First half-marathon
September 24, 2007 General, running 1 CommentYesterday I ran the Lyon half-marathon. I was a bit disappointed with the organisation – lack of signposting at the start, and kilometre markers that were all over the place (I passed 1km at 5:50, and 2km at 8:30!). It makes it a bit hard to correct your pace if you’re going too fast or too slow.
There were the usual problems of a mass start – it took me about 1500m to see some air and start running at my rhythm. The problem was that I ended up running faster than I wanted to (around 4:15/4:20 per km) – and payed for it in the last 10km. Usually at the end of a race I have a bit of energy to accelerate & finish the last 2km pretty fast, yesterday I had to convince myself a few times to keep running in the last 5km.
Anyway – pleased with the time (1:36) and I’m on course for a sub-1:35 Marseille-Cassis next month.
links for 2007-09-20
September 20, 2007 General No Comments-
I guess there are people out there willing to pay $30 or $40 to get a free software bundle on a CD. Good to see initiatives like this bringing top notch GNOME and GTK+ software to Mac users.
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Handy GNOME tips from Bruce Byfield
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Ideal migratiuon story – a human face, small company making savings switching to GNOME – great stuff
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2.20 comes out! Congrats to Murray, Lucas and Andreas for pulling together release notes. Still not an ideal process, and we’re still short-handed when it comes to copy-writers, so I appreciate your efforts, guys.
OSiM
September 19, 2007 General No CommentsI’m in Madrid this week for Open Source in Mobile – -it’s a decent CIO-type conference, and companies working with free software are well represented.
I gave a presentation yesterday on how to reconcile having a commercial team of developers working on your software, while trying to build a community. The major lesson is “be transparent, and let the community have control. And don’t forget that the community includes you.”
And that point – letting control go – *really* scares people around here. Because when people think of that, they’re thinking “I’m going to have to ship code I don’t want to on my devices”. That’s a non-sequitur, but it’s perhaps not easy to see why.
No-one can force you to ship code you don’t want to, or not to do work which is essential for your business. But when you are community building, you have to stop thinking of the project as your project.
What you need to do instead is have your development team engage (as individuals) the community to make sure that your voice is heard for the community roadmap. It’s entirely likely that the community leader will be someone working for you.
The code you ship can have a delta with that reference code that the community maintains. Sometimes your patches will be rejected, or you’ll have to remove things you don’t want. The whole point is to move the burden of maintaining that delta from the community (“It’s our code, but feel free to maintain a branch”) to you “You’re the bosses – but for reason X, we need to ship something different”).
It’s all about making sure that community members feel ownership of the project. If any of the things you do erode that, you’re damaging that community and preventing it from growing.
The daddy of all bombs
September 13, 2007 General 4 CommentsIt is environmentally friendly, compared to a nuclear bomb
What a recommendation for Russia’s newest monstrosity…
“But the *really* cool thing is…”
September 12, 2007 General 5 CommentsWhat have I been doing for all these years? What is GNOME? What is the WengoPhone?
Hugh McLeod says that the trick to marketing is to have something so cool, you’d want to talk about it *even* if you weren’t in the business…. Seth Godin encourages us to create a purple cow – something unique, and thus remarkable.
GNOME is a graphical desktop environment.
The WengoPhone is a softphone you can use to make free video calls and cheap phonecalls.
Yawn.
So now I’m wondering – when I’m talking to someone, what is the *really* cool thing about these projects – so cool it makes my eyes twinkle with enthusiasm when describing it (and no, that’s not the alcohol), so cool that people’s ears prick up and they want to hear more?
Testing frameworks
September 12, 2007 General 2 CommentsAn intern in Wengo, Maxime Gaffé, is working on putting in place unit testing frameworks for the WengoPhone. I’d like to test all levels of the application, from sound & video support, low-level APIs, and application internals up to the GUI.
We’ve got something of a dilemma, however. We’d like to have a tool to automate GUI tests which is cross-platform, and which integrates well with QT (that rules out Dogtail or LDTP) – the most promising option we’ve seen so far is squish – a commercial GUI testing application.
I’m interested in hearing about others, because Squish isn’t free, and I don’t want to depend (even optionally) on a commercial tool to allow people to run unit tests on the application.
Any suggestions?
Charity meme
September 10, 2007 General 1 CommentAfter complaining about never getting tagged by memes, I found out that I totally missed one from Ken Guest a few weeks ago. It seems reasonably worthwhile to give link karma to charities, so here goes.
The list is getting a bit long, so I’m going to break the chain, and not name anyone. Boo, hiss.
The list of charities so far is:
- MS Society Ireland
- Irish Red Cross
- Samaritans
- Cancer.ie – Irish Cancer Society
- Irish Hospice Foundation – Hospice and palliative care in Ireland
- Barnardos – Ireland’s leading children’s charity
- The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity – Polish Charity
- CPR For Schools Across Poland – CPRTraining
- Program of Insulin Pumps in Diabetic Children Therapy – Insulin Pumps For Children
- Non-invasive Neonatal Breathing Support – Infant Flow
- Program of Universal Neonatal Hearing Screenings – Neonatal Hearing
- American Red Cross – disaster relief
- Raleigh Rescue Mission – homeless raleigh
- Samaritan’s Purse – emergency relief programs
- St. Jude Children’s Hospital – cancer research
- Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders – Humanitarian Relief
- American Red Cross – Emergency Preparedness
- AMREF – African Medical & Research Foundation – African Health Development
- DOROT – Programs for Elderly
- Feed the Children – Protect Children
- Service International – Disaster Relief
- Pujols Family Foundation – Children with Down Syndrome
- National Alliance to End Homelessness – Homelessness
- The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research – Parkinson’s Research
- Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Program – Child Healthcare
- Aids Research Alliance – Aids Research
- Wildlife Conservation Society – Wildlife Protection
- Cancer Research Institute – Cancer Research
- Second Harvest – End Hunger
- AARP Foundation – Helping Senior Citizens
- Bubblegum Club – Children In Crisis
- Autism NI – Autism Northern Ireland
- Adoption Ireland – Irish Adoption Charity
- Ireland Funds – Peace and Reconciliation In Ireland
- Dublin Simon Community – Combating Homelessness in Dublin
- Aware
- To Russia with Love
- Debra Ireland
- Focus Ireland
- ISPCC
- Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind
- The Jack & Jill Foundation
- The Carers Association
- The Chernobyl Children’s Project International
- The Samaritans
- Médecins sans Frontières – Emergency medical aid
- Muscular Dystrophy Ireland
- Reporteurs sans frontières
- Bringing me back to the days of my youth: Society of Saint Vincent de Paul
- Temple Street Children’s Hospital – my brother got very well taken care of here. Worth supporting.
links for 2007-09-07
September 7, 2007 General No Comments-
A reviewer for Ekiga and OpenWengo – I look forward to reading the results.
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Adrian Georgiescu launches the first open XCAP server for contact centralisation with SIP/SIMPLE
links for 2007-09-06
September 6, 2007 General No Comments-
Interesting blog on Sun – the last paragraph shows how Wall Street views companies, in contrast to us normal people.(tags: sun wallstreet)
