February 5, 2008
General, openwengo, wengo, work
2 Comments
I have seen a meme spread over the past few days which I’d like to correct, and hopefully nip in the bud.
The OpenWengo project did not die with the withdrawl of Wengo. Nor is it in limbo.
The torch has been passed. (PDF) Finally, in late January, the news was announced. The project has a new maintainer, Vadim Lebedev of MBDSys. Vadim has been involved in the project from the beginning – he was hired by Wengo to write the back-end code for the first prototype. His company has experience providing customisation services on top of the software. He’s absolutely the best person for the job.
I have known this for several weeks, but was asked not to announce it until an agreement had been reached between Wengo and MBDSys. I alluded to this, as Marco indicated in his blog entry, in my previous entries on the subject, as well as in email to the mailing list.
To repeat myself: this is the great thing about free software – the project can outlive the founder. Spencer Kimball and Peter Mathis lost interest in the GIMP – it took 6 months to get over that speedbump, but the project outlived them. If Alfresco goes out of business, there are enough individuals and companies invested in the project that it will live on.
Wengo has withdrawn from the OpenWengo project, and yet development continues, people are still investing in it, volunteers are still working on it. Life goes on.
Welcome to the new way of doing things.
February 4, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, guadec, marketing
No Comments
I can confirm two more keynotes for GUADEC! Yay!
Eric Sink is a co-founder of AbiSource, and author of an informative and influential blog. In particular, Eric has written some series’ of articles which might be considered essential reading for those interested in the business of software development: Marketing for Geeks and the Business of Software. Eric has eschewed the software megapoles of San Francisco and Boston to start his latest company SourceGear in Champaign, Illinois.
Leisa Reichelt is a User Experience Consultant, based in London UK, but recently of Sydney, Australia. Most of the work she does is in interactive media (web, iTV, mobile and the like) and she uses a mixture of User Research Techniques, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability skills mixed up with a background of Project Management, Producing, and Account Management to help define the requirements for a project, understand (and often define) the content and functionality involved, and design a structure (or architecture) and interface.
Leisa has been doing this kind of work for about ten years, under various guises, including project management, account management, web producing, information architecting, user experience designing, interaction designing, digital strategising and generally evangelising all the things she thinks are good about the internet and networked technology in general. She’s recently gone completely mad^Wfreelance.
These come after the confirmation of Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks, as well as being a design consultant, who has already confirmed his attendance.
There is a fourth keynote which is currently very likely, but not yet confirmed, so I’ll keep mum on that person for the moment, except to say that of the 4, it’s the one I’m the most excited about.
February 1, 2008
General
4 Comments
In addition to all the reasons listed in this classic article for avoiding Reply-to on mailing lists, I’ve stumbled on one other reason yesterday which is tied to how I use my mail software (Thunderbird).
I have been a member of ALDIL for the last 5 years. Over that time, I have exchanged mails with dozens, maybe hundreds, of people.
My absolute favourite feature of Thunderbird is the auto-add feature of the mailbook – when I send someone an email, they are automatically added to my address book, and when I start typing their name, paf! auto-completion. If that doesn’t work, I still have a good old search function.
Unfortunately, recently I have had to spend time digging for the addresses of people I have sent mail to on dozens of occasions. Why? Because all ALDIL lists set Reply-To, so I have never sent mail to many of the people I have exchanged with over the years – I have saved some of the email from them, but usually my best way to find their address is with a Google search of “site:https://listes.aldil.org” with their name. distinctly sub-optimal.
February 1, 2008
General
24 Comments
I crashed my laptop hard (while standing in front of a room full of people awaiting my presentation, ew) when plugged into a projector and clicking Fn-F8 -CRT/LCD) a few times. I kind of suspected I might – I have used xrandr previously to adjust the resolution of the screen to 1024×768 (from 1200×800) before plugging in the CRT, but since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 that hasn’t worked, and there seems to be better support for multiple screens… anyway, crash, bang, slink off stage and let the next guy go first, I ended up doing my presentation on a spare windows partition.
When I booted back up, something was wrong with my X config. It fell back into some kind of failsafe mode, the keyboard turned from azerty to qwerty, and there were some other quirks. On logging in to GNOME, I
got this dialog:
Now, which button should I press?
