Wiki update
Several people recommended the C based Didiwiki (although I must admit that coding a wiki in C is not something I would have considered): http://didiwiki.org
potwiki (a VIM based wiki) also got a vote, and will be tried: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1018
Christian: The point of the whining isn’t that a change has been made. The point of the whining is that a change has been made (1) which sucks, and heavily imacts the user experience (2) two weeks before a release, and (3) in everyone’s new favourite distribution. Oh, and (4) from the looks of the bugzilla comments, as a unilateral decision by the boss.
I would have preferred if they had added a toggle in the preferences, and defaulted to the other “standard” Nautilus behaviour of the browser. In addition, that would probably be much more pleasing to the vast tracts of Windows and KDE users out there who seem to expect that and find Spatial annoying. Then I could just switch on spatial, and be done with it.
Personal wiki solution
I’m looking for a wiki-like program which has the following characteristics:
Really, a wiki is ideal, except all of the wikis I know need a web server, and what I really want is more like a cross-platform Tomboy. Does such a thing exist, and I just don’t know about it?
Update: Thanks to Emmanuel Touzery and Stewart Smith for quick answers – Emmanuel reccommended Instiki (which I believe Nat mentioned a few weeks ago too). 2 clicks, and I was away. Exactly what I was looking for. Bummer that it doesn’t use the same wiki text as moinmoin, but you can’t have everything 😉
Paul Graham on high school
Particularly amusing are the footnotes:
If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they’d do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
Dissipation
One of the problems of free software is dissipation. Because of its success, there are many avenues of communication, many projects. It has become hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise.
This works both ways – developers feel they’re not getting quality feedback, and users often don’t have any way to know what’s good and what’s not in terms of applications and communication channels.
We also have more blogs, planets, user communities, news sites, and on & on.
The enthusiasm in the free sofware world is not constant, it’s growing all the time. But it is limited. And as time goes on, the average temperature of our universe is going down.
GNOMErs in Stuttgart
Here’s a special request to Stuttgart GNOME people – could you sign up to guadec-list, and declare yourselves on the wiki, please? We really need more people with local knowledge to help people figure out stuff like where to stay, how to get around, and what there is to do.
This is hillarious. My favourite bit of the pamphlet is point 4, where he says “notice the breasts are violently pierced”.
Funny supply & demand curves
RML: Supply of employment is not a linear entity, nor is demand. People must work to eat. Employers must hire people to have the resources to make lots of money.
In addition, the minimum wage only affects a certain class of job. A computer company will not be able to hire anyone at the minimum wage to hack kernels, because that is a different market to the one in which the minimum wage plays a role.
In the market where the minimum wage might play a role, it’s more like perfect competition. There are N low-wage job positions to be filled, and an infinity of people willing to fill them. At 5 dollars an hour, all N will be filled. And at 6 dollars an hour, all N will be filled.
The question is what is the minimum quality of life we as a society want the bottom wage earners to have. If a mother has to get 2 jobs at your alleged point of equilibrium just to be able to pay rent & buy groceries, that’s a problem. The minimum wage is set very simply – what is the minimum someone needs to be able to be paid to survive? If people are working full-time for less than that, that’s society’s problem.
Planning GUADEC
Traffic has picked up a little on guadec-list recently, with more people asking questions about how to get to GUADEC, and suggestions for the schedule and the like.
If you’ve been putting it off, now is definitely the time to subscribe. As I said a couple of weeks back, no GUADEC announcements are going to go to any other maining list from now on. I don’t want to spam people not coming, and I’m expecting everyone who is coming to be subscribed.
The wiki is still there, awaiting your questions, hints, tips, ideas, rants and jokes. Mosey on over to http://live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005 and help us make GUADEC.
Monday afternoon is officially GNOME planning time. There is a planning session for GNOME 3.0, as well as 2 full hours of time for team meetings, roadmap discussion, information sharing and general fun.
To help organise that time a little, we’re going to hang general labels on some of the main halls – things like “Developers platform”, “Desktop”, “Marketing and user groups”. From around now, we are actively looking for people to lead those sessions – they should be pretty self-organising, but the idea is that teams split off into smaller rooms, do their planning, then come back to the main hall during the second hour and present an overview of the big things to come out of the planning.
So a GTK+ guy will know that the GTK+ planning session will kick off in the “Developers platform” hall, where he will meet up with all the other GTK+ guys. The Cairo, libgnome, bindings, libglade, gconf and other API guys will all be there too. Perhaps they will decide to have a group session for half an hour, then split off. Hey, it’s your conference.
So – go wild! What do you want to do at the end of May? Let us know on guadec-list and live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005.
