General – Page 3 – Sri Ramkrishna

Lost in the skies, clouds roll by and I roll with them

After a 6 year hiatus, I have finally booked tickets to Brno to attend my first GUADEC after such a long time. I’d like to think that I have grown wiser, but I really just got older and I’m just as stupid.

My triumphant return of course means that I will be preying on all my favorite people, you know who you are. I got older, but I haven’t lost the hyperkinetic energy from last time! I got all MANNER of fun stuff to discuss this time around. People to see, things to do, places to go, arguments to start, beer to drink, dolls to dress up.. er wait.. maybe not the last one, that’s kind of private… but but.. ENTHUSIASM!

But this time kids, let’s not have any pictures of me on the Internet . It took 5 years for the Google to remove Ross Burton’s pic of me from the last GUADEC as the top hit under my name. I mean honestly, folks, that pic sucked. I’m supposed to be all proper and respectable. But DO, do..do do do, post pictures of the fun times you are having on blogs.gnome.org so that the portion of the world who aren’t part of your twiter feed, your facebook, google+ and so forth can join in the spectacle that is GUADEC and you! Just leave me out of it!

Also, attend my talk, it’s going to be way more interesting that Poettering kid’s talk. Applications sandboxing? Pfft. Who cares about all that mumbo jumbo! Apps aren’t important! I am! Besides, it’s not going to family friendly. It’s Lennart Poettering! You would much rather come to my talk. We can gossip about kernel developers! Did you know that Linus and I share the same house inspector?! No kidding! It’s like we share the same monkey that looks for lice in our hair! Lice free since 2007!

One last postscript, remember, folks when you set up your google+ profile, make sure under “bragging rights” you put in “I know Andy Wingo” The number of folks who’ve added me when from 500 to 3000! Do it! You’ll be glad you did!

See ya at GUADEC!

The Coefficient Of The Linear Is Juxtaposition By The Hemoglobin Of The Atomospheric Pressure In The Country

Hello! Hello Again! I’m out here attending Northwest Linuxfest! Doing a presentation on GNOME 3.. probably one of the first ones post release. I’ll blog about the experience. If any of you are attending Northwest Linuxfest, look me up! We’ll chat about whatever!

Misc stuff:

Congratulations to Ubuntu on the release of Natty Narwhal with the new Unity shell!

It feels wierd not to be running Ubuntu on my main machine, my laptop. With Ubuntu moving to Unity as their main UI, I was forced to move to Fedora 15 in order to get my GNOME 3 experience. Fedora is a great distro, with great support, and even more awesome people But I really mess debian packaging. Yum gets on my nerves. This is my first rpm based distro since RH 7.3!

My desktop machine at home is in a wierd state with Unity broken, gnome 3 not quite working.. logging in gives me the GNOME 2 experience which is also hard since I keep wanting to filck my pointer to the left top hotspot to get to the menu and wondering why it is not working. *face palm*

In any case.. maybe when Ubuntu has full support for GNOME 3 I might move back.. but for now, I’m a Fedora guy!

The Start of Something Beautiful

Congratulations to everyone who help make this release a success. Translators, designers, hackers, distributors and of course the marketing and gnome journal teams, my comrades in arms in running around getting GNOME 3 promoted.

I need to call out the webhackers who worked on the website. We started planning for a new website in 2006. We never thought that thing would be finished, but you guys pulled it out and face lifted all the other websites. Thank you guys for all the hard work you put into it. It is great!

Also thanks to the sysadmin team for all the support. A good sysadmin team works hand and glove with the community and you guys our outstanding!

Finally, thanks to all the people supporting our release with your positive comments! Thanks all of you!

Did imagine the final sound was a gun?

I managed to not blog the entire year of 2010. Despite being active in GNOME, I don’t blog much. I intend to discipline myself and blog a little more often to at least support my favorite desktop!

So what have I been doing the past year? Mostly, personal stuff, I’ve been steadily been drifting away from doing any work in GNOME and was spending most of my time snarking around IRC and even that tapered off. I’ve had some interesting times, my grandfather turned 100 years old, and then 5 months later passed away. 100 years old. Flawless victory.

Anyways enough about me. How are you? Maybe I shouldn’t be asking the Internets that. That’s how reddit and digg started!

These days, working on helping out with the marketing and gnome-journal projects. Doing some press work and of course dogfooding GNOME 3 every day. I use GNOME 3 every day on my work laptop and I can honestly say that after using it now full time for the past 2 weeks that I’m having a hard time going back to GNOME 2. Sure there are some quirks to the design that I have to adjust my work pattern to but overall a positive experience! I enjoy the task centered workspaces that GNOME 3 has that lets me focus on the tasks on hand. As a sysadmin, I’m always doing a lot of tasks that I need to keep track of.

Most people should understand that when GNOME 3 is released that this is only the beginning of an iterative evolutionary process. It’s hard to strike out on our own and try to build a new user experience that distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack. I notice that we have a number of disgruntled people who like the old method of doing things. Understandable. But we can’t just stick to status quo especially if we want to challenge the big boys. I’m hoping that this is a start of something new. Is what we doing spectacularly different? I don’t think so. I found myself doing the same thing I was doing on the shell on my new android phone moving from screen to screen using the built in expose feature of the phone. It is a starting point of sorts. I’m interested in seeing where we go from here.

A long time ago, we took the risk of breaking with tradition and working on a desktop that anybody can use on top of a Unix like operating system. I think largely we’ve succeeded. We’re going to do it again and it’s going to be exciting! I’ll blog more later about some of the things that we’ve managed to do thus far.

Iran and the elections aftermath

I wanted to express my best wishes and hope for the safety of those
who are in danger.

Especially to the GNOME Farsi community in Iran, we are all hoping for your
continued safety during this upheaval. Please be safe.

re:Twitter –
The wonderful thing about twitter is that they can communicate their
stories and experience in such a profound way. I find myself glued
to the screen to see how things are unfolding in Iran. I’ve been
following the news on Andrew Sullivan’s blog site which gives up
to date information of what is happening in Iran.

edit: fixed broken link.

Linux Plumbers Conference…

So I’ve been meaning to put a post on this but I haven’t had a chance thanks to school and what not. Having finished my exams and projects, I thought I would put in a word or two regarding the other thing I’ve been busy with and that is the Linux Plumbers Conference. This is my second year in a row in being part of the organizing committee of Linux Plumbers Conference!

Linux Plumbers Conference is one of those small conferences organized by developers for developers and thus have a highly technical focus. As a bonus, it’s held the same week as Linuxcon so you can get your taste of the O’Reilly type conference as well if laundry is an issue. 🙂 The goal is to improve the Linux platform, targetting the weaknesses and improving them. Last year we had the fast boot by Intel which started a distro war over boot time. and we had a piece of X put into the kernel, so things happen at this conference.

We are currently looking for paper submussions. Have an idea for the desktop but you need kernel developer support? This is your chance! Thanks to Jim Gettys to being our runner for the UI track. So if you have ideas that will help advance the Linux platform/ecosystem. Please submit your ideas! The conference is in Portland, OR Sept 23-25, 2009. I hope to see a lot of you there. As many can attest, Portland is an awesome city with some of the coolest people on the planet living here.

End of a stage of life.

I celebrated my 40th birthday yesterday. My parents and brother made a surprise visit and we had a good couple of days hanging out and having fun. I got a real nice gift of a photo album chronically 40 years of life. It was a really nice gift and I will treasure it a lot. Got two music cds as well!

Thanks everyone for all the birthday wishes, I appreciate it! I don’t particularly feel any different than I did in the 30s. I would venture to guess that I look better now than I did in my 20s with regular 3 mile.

All I need to do now is finish off my master’s and I can get back some of my free time!

Seeing as the end is near, I have started to get more active in GNOME this quarter. I’m working on Gnome Journal having completed an article this past issue on Gourmet Recipe Manager. A great little app, that you guys should check out.

We could use feedback on the last GJ issue so if you could mail me or post here or whatever that would be awesome. We are already working on our next issue! So if you know of interesting stuff let me know.

I’m on the planning committee of the Linux Plumbers Conference for the second time year in a row. We had great fun last year and those of you I met, it was great seeing you and I hope you will come again this year. We have some great keynotes that we will be announcing later. Also, I hope you guys are thinking of submitting some good abstracts. We are really going to be tackling sound and X again with our very own Keith Packard and Lennart Poettering and of course filesystems and embedded. If you’re an expert we want to hear from you!

http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/

Check it out!

GNOME 2.24 release!!

Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to get this release out. Especially the release team. You guys rock!!

Had a busy couple of weeks, putting on Linux Plumbers Conference An exciting time and it was great to meet old friends and new ones. I think we were able to get all the goals we wanted. It was amazing watching something from conception to execution. We didn’t have a lot of problems.

We’re hoping to plan next years soon and see if we can top what we had. Those of you I got to meet last week, it was great hanging out and I hope we get to do it again! Our community rocks! 🙂

Alll my blogs begin with long time no post.. hah!

Well, look whose blogging! That’s right, it’s me. Let’s see if I remember how to do all this bloggy stuff…

Last time or was that episode? Episode then. I”m feeling peevish, I blogged I was defending vegetarianism and posted a picture. Sorry no picture this time. I have been eating good stuff though. 😉 Including a nice home made vegetarian pizza. Maybe I’ll post it. If y’all are nice to me and such.

Since then, I’ve been busy with school and not much time for GNOME other than to hang out. I guess I’m here for the beer this year. It was great meeting the lot of you at OSCON which seems to be the post destination after GUADEC. Sadly, none of you bought me a t-shirt. Shame on you. I thought I was the mascot, I guess it was all pillow talk.

I have approximately less than a year to graduate with a M.S. in C.S. at Portland State University. I can’t wait since it’s been a real pain doing work and school and people have noticed that my contributions have shrunk to a trickle.

Anyways, knowing this audience, y’all want to talk about GNOMEy stuff. Too bad. We’re talking about me. I’m taking over for Rich Burridge! But we’re going to talk bout furry felines, not kids. Which means we’re going to talk about David Schleef. Don’t worry, he loves when we talk about him. It makes Dirac development faster. Anyhoo, Every friday, I intend to post some cynical observation about *something*.

I do have some stuff to talk bout that isn’t about my boring life. That is that you may have noticed the GNOME Journal has been a bit stagnant due to its members being really busy with either their jobs or other projects that take up their time. Some of you are probably read Planet for fun, and sometimes think “what a great bunch of people, I wish I could help out. But I can’t because David Schleef won’t let me.” You DON’T need David Schleef‘s permission. (remember, Dirac code is speeding up now, keep talking about him!) No, we are looking for a few good people, preferably human, but we have known to take on Vulcans; we aren’t racist, green blood not withstanding, to help out with writing articles. Maybe you think “I don’t know what to write”, or maybe you’re scared. If your’e scared, it’s obvious you haven’t been to GUADEC. There’s nothing to be scared of. These people are pushovers. if you get into a situation, remember “beer is GNOME kryptonite” keep a can with you always. If they are Australian, Fosters will actually repel them it’s like holy water on vampires! ANYWAYS.. We have plenty of ideas we think would make good articles. We need people. You are of course free to write your own as well. Write what you think might be interesting and we’ll do the rest. Hope you’ll sign up. Send me some email, or join us on irc in the #gnome-journal channel. Bring your dog, we like pets.

The other thing is that I’ve been actually doing some hacking. Yes, surprising as that might be. I have taken an open source class, so I essentially got to take 8 weeks and learn glib/goject/sqlite and write me up a new backend for Rhythmbox. It’s not quite finished but most of the major sutff is done and I’m trying to get into a useable state before sticking it in bugzilla. One might be tempted to think sqlite is a superior solution cuz well it’s sqlite and it’s the best thing evah! Keep in mind the current backend is pretty damn good and is a result of several years of tweaking. It’ll be a while before this backend has any chance of being supported. Huge thanks to teuf and moch for giving their time to help me and answer questions. But the project has been good for me as I’ve finally got time to learn all those dependencies that I always whined about that I couldn’t learn. Hopefully I get to participate more in the development process than I have.

Well, that’s it for me. I’ll post something mildly amusing on Friday.

Oh yeah, contact information.. mail me at sriram DOT ramkrishna DOT gmail DOT com if you are interested in helping writing articles. Free picture of me for the first person to respond!