as a .zip

Things that I don’t like about Dropbox :

• It’s not open source or free software – while the Nautilus integration piece is GPL, the dropbox daemon is closed, and this is the bit that does all the clever work. I guess Evenflow are worried that if the whole thing is open, any tom, dick, or harry could rig up some S3 storage and offer a competing service. On the other hand if it was open I would be using it everywhere; to sync to my file server, to usb drives, and would have already bought the upgraded service (although I’m assuming it could be made generic and still have all the good points above).
• I don’t mind that they require source code assignment for patches to the nautilus part, however I think it’s somewhat misleading to equate what they’re doing to assigning copyright to FSF for GCC contributions. Assigning copyright to a commercial entity is quite different to assigning copyright to an nfp like the FSF (especially given their 20+ year record).
• Currently only monitors the $HOME/Dropbox folder (ability to sync any folder is a medium term feature)

Overall I’m liking the Dropbox experience and starting to rely on the features, which is why the licensing / business model is such a dilema. While my data would never be trapped if the company went under (at least one machine would have the definitive files) it would likely be a significant disruption.

Much of Australia went into DST mode this week, with the only holdouts being the odd little backwaters of our country (generally referred to as “Queensland”) for whom daylight saving is a threat to curtains or farm animals… and anyone relying on PHP5’s bundled timezone database.

I filed a bug and test case regarding the problem (which will hopefully be be fixed with an official update, given that Hardy is an LTS release), but here’s a quick guide to work around the problem in the mean time. Thanks to Andrew “ajmitch” Mitchell for pointing me in the right direction!

1. Grab and unpack the timezonedb extension tarball from PECL.
2. apt-get install php5-dev
3. phpize
4. ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5
5. make
6. sudo cp modules/timezonedb.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613/
   Note: The precise name of the final directory might be different. For instance, on hardy-i386 it will be 20060613+lfs.
7. sudo vi /etc/php/conf.d/timezonedb.ini
Yes, this is a new file. Content: extension=timezonedb.so
8. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Now your PHP has the very latest timezone data up its sleeve, so you can rest easy knowing that your web visitors won’t think you’re a Queenslander.

Zing!

Update: The php5-timezonedb extension was added to Debian, but removed from intrepid… seems it was because intrepid’s php5 has a patch to use the system tzdata. It would be awesome to get that patch into hardy!

Update: Uh, what about make…?

Woohoo, great news from the hackfest and that didn't got announced properly: Andreas will get married in two weeks!

Congrats, my friend! Now the real question: will he create some cool graphics for this event? I'm pretty sure he will!

I have just uploaded a few pictures of the GNU Festival conference I attended a few days ago in Chihuahua / Mexico.

There are more pictures of the event at the AUCH web site.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post here at Collabora Multimedia we have been working with Canonical and the BBC to create a plugin for Totem which plays BBC content. This work is progressing well and with the recent patches we made for Totem to sort out python threading issues are looking really good. I really recommend that people running the latest Ubuntu test releases grab this for some testing. I attached a screenshot of Totem playing a Dirac stream from the BBC showing Big Buck bunny.

Big Buck Bunny

Update:: I noticed a lot of people commenting on the user interface. We are aware that the current user interface is far from perfect and a lot of the requested features are planed. So far we have focused on getting the base technology working smoothly which I think you will agree is the most important first step. A nice looking user interface is of little value if the application locks up