Safe as Milk

Call to release team: Open shop on GNOME 3.0 planning!

vuntz has blogged today about some of the brainstorming that has come out of the Summit this year – and that’s great. The Summit’s an important chance to get a lot of focussed work done.

It’s a start on the road to a GNOME 3.0, but it’s not enough. what I’d like to see happen now, if the Release Team (and indeed the GNOME community) is serious about implementing a two-step 4/4 beat in the project, where every 2 to 3 years we have a major version, and we continue with our 6 month drives, then we need to get serious about co-ordinating those major feature arcs.

I’ve discussed this a few times in private, but nothing’s been announced – so as I threatened to do at the JDLL, here’s what I think that the release team should do: Open a consultation period when the community proposes major themes/feature arcs for the desktop – proposals might be conservative or ambitious, it doesn’t matter. They should be realistic, but exciting and over-arching.

Some examples I can think of are “Integrate with web services where appropriate” – and give examples of the web services and applications in question – or “Make contacts first class objects” – and show the interface for this, how we start to depend on libsoylent, various applications that include presence, more than just throwing out an idea, getting concrete about what needs to be done for the feature arc.

After the (short) consultation period, the release team announces the theme for GNOME 3.0, consults with the various maintainers concerned to ensure we’re all on the same page, and that major features are added to the mid-term roadmaps of all the applications concerned. And then magic happens, code gets written, and we have a major new feature arc for our desktop in 1 to 2 years time.

Rinse, repeat, every 2 years or so – in the run-up to a major release, we pick a new major feature arc and drive for that. In the absence of this kind of co-ordination, we will continue to have the kind of piecemeal progress that we’ve seen over the past few years – all our apps are improving, the GNOME experience is better than ever, but we don’t have a story to tell.

Congratulations Jono

Jono: Congratulations on the release of Denied by Reign – I must admit it’s not my cup of tea, but I’m looking forward to the first non-metal remixes/covers of it.

If it’ll help the advancement of your plan for world domination, I’ll happily leave the album scrobbling on last.fm – playing on repeat all night with the speakers off

Just so long as my neighbourhood radio ends up having more Nina Simone than death metal.

GNOME at JDLL 2008

It’s been a quiet day in GNOMEland here in Lyon. Not too many people around the JDLLs this year – hopefully things will be more lively tomorrow, and some lessons will be learned for the organisation for next year.

I finally got some A1 & A2 posters printed up that look very nice, if I may say so myself – special credit to artists & contributors andreasn, mizmo & zagorskid for the material.

Fredp, looking zen, at JDLL 08 in Lyon

Along with some “Why choose GNOME?” hand-outs, a Nokia N810, Nokia N800, a couple of laptops, and fredix, Dodji fredp and myself, the stand is looking not too shabby – could be better, could be worse. Tomorrow Dodji will be gone, but vuntz will be here.

End result

After all the to-and-fro of an afternoon on the phone with various departments saying it wasn’t their problem, I finally got on the phone with the French company that (allegedly) has the event box. Unfortunately, with the information I have, they can’t find it. They might have it, it might get to me soon, but as the guy said, “If you send stuff with the postal service, we don’t guarantee a delivery date”. Helpful.

So the event box is on its way, it’s probably in France, but no-one can tell me where, or when I might expect to receive it. So I’ll be spending tomorrow morning printing up some posters and hand-outs for an impromptu stand, I’ll bring my laptop, an N800 and an N810, my go-ban, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go…

If I arrive late at La Doua tomorrow, GNOME-fr people, you’ll know why.

DHL phone service

Apart from a very pleasant Julie, everyone I’ve talked to from DHL today has been shockingly disagreeable. I’ve gone from people hanging up after 5 seconds (raises the agerage number of calls) to one woman who insisted on interrupting me half way through every sentence.

At least you can get them on the phone – I spent over an hour talking to no-one on the Coliposte telephone service. Coliposte have it all worked out. “If you want to talk to automated service A, press 1. If you want to talk to automated service B, press 2. If you want to talk to a human being, please hold until you get bored and hang up.”

Delivery service telephone helplines: turning good days into bad since 1982.

Decision time

I bought some shares in Sun a while back when they were pretty cheap (pre-reverse split, around $4) – I really liked their product line, and liked the noises I was hearing around their free software strategy. For a while, the share did well, at one stage I was up about 50% when the share went over $6.

But then there was a series of things that seem to have shaken confidence – the ticker name change to JAVA seemed about as gimmicky as McCain “suspending” his campaign, the reverse split sent completely the wrong message to the market (another cosmetic change, but one that sends a message that you think the price might be going down), and from the heady days of 2007 when we had 5 straight quarters in the black, Sun’s back in the red for the last couple.

With shares now down to pre-split levels, Sun’s lost 80% of its market value in the last year, which leads me to think that one of three things are true:

• Sun is going down the tubes, and the market is singing their requiem – in which case I should sell at a loss, take whatever I can get and call it quits
• Sun is a prime acquisition target – I should probably hold onto my shares in that case and get a little more than current market value
• Sun is a company that will survive and thrive again, and it’s currently undervalued due to the crisis – in which case, I might consider doubling down

Obviously I’m no market expert, and how the share price goes over the next month or so will depend on earnings announced at the end of October – the way things are going, you have to expect those results to be bad. I’m not one to ask for advice like this usually, but I’d appreciate people sharing their insights on Sun’s prospects.

Congrats on 2.6.0!

Congrats to the GIMP team on the release of the GIMP 2.6.0. This is the first version to depend on GEGL, which makes it a major milestone for GIMP historians. GEGL can optionally be used for colour operations, and an experimental GEGL operation tool exposes the power of GEGL operations to the user – in a future release, these will hopefully be available as configurable effect layer modes. There are some other pretty impressive new features described in the release notes.

This also represents a very quick release cycle – under 1 year since 2.4.0 – which is good to see.

maemo.org redesign IRC meeting

To follow on from various discussions and the unfortunately short BOF we had on this subject in Berlin, Ryan Abel (who couldn’t make it to the summit) suggested holding an informal IRC meeting to talk about the next steps in the maemo.org revamp.

The IRC meeting will be at 19:00 UTC on Saturday the 27th of September, on the #maemo-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.

After the Summit, I believe that the basic elements of the changes we want to make are now well understood. Our dual goal is to reorganise existing information to provide the most relevant information to people who are coming to the site from outside the community, while catering to the different needs of people who are long-time members of the community. We’re going to do this by reorganising existing content where possible, rather than attempt to completely redesign the site.

Disillusionment

For those of you wondering what the motivation behind that last post was (and for the benefit of one commenter, it’s not because I’m voting McCain – I’m an Irishman living in France), it’s because I’ve been growing increasingly disillusioned with the level of discourse in this election.

Most of the Americans I know (democrats) seem to be concentrating on the ultra-polarisation of the candidates their facing – there’s a consistent attempt to show how dumb McCain & Palin are (and similar attempts coming from the other side), how radical conservative ultra-Christian she is (“burning books! Dinosaurs in schools! Handing out automatic weapons to third graders!”) and so on.

On the other end, conservatives are trying to paint Obama as the no-experience, tax-and-spend (as opposed to reduce-tax-and-spend Bush) ultra-liberal Democrat, with Biden sticking his foot in his mouth every day.

The truth, and the election discourse, is not well served by this. We are discussing minutiae, not what’s most important.

I don’t care whether Gov. Palin knows what the Bush Doctrine is – I want to know if she agrees with it.

I don’t care if McCain knows what the name of the Spanish Prime Minister is (although I must admit, transcripts of that exchange are bewildering) – what I do want to know is how he will act when president, what his priorities are, the factors which will influence his decisions, whether he values human rights more than national security – in brief, his moral fibre.

For the record, it appears to me like the moral fibre is on the side of Barack Obama. The man is, aside from being charismatic and a great speaker, thoughtful in his reflections, and seems to me to have his heart in the right place when it comes not just to America, but to the world.

That’s what I want to find out. Where is your heart.

John McCain’s heart seems firmly set on the White House, his “put America first” mantra implying, of course, that Obama won’t. On that point, I think he’s right. I believe that if America’s interests are at odds with the interests of the world, Obama will do what’s right.

“X doesn’t even know Y”

I find it amusing that we hold our politicians to standards that 99% of our citizens could not meet in terms of knowing stuff which usually figures as useless trivia. “Who is the prime minister of Spain?”, “How many soldiers in an army brigade, and an army battalion?”, “What is the Bush Doctrine?”, “How many chucks would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?”

It reminds me of programming job interviews where people think that questions like “What is the difference between an inner join and an outer join?” or “How do you do an XSLT transform using Xalan and Xerces?” are good measures of how good a programmer you’ll be.

Try measuring what decision people will take when faced with a big difficult dilemma, rather than whether he knows the answer to a question which 30 seconds in Google would get him. That seems to me to be a better measure of presiding skills.