Many thanks to Pascal K. of ALL in Montpellier – they’re going to fit me in somewhere for the Journées du Libre on Saturday in the “Espace demo”. I don’t know where, but I’ll be there.
I’m back running – made just over 48 minutes in the 10k run in Lyon, with a little pain, at the end of April, and I’m now able to do a 5k training session at a good speed with almost no pain at all. Just finishing up physio, and hopefully I’ll be able to ramp up to running 3 times a week for about 20km total in a few weeks. The day I run for an hour with no after effects, I’ll be a happy man.
For those interested, I saw a chiropractor who gave me some good training tips (don’t over-train, mix low-impact sports like swimming & cycling until you have more distance under your belt) and who thought that the root cause of my injury was probably the fact that I was wearing shoes which corrected against pronation, while it appears I don’t need them. So I also got a new pair of runners for €120 – the most expensive footwear I’ve ever bought.
I never seem to get tagged by these blog memes (or at least, I’m never aware of it). I don’t know whether to consider myself lucky or unloved.
Andy Oram from O’Reilly and Associates (a very nice guy over email, and a man I would like to have a pint with one day if our paths ever cross) wrote an article on O’Reilly Radar about the problems he has with the desktop in general, and free software desktops in particular.
I’d rather have lean visual effects with minimal distractions (which can look very attractive) and let desktop developers focus on getting programs to be more open to each other and work together more tightly. I’m getting tired of moving between one silo of an application to another, a division I’m finding increasingly arbitrary.
In brief, Andy wants to have a set of pluggable components, each doing one thing well, which get brought together for a seamless user experience where that makes sense. I agree, but as Federico points out:
To turn a personal tool into an application robust enough for other people to use takes three times as much work as developing the personal tool. This includes polishing, documentation, and debugging.
To turn an application into a library (which Brooks calls a “programming system product”) so it can be used in the way I’ve asked as a component also requires three times as much work as developing the application.
Andy talked to myself, Federico, Lubos Lunak from KDE and others on the nature of the desktop, and what was going on right now to address that. All in all a little utopian and perhaps a bit simplistic, but a good read nonetheless.
It looks like Jono made the mistake of aiming too low…
After reaching his target of £1000 in under 5 days, that total has barely moved in the last week.
Unless you want me to be completely wrong in my suggestion that he would blast through that target, Jono needs to raise another £1000 at least for comic relief – so if you haven’t done so yet make a donation.
Gerv: Was that someone me?
The conference trail I had in mind was:
And for good measure, you also have: <snip> the COPU Summit in China, 27 – 28 June, Gartner Open Source Summit, 19 – 20 July, Rome, and UTOS, 2 – 4 September, Utah.
Oh – and toto is arriving around the 15th 😉
Update: A couple of events removed – thanks to corrections from hub and colmacc. This calendar needs updating. And DDC will not coincide with OLS this year, since it would be just before both the major free desktop conferences.
On the day of my birthday (by complete coincidence, I assure you), Jono Bacon will complete yet another mad and brilliant scheme – he’s recording an entire album with 7 tracks in 24 hours on his own for charity (and releasing it under CC BY-NS-SA).
I’ve been talking about easy ways to do outreach recently – and this ain’t easy. But I definitely feel he’s underestimating his potential – he’s set his goal at £1000 when I am sure that he will get at least 5 times that (so prove me right!) – he’s already over £250 a couple of hours after announcing the insane trip.
I hope he gets some attention for this on the day, and gets to talk a bit about Creative Commons and why it’s good for everyone that we be allowed to build on our shared history and culture. Who knows – maybe he’ll get invited to play a track live on the night?
Update: The next morning, Jono’s up to £516 (the not-round-figure is due to Travis Reitter, who donated £51 just to get to the top of the list – quick, someone donate £52!)
Update 2: I’m not going to do this every day, but Jono’s now up to £821 after 3 days. Keep the support coming!
Home again. Tired. Got in around midnight last night, and after giving the boys hugs (without waking them up) and unpacking, I got to bed around 1.
I think the “Why do we do it” talk was well received again – but I guess I will need some of the people who were there to comment on that. There’s a lot on how you actually get involved – I compare getting involved in a free software project to walking into a party and getting to know everyone.
If you expect people’s first contribution to be on the mailing list, that is roughly the equivalent of having people you don’t know sing kareoke as soon as they arrive at your party. So remember that the people on the other side of the ether are human beings, that we’re shy, can get our feelings hurt, and assume that the person you’re talking to doesn’t know our culture.
Since I’ve been travelling more, the thing more than anything else that I have noticed is the assumptions people make – the things which are self-evident in one culture, and which are completely strange in another. “Well, of course I don’t have to pay when I go to the doctor” would say a Frenchman. “It’s natural that you pay to get healthcare, and pay more to get better healthcare,” an American might say.
Our community has its culture and its assumptions too – sometimes just the fact of identifying them is enough to make people realise they’re not necessarily true.
And yes, I still think we’re working on free software because we are changing the world.
For the past while, I have been running quite a bit, in training for a marathon. I have no idea why – I was never a fan of jogging – but the idea of running a marathon started teasing me last Summer, and I finally decided I was going to do one. At the point where I went searching for candidates, and chose the lucky winner, the Annecy Marathon on the 29th of April, the die were cast and there’s no turning back.
To get into the habit of running, I trained for and ran the Marseille-Cassis on Hallowe’en weekend – I got through the 21 kms in 2 hours and 1 minute (I beat the 2 hour pace-maker by a couple of minutes, she had faded in the heat at the end). The unusual think about the Marseille-Cassis is that you start at an elevation of 0, between kilometers 6 and 10 you climb from 100m to 320m elevation, and then from kilometers 16 to 20, you go back down to 0 again. It’s very tough on the knees and hips, but great fun.
Next weekend, in Brussels, I will be asking myself whether this is worth it – will the madness ever end. I have a 21km run to do according to the Hal Higdon training schedule I’m doing my best not to ignore, and I’m planning on doing it in Brussels early Saturday morning (with thanks to Martin Sevior for the link to the very useful gmaps-pedometer site).
How early? I figure if I want to be at the conference for 10am, I will have to be running by 7. So getting up at 6.30 ought to do the trick.
Which brings me to ask myself: is it marathon or masothon?
