Science fiction online

February 13, 2009 General 11 Comments

One of the economic and cultural developments I’m more pleased to see happening is that of artists putting some or all of their work online, with the plan or hope of attracting followers and being able to capitalize on them in the future in one way or another. It’s not like giving away free samples is a revolutionary idea, but in an era of adamant (and, IMHO, misguided) defense of “intellectual property” by some sectors it’s certainly refreshing to see some people embracing the wave rather than fighting it.

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, so in this post I’ll list some great stuff that I’ve found around in the past:

  • Accelerando: by Charles Stross. Follows the story of a dysfunctional family through the coming of a sort of Singularity. I downloaded it in my N810 and read it in a couple of days, and although the pace seems a bit uneven in some places it’s for sure a great journey full of interesting ideas (Matryoshka brains! Turing oracles!). If you like it make sure to buy Glasshouse,  a delightful novel by the same author where the action happens in the same universe.
  • The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: by Roger Williams. A post-Singularity novel (by now it might seem I’m kind of obsessed with the topic. Not really. Or rather, I’m obsessed with many other things) that deals masterfully with a classic thought experiment: what does it mean to be human in a world where all your wishes can be fulfilled without pain or struggle? A real page-turner, and it seems a sequel might be published some day. We can only hope.
  • Greg Egan: the left-side of the brain companion to Philip K. Dick. Some of his novels will bend your brain, and some of the ideas he elaborates have literally changed the way I see the world. His homepage is full of technical notes for his work and a collection of free stories, which are a perfect way to get hooked and decide to buy his books (if you want suggestions, my personal favorites are Permutation City and Diaspora).
  • Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, …: Cory Doctorow might be the most famous science fiction writer publishing some of his works under free licenses, but I must admit I haven’t yet read any of them. Rumour has it they are pretty good, but if you don’t like them you can have your money back.

Well, that’s it. There’s probably more, but I can’t think of any more off the top of my head. If you know of other great stuff published online by its authors please tell us in a comment!

See no long time

February 11, 2009 General 5 Comments

It’s been a while since the last time I blogged. I won’t promise to do it more often from now on though, that way I might save myself from the Ghost of the Internet’s Clichés.

Some of you already know that I quit litl last year, but most of you probably don’t. I left in excellent terms with them, and I still think that what my old colleagues are doing there has the potential to be something, only that now I get to wait and wonder when they’ll release it like everyone else. Fortunately some of the things that we were working on are already public, like gjs, so nobody can say litl is a black hole anymore :) .

The most important reason to quit was a desire to spend some time working on some things that had been floating around my mind for a while. They involve Lisp and the fantastic Web technologies, are still in progress and I might have more to say about that in the future (although it’s probably a bit off-topic for the Planet).

Anyway, another thing I’ve been trying to do is to spend more time with Epiphany/WebKit. I’m pretty happy with the progress we have done in the past few months (thanks to all, you know who you are), major pieces are already in or being actively worked on (deep libsoup integration, downloads, http auth, gobject/c dom bindings, a11y, …) and our current hope is to have it ready for general use in time for GNOME 2.28. I’ll make another post soon talking about this a bit more in depth.

Which leads me to the last, but my no means least, point. Since this monday I’ve joined Igalia, part-time, to work on upstream WebKit and Epiphany. I’m quite excited with this great opportunity, not only because I’ve long admired Igalians and the way they work, but also because I’m really looking forward to spend my time trying to improve GNOME’s platform, where a solid GTK+ port of WebKit could be an important player.

Happy Hacking, and hopefully it won’t be another 8 months before I post again. Ouch, here comes the Ghost of the Clichés…

PS: This should be my first entry on Planet Igalia, hi guys!