Safe as Milk

GUADEC papers update

Several people have contacted me and the guadec-papers list over the last week a little worried because the due date for written papers is coming up (1 March), and we still haven’t told people whether they have been accepted or not.

Because of an unforeseen delay (which we are working hard to resolve), we will not be able to tell people for sure that they are accepted until the end of next week. So we have decided to extend the deadline for submission of papers to March 15th to give people just under 4 weeks to submit papers after being notified.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

On a side note, the quality of presentations we have received this year is excellent, and due to space constraints, we have had to be hard on a great number of high quality presentations. This year’s GUADEC should have the highest quality of talks of any so far. We have reduced the number of parallel streams, to have even more time and space for the stuff people really expect from GUADEC – fun, and in-person brainstorming and team building. But we also have a good mix of presentations and tutorials for GNOME newbies, to get people loving GNOME even more, and even faster. It’s going to rock.

Ubuntu (and GNOME) takes over Asia

Federico: Thanks for the tip. So – what’s the secret to developing B&W film over IRC?

On gimp-users today someone asked a question about the availability of panorama tools for the GIMP.

I had previously searched for and found such a plug-in, but it had been a couple of years, so I went on a quick web search to see if I could find the one I remembered.

I uncovered this massive community of people interested in stitching tools, with a very active mailing list and several applications (some GIMP plug-ins too) – I must admit I was surprised, since I had never heard of most of these applications before.

Here are the results of that “quick” search, for posterity.

• The original set of tools I remembered was pandora. It has its own webpage with a more recent version to download: http://www.shallowsky.com/software/pandora/
• Or it might have been Panotools. The home page for Panorama tools is http://panotools.sourceforge.net/ and it is GIMP 2.0 compatible.
• However I found a whole mailing list which is *very* active on panotools frontends – http://www.email-lists.org/mailman/listinfo/ptx

• There are many programs mentioned on that list, among them
  hugin seems to be the most reccommended: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

• And the enblend program: http://enblend.sourceforge.net/

• And finally autostitch:
  http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/

The ptx mailing list has about 100 mails a month, primarily from hugin developers. This is a great model for “themed” software – different packages whose functionality complements each other.

Wow. It’s amazing what years of fear will do to a country.

We need more rebel movies. Bring back Dean and Brando!

In other news, Jean Pierre Raffarin is trying a new tack to getting fired. I’m not against allowing people to have longer working weeks, but I’m in the minority.

That’s because the way things currently work in France is that you have the same working week as everywhere else (40 to 50 hours), and you get 10 to 20 extra holiday days per year. Last year I had 40 days holidays, this year (because I changed jobs) that’ll be down to about 15 (10 days RTT and 5 days holidays).

The French have this weird system where you have to earn your holidays in one year, and take them the year after. Then when you quit you are paid for all of the holidays you earned, but didn’t have the right to take yet.

Wiki news

On a thread on marketing-list last week, a point was made that right now there are too many avenues of communication into the GNOME project. Many requests for help appear to fall on deaf ears, simply because they are never seen by the people best able to respond. With the vast number of mailing lists, websites and other resources, it can be hard to know where to turn for help.

That was part of the reason why gnomesupport.org was so successful as a help site – people could turn up to the forum, ask questions, and expect answers. One of the things which gnomesupport.org did was put up a wiki, long before live.gnome.org existed.

So as a small step towards the consolidation of points-of-entry for low-level users, I proposed to stro over at gnomesupport that we work towards migrating all of the information from the gnomesupport pages to live.gnome.org. We haven’t worked out all of the details yet, but at least there is agreement that this is a good thing to do. The GNUCash developers, who didn’t even know about live.gnome.org, used the gnomesupport wiki exclusively, and a first response suggests they are happy to move too.

So, it’s a small step, but soon there will be only one wiki for GNOME, which is a Good Thing. Many thanks to Claus Schwarm for pointing out the gnomesupport site to me, and to stro for helping work out the details of the move.

Robert: Your argument against rent control is a good one, but it has a fatal flaw. When you say

the problem is that, in a stable market, prices properly reflect the position of supply versus demand

you’re correct. However, accomodation is not a completely open market, and thus purely market forces do not suffice to stabilise it. Accommodation is a limited resource, and usually people have little choice where they live once they take a given job.

The situation in Dublin in the ’90s is a good example. At the start of the decades, rents were cheap by European standards. Even in 1996, when I moved to Dublin, I was paying £35 ($50) a week for a bedsit, which became £40 ($57) a week in a house-share soon after.

Then the job market exploded. The population of Dublin and its greater metropolitan area went up from under a million in 1991 to 1.4 million (including satellite towns) in 2002. My rent went from £35 a week to £450 ($600) a month when I moved to a 40 m2 (400 sq ft) apartment in 99, and from there to £750 (over $1000) a month when we moved to a slightly bigger apartment – 55m2 (550 sq ft) in 2000. That’s an inflation rate of 300% or 400%, which was caused by a mix of market factors and geographical factors.

• More meople were arriving in Dublin than there were places to accommodate them
• Dublin’s design (and planning laws) meant that it was hard to accommodate everyone in the town, leading to some urban sprawl
• Houses were coming on the market 6 to 9 months after they were needed, leading to a tulip war over new houses
• People needed accommodation, so to get what little there was, took bigger loans at the bank
• The banks, seeing the market explode, were happy to give people more money than they could afford to pay back easily.
• More and more people were buying property as an investment, raising rents to pay back mortgages
• Most of the people migrating to Dublin were in the 20-30 age bracket, and most of them could not afford to buy at market prices

The classic laws of supply and demand make assumptions about buyers and sellers (such as, if a buyer is charging too much for a good, the seller can decide not to buy it) – the situation in the real world where a good is both a necessity and in limited supply mean that controlling the market is sometimes a good idea.

Just to clarify what I mean by rent control: when you agree to let a property at a specific rent, you are limited in the frequency of rent increases, and in their amount, by the law. Typical restrictions might be “no increase for 2 years, then no more than 3% per year”. So if you rent an apartment in 2000 at $500 a month, then you know that your rent will not be any more than $515 a month in 2002.

In situations where rent control is in place (such as France), market pressures can still force rises in property prices and rental prices, while protecting existing tenants from landlords. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it means you can’t arbitrarily raise the rent to get in a “better” tenant, putting some poor 70 year old woman who worked all her life embroidering tablecloths out on the street.

A first: I needed information on the modbus or modbus+ protocols for work today (it’s a low-level protocol common in embedded stuff – basically a master says to a slave “Give me 50 bytes starting at offset 0x08”, and the slave does), and came across this page.

What’s particular about the page is this line, in their product specs:

• Straight forward per-developer-seat software license, no royalties or GPL

This is the first time that I have seen “no GPL” listed as a “feature” of a commercial product. I suspect that it’s important in the context of an SDK,and if it’s there it’s because clients have asked the question, but it just struck me as odd. I guess it means that

1. Free Software has mindshare even in niches where you wouldn’t expect it, and
2. the first reaction to Free Software is fear and uncertainty.

Luis: Of the 40 patches which got “reviewed” , over half were from the GIMP. Sven and mitch do a great job of looking at and commenting on every patch we get, but they don’t always update the patch status. So all that had to be done was to go through the bugs, and mark the patches “needs-work”, “committed” or “rejected” depending on the previous feedback. Easy peasy 😉

So can you update your list of “top performers” now? 🙂

Alan Horkan mentioned this presentation, which gave me something of a buzz. It’s a presentation about and around social software, but is also valid for a bunch of other group situations.

I got particularly excited about the IRC/Wiki/conference call situation he described later on.

The author is discussing the design of social software, but he comes up with a number of insights that are somehow related to other things two:

• A group is its own worst enemy
• You can’t separate social and technological issues
• You need barriers to participation

Some related articles are here (Joel on Software) and here (LambdaMOO changes direction).