Ist Zucker drin? Zucker beruhigt.

(Eine sehr vage Abhandlung über Handlungsmaximen, da Freunde mir gerne ein “Blog doch mal was Nicht-Technisches” entgegenbringen. Hätte ich “Jetzt kommt die Krise” nicht bereits vor drei Monaten als Blog-Überschrift verwendet, es wäre an der Zeit ob der Weltlage.)

Vor einigen Jahren habe ich für mich eine Regel aufgestellt, die oft schwierig zu realisieren ist, da sie Ehrlichkeit erfordert und definitiv die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen verändert: “Sprich Dinge schnell aus gegenüber Personen, denen Du noch etwas Wichtiges sagen musst. Egal ob gute oder schlechte Dinge.”
“Ich liebe Dich” und “Du bist ein Vollidiot” kann also beides wichtig sein, und beides erzeugt Änderungen im Verhalten. ;-)
Warum? Manchmal ist man sonst einfach zu spät und ärgert sich. Das heißt dann, daß man eine Möglichkeit verpasst hat weil man nichts gesagt hat, oder (noch schlimmer) daß man einen Menschen verloren hat bevor man ihm noch etwas sagen konnte.
Vor einigen Monaten las ich nun im Zug Richtung Süden fahrend folgenden Satz: “Umgib Dich mit Menschen, die gut für Dich sind.” Kombiniert mit erster Regel erzeugt das manchmal Gefühlslagen, die eher selten sind, wenn man nicht eh himmelhochjauchzendzutodebetrübter Borderliner ist – z.B. ziemlich glücklich und total traurig (weinend) gleichzeitig zu sein.
Quintessenz: Hauptsache, der Film bietet gute Unterhaltung mit Höhen und Tiefen, auch wenn man selbst mitspielt. Einladung. Deshalb draus lernen. :-)

Posted in lang-de, misc, music, non-technical | 2 Comments

GNOME 2.24 is out. Want to get involved?

The GNOME 2.24 Splashscreen

Congrats everybody to 2.24.0! Been hard work sometimes, but always fun.

Now while you, dear user, are probably going to send zmrzlina, chocolate, cheese and kisses to your beloved favorite hackers*, you might also consider becoming involved. Here’s some offers I have in mind (unfortunately all unpaid positions). ;-) Not all of them require coding skills (I don’t code either, so “Why don’t you do it yourself?” comments are unrequired).

  • nautilus-actions is looking for a new maintainer, see the announcement. Interested in helping out? Or even fixing the most favourite bug? Feel free to contact the former maintainer if interested!
  • Update ancient project websites. We have lots of old projects sites in http://www.gnome.org/projects/. You don’t want to code but you know about HTML and a bit of CSS and your Wnglish is good. A list was provided by element3260 as part of his GHOP work, available here – this should be transfered to a wikipage at live.gnome.org first, see the Gnome Goals pages for an example how this could look like.
  • Push the Gnome Goals to clean up our stack for 3.0 by providing patches. There’s still enough to do. Also see GioPort and GtkPrintPort.
  • Take a look at bugs in Bugzilla with gnome-love keyword set. They are a good place to start working on the code of your favourite project.
  • Unrelated to this, worst translation issues will become blocker bugs for GNOME 2.26 too. Providing good applications definitely also includes a well-localized UI, and this is impossible when not fixing them.
    Some examples (not to blame developers, but to get a feeling what this means): Missing context, split sentences, english structures, broken plurals.
    Most (not all) translation issues are easy to fix and gnome-love bugs too. Just take a look at bugs with L10N keyword set.
  • Identify unmaintained modules. I’d love to have a small script that could run on my svn checkout and printing the date of the last svn commit (svn log –limit 1) that was not an updated .po file. But I don’t do code, so if anybody has too much time… *cough* Would make it easier to identify rotten modules in order to remove them from Bugzilla and the translation statistics, so nobody wastes time anymore on them.Another shameless request – I’d also love to have information on the language team pages about the date of their last commit for that language. Would make identifying non-active teams or maintainers easier.
  • Nothing in that list for you? Don’t want to code? For more ideas, visit JoinGnome.

(* “hackers” refers to developers, translators, artists, marketing folks, bugsquadders, doc writers, …)

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 7 Comments

Last week.

Private:

  • Finally been able to attend a concert of Vypsaná fixa at a festival. Feeling happy for the rest of the day (not only because of that one band).
  • Watched Prague’s local icehockey derby Slavia vs. Sparta (2:1). Could have been more exciting. Security checks like at an airport. Same as the food prices at the venue: Impressive, in a negative sense.
  • Bought two beers at night and gave one to the first person I met on the streets. Two street cleaners lucky about having a short break. Do that more often, it’s easy.
  • It’s that Burčák season again! Yummy.
  • Travelled to Maemo Summit with jbenc. One guy sitting next to us in the train heard that we were talking about linux and joined us. There’s really linux users out their in the wild, they exist, and they are not antisocial! :-P

Maemo:

  • Maemo Summit itself was awesome – most impressions have been already covered by the blog posts on Planet Maemo. Much more people than expected and a nice geeky venue. In general it also underlined my positive impression that Nokia’s opening and understanding Open Source better. My talk went well though there could have been more attendees. Most discussions (like always at conferences) happening outside of the talks or when having a beer at the evening, quite productive. Great Openismus party on Saturday, great company! ;-)

GNOME:

  • Now looking forward to the GNOME 2.24.0 release coming up this week. Hope we all (devs, translators, documentators, artists, bugsquadders and so on) did a good job and will get content users and good reviews.
Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en, maemo, music, non-technical, prague | 2 Comments

Getting Nokia involved in Maemo Bugzilla?

Nokia

Thanks to Nokia I had the opportunity to spend a few days at Helsinki last week, having talks, discussions and meetings with several people, especially in Maemo error management.

As I interact with Nokia’s error management by discussing/forwarding bug reports, and as there have been some confusion and misunderstandings already (Karsten‘s and my work do not fit perfectly into Nokia’s current well-defined and not easily to change workflows), I gave a small presentation about what we are doing, the problems and expectations.
I see ourselves (the maemo.org bugmasters) as a kind of bridge between the Maemo community and Nokia’s product management. Being involved in Maemo and GNOME, we’re used to open source and understand its culture, but I can also understand managers being conservative when it comes to changes and when advantages aren’t obvious at first sight.
So at the beginning of my presentation I asked the audience (Nokians involved in error management) how many of them have ever dealt with open source community, culture and practices. It was less than 15%, something I had expected. My theory is that in general, professional error management in open source projects often simply does/did not exist, hence there can’t be that many people existing already used to it – definitely not Nokia’s “fault” or whatever. I explained that 3rd party developers, power users and fans can help any company leading an open source project in producing better software by helping in testing and providing patches and feedback, but they also have expectations and want to get something back for their efforts, e.g. becoming more involved and having more transparent processes. Or to quote a fine sentence by Jaffa that I also said while having my talk: “If Nokia aren’t seen to be committed to the community, why should the community be committed to Nokia?”
In my impression Nokia has already improved in understanding, but there’s still a long way to go. There have been “bad” examples, e.g. I was told that Nokia probably publishing updates more often now is already a sign of becoming more open (Sorry, this is an internal decision and has nothing to do with community involvement). But there also have been good examples. See, Nokia is a big company with lots of different opinions and people with different backgrounds and hence different definitions of “Openness”, and talking to each other helps to understand “the other point of view” better. Some Nokians involved in error management will be present at Maemo Summit. Looking forward to continuing discussions with community folks (and input) around.

A valid argument that I can second is that developers want to have one central place to track their bug reports. This is currently Nokia’s internal Bug tracking system. Some Nokia developers also comment in Maemo Bugzilla (mostly those coming from open source too, and in my impression this number has increased a bit in the last months), but quite often you don’t have the time to track two systems. Hence I waste spend a lot of time already on keeping reports in sync (been working lately on porting a script I use in GNOME Bugzilla to quickly insert comments on bug reports to save some time).
But I also do second that in the long run we should have those components that are completely open source in Maemo Bugzilla only. Now you might ask: Why not starting this immediately? So when examining on how hard it will be to open some parts of the existing internal infrastructure, I was often told that there are legal issues to resolve first. It’s not only about Nokia’s internal Bug tracking system, there’s much more that’s part of the long tail – information that a commercial company does not want to be accessed by its competitors, such as for example policy plans, product and hardware information, information about the internal testing infrastructure and especially copyright related issues. So it’s time to identify and check those blockers one by one. But there definitely IS slow change (maybe too slow for some Maemo folks that have been expecting more changes for the last two years), probably Nokia just needs more lawyers to handle all this more quickly. ;-)

maemo.org Bugzilla stuff

Apart from the ongoing triaging of new incoming bugs, syncing between the internal Bug tracker and Maemo Bugzilla and reorganizing some components in Maemo Bugzilla to fit better with Nokia’s internal development teams, we are going to remove the deprecated bug resolution RESOLVED LATER in the next two weeks. “LATER” either means WONTFIX, or the bug should just remain in open state. This requires “fixing” the existing bugs first. After that, LATER can be removed from the Bugzilla code. We have already removed the meaningless Target Milestone “Next” and retriaged all bugs RESOLVED REMIND that also needs to be removed from the code.
I have also disabled setting the Target milestone when filing a new bug, because Target Milestones are definitely not wishlists. Setting “Fremantle” or “Harmattan” as a target milestone for a bug should really mean that a developer works on it and plans to get the issue fixed by that release. We currently also discuss on switching to the “guided” bug entry template to make it easier to file valuable bug reports, but currently that template is way too crowded and noisy to be useful, so this will take some time and changes.

Posted in computer, lang-en, maemo | 14 Comments

Politik, Musik, Kunst.

  • Ich verstehe nicht das Rußland-Bashing der gleichgeschalteten Medien. Georgien hat als erstes das Völkerrecht gebrochen, indem es 48 Stunden nach einem Waffenstillstandsabkommen Süd-Ossetien militaerisch angegriffen hat. Und die Anerkennung von Abchasien und Süd-Ossetien durch Rußland ist nichts anderes als der Völkerrechtsbruch, der als Novum mit der Anerkennung des “Kosovo” durch den Westen begann und nun Schule machen wird. Wenn der Westen überall seine diffusen Machtansprueche durchsetzen möchte (lies: seine Öl-Pipelines in Sicherheit wiegen möchte), dann viel Spaß bei weiteren Kriegen in Dagestan, Inguschetien, Berg Karabach und Transnistrien (letzteres wäre dann ja endlich Krieg vor der Haustür der EU, und nicht irgendwo kurz vorm Aralsee). Aber Deutschlands Interessen werden ja inzwischen auch am Hindukusch verteidigt.
  • Überrascht vom Abspann der samstäglichen “ARD Sportschau” gewesen – die Platte steht hier ja auch im Schrank, aber hat jemand der Redakteure eigentlich den Text des Liedes verstanden, welches dort Bilder des 3. Spieltages untermalen durfte? “Skinny girl, dressed in black, leather boots, nazi hat”? Na, wenn die ARD das so meint… Der bierselige Durchschnittszuschauer wird das schon nicht mitbekommen haben, war ja in einer anderen Sprache gesungen.
  • Big Ideas (don’t get any). Die Abschlußarbeit des Kunststudenten James Houston. Song im Original von Radiohead. Den verwendeten Scanner habe ich auch einmal verwalten dürfen. Mit großem Dank an la_rayis für diesen Link in ihrem Blog.
Posted in lang-de, music, non-technical, politics | Comments Off on Politik, Musik, Kunst.

Maemo Bugnews.

  • The Maemo Bugsquad is now in place. For triagers we have a Triage guide, general and product generic Stock answers that can be copied & pasted into bug reports, and for reporters an updated (maemo’fied & and shortened) Bugwriting How-to. We also decided on a policy when to close rotting moreinfo bugs.
  • There will be a Maemo Bugsquad BoF at the Maemo summit on Saturday, 16h30. Everybody also interested in managing the Maemo bugs is highly welcome.
  • Being part of the current 100 Days plan, the Maemo crew has five sprints (and open IRC meetings too) à 20 days with defined tasks. For those who haven’t seen it yet, we also log our daily activities so our work becomes more transparent. ;-)
    As a first step to Get Nokia more involved into Maemo Bugzilla, I’m currently looking into Reorganizing components in Bugzilla to make it easier for Nokia’s developer teams to be able to track those reports that affect their scope.
Posted in computer, lang-en, maemo | Comments Off on Maemo Bugnews.

29.

Yay! Catch me if you can. :-)

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 2 Comments

GUADEC conference at Istanbul

Yes, it’s that great time of the year again: GUADEC, the GNOME conference, this time at Istanbul, and now it’s time to provide a very quick summary so far.

guenther and me had arrived on early Monday morning at the airport that is located in the Asian part of the town. After arriving at our apartment and chilling on the terrace it was very impressive to listen to all the morning prayers of the Muezzins when dawn took place at 4:30AM.The place is nice and you have an awesome view on the city. Since all Openismus employees live in the same building, we’ve had two evenings sitting together on our terrace and having a good time.

Our venue (Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi) is located directly at the Bosporus so you can sit outside, have a lot of conversations and meetings with friends and other developers, and watch huge ships passing by.

The BoF that we gave on Bugtriaging in GNOME could have had a few more attendees, but the time was moved to have it one hour earlier so many interested people missed it. If you’re one of them and are interesting: We’re going to repeat it today (Thursday) at 3:30PM (meet at the info desk and then find a free room), right after Kris’ keynote on the state of GTK+ (definitely worth to attend to also find out more about the future of GNOME in general I’d say).

Besides, I have huge problems to access some of my mail accounts and IRC (conference wifi). Youtube seems to be generally blocked here (“Access to this web site is banned by Telekomünikasyon İletişim Baskanliḡi”).

Ah yeah, and for the third year in a row we also had a football tournament with lots of fun and some nice goals:

(Picture by Alia and Zaheer Abbas. © All Rights reserved.)

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en, maemo | 5 Comments

“Jetzt kommt die Krise.”

Eine Woche GUADEC in Istanbul.
Istanbul stellt sicherlich einige der bisherigen Eindrücke, die man durch die in Deutschland lebenden türkischstämmigen Menschen erhalten hat, auf den Kopf. Die Stadt ist in einigem internationaler und fortschrittlicher als ich es je erwartet hätte, und ist dennoch zugleich unkompliziert, gerade in Bezug auf den Straßenverkehr (Taxifahrer fahren 140 in 70-Zonen etc oder hupen, wenn sie überholen, damit der Gegenverkehr abbremst). Danke dafür. :-)

Beeindruckend, wenn morgens um halb fünf langsam die Sonne aufgeht und gleichzeitig ein Dutzend Muezzine in der Umgebung der eigenen Dachterrasse anfangen zu beten. Die Moscheen sind wunderschön. Und ich warte auf den Putsch, der aber sicherlich erst im nächsten Monat geschehen wird. Während eines Meetings heute morgen in der Cafeteria wurden auf einmal die Fernseher angemacht und die Lautsprecher, da aber keine Panzer zu sehen waren handelte es sich “nur” um einen Anschlag.

Unsere Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi liegt direkt am Bosporus und es ist beeindruckend, mit einem Getränk im Garten zu sitzen, Asien in Sicht zu haben, einige riesige Dampfer vorbeiziehen zu sehen und mich mit vielen alten Freunden zu unterhalten, die man eine lange Zeit nicht mehr gesehen hat.

Das Football Tournament gestern hat wie immer großen Spaß gemacht, vorallem wenn von zwei Seiten die Gebete über Lautsprecher den Platz beschallen. Mein Team war nicht erfolgreich (1:3 und 0:4), dafür aber mein Ehrentor quer über den Platz hoffentlich sehenswert. ;-)

Unser Konferenz-Talk über das Bearbeiten von eingehenden Benutzerrückmeldungen und Fehlerberichten (“Bugtriaging in GNOME”) war schlecht besucht, da er eine Stunde vorgezogen wurde und dies in den ausgedruckten Programmen nicht berücksichtigt wurde. Wir werden ihn daher spontan morgen wiederholen. Zudem habe ich Probleme, E-Mails abzurufen und zu verschicken sowie IRC zu nutzen. Ich sehe schon den Berg an Emails, der Anfang nächster Woche auf mich wartet…

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-de, non-technical, politics | Comments Off on “Jetzt kommt die Krise.”

Tipp des Tages.

Wenn nichts im Inneren kaputt ist, kann man Geigen auch mal selbst reparieren. Das dauert weniger als eine halbe Stunde. Der Vorher-Nachher-Vergleich:

violin-before.jpg violin-after.jpg 

Jetzt nur noch irgendwann mal stimmen.

Posted in lang-de, music, non-technical | 2 Comments