Search Results: "mako"

24 November 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: "You May Go About Your Business"

Access and borrowing privileges at Harvard libraries is one perk of being an MIT graduate student. Actually taking advantage of the privileges of course is a borderline Kafka-esque quest that involves 5 forms, several databases, two universities, a rather impressive MIT libraries official stamp, and three geographically separated offices on opposite ends of Cambridge. Only once all those obstacles are triumphantly overcome can one go through the two card swipes and/or manual verifications necessary to get into the Widener stacks. The webpage makes it sound easy and, in all fairness, nothing about the process is threatening or difficult. While the libraries are worth the effort, it is long and tortuous: by no means for the bureaucratically faint of heart. The high point of the process, in my opinion, is picking up one's ID from the Harvard ID office. The ID office is appropriately located on the ninth floor of a building that requires ID to enter.

Benjamin Mako Hill: ...And Straight Up Is Right Out

In my computer supported collaborative work seminar, we were discussing the design of table-top systems for synchronous collocated collaboration. There was a bit of conversation on the problems and strategies with images projected onto the table (e.g., people getting in the way of the beam). There seemed to be consensus that most simple and effective solution was projectors mounted directly above the table. I pointed out that, in this context, straight down was the most straightforward.

22 November 2005

Clint Adams: GUI music players

First, I should point out that I hate GUIs. Then I should point out that I don't want to play music with a GUI music player. I'm including ncurses-type things like cplay in the GUI category. They've always made my skin crawl. So, why am I testing out GUI music players? It's because I didn't didn't realize that I misread the Audioscrobbler spec. Now that we've established that I don't know what I'm talking about, let's move on. Yesterday, I followed the suggestion of some KDE people and tried amaroK. I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty, it was functional, the UI didn't piss me off, and it kept showing me a picture of Mako for some reason I still can't figure out. Here's where it fell down: it wanted me to select tracks based on album/artist info in the file tags; the musicbrainz lookup function is not as useful as tp_tagger; when I tried to play tracks off of a slow networked filesystem, it skipped a bit, then it shoved its head up its ass and ate itself. It managed to finish the track before it disabled its frontal lobe, but it didn't send the data to last.fm. So, amaroK was a lot better than I expected, but unacceptable. People seem to like Quod Libet. Joey and Erinn. So when I tried it today, I didn't expect it to be awful. Here's what it has over amaroK: it doesn't fall over and die when trying to deal with files on a slow networked filesystem. It just skips. You may be thinking that this could be easily solved with proper buffering. I'd think that too, if it didn't skip when playing files on the local hard drive. You may be wondering why I'm trying to play music on an old 486. I'm not. This is a Pentium 4 2.8GHz under almost no load. This is ridiculous. Compared to amaroK, this thing is ugly as sin, and incredibly awkward. That includes the metadata editor that people keep raving about for some reason. Furthermore, when I rearrange songs in the Play Queue, it occasionally ignores me and plays the track that used to be at the top of the list. Rhythmbox also has problems with skipping, so I guess that gstreamer is the devil. I'm not filing bugs because I don't intend to ever use these programs again.

21 November 2005

Robert McQueen: When exactly is week 1 of 2006?

According to Jeff, I’ve become a smelly Nokia contractor (the reason he stayed with Luis instead of at Mako’s place in Boston, although I’m sure he was referring to Rob Taylor causing the smell). Part of this entails exchanging project schedules with various managers, where time is often talked about in terms of numbered weeks of the year, like: Foo task will be completed by week 42 of 2005. We ran into some problems with varying definitions of these numbers when exchanging schedules with people running on different platforms. Then we realised that even the software we’re using seems to have different ideas about what’s going on too… The result is a whole world of pain, and at best causes extreme confusion when we provide documents referring to both dates and week numbers which are inconsistent with each other in their minds, and at worst makes our managers think we’ll have things done a week sooner than we do. I’m not using Evolution at the moment for calendaring stuff, so I can manage if I remember to add one to all my 2006 week numbers when interacting with managers based on GtkCalendar and Planner, but this all seems to be horribly broken. I really don’t want to have to do this for the whole year.

20 November 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: Nimmer on Creative Commons

Seth Schoen pointed me to this article by Ray Nimmer (not to be confused with the (more) famous copyright scholar David Nimmer). Nimmer is an outspoken advocate of strong copyright and is very skeptical of free software. What is interesting about this article is the overlap between my argument in Toward a Standard of Freedom and the argument made by Nimmer . Nimmer 's subject is the free information movement and he argues against a principled position and a social movement toward freedom. He argues that part of Free Software's maturation can be seen in what he sees as the movement's tendency to look beyond its principles and standards. He positively describes a trend of putting aside core values and principles -- both in terms of the particular values in the FSD, OSD and DFSG and in terms of the method of building a movement around a defined standard of freedom -- as, "an assertion of productive and healthy individualism [that] arguably, reflects an expansion of the core ideas of open source outside the narrow confines of its own limiting doctrines." He holds up Creative Commons as a productive example of how the free information and culture movement is getting beyond their whole doctrine, principles and standards nonsense. If we look at CC as part of a larger free information movement that may eventually start influencing free software, he may be right. Open Source succeeded in separating the doctrine and definitions of Free Software from its principles and ethical arguments. Creative Commons, and others following their example, has now introduced a broader free information movement that has fully excised any fixed definitions of freedom and openness and has even abandoned the strategy of providing definitions at all. This of course, is precisely the argument I made in Toward a Standard of Freedom but it's a little disconcerting to see it made by someone on the other side who then comes to the opposite conclusions. As Seth put it, "Nimmer is saying that CC is doing exactly what you're saying it's doing, except that he thinks it's good because he doesn't like free software!"

18 November 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: Cilia

I think "Cilia" is a pretty name for a girl. My biologist friends disagree. As far as I'm concerned, it sure beats Flagella.

17 November 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: No Price Is Too Much

This article from Access North Georgia's Newsroom describes how there is a investigation in Cobb County into allegations that, "the bidding process for the 100 million dollar laptop program was slanted in favor of apple." Making a laptop for 100 million dollar hardly seems that difficult. Some of us are more ambitious. If you haven't seen it, the first demo of the laptop was unveiled in Tunis and is totally green. Congratulations to everyone else who put in long days (and nights) on making this demo shine.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Unrehersed Redundancy

Kiko, Micah, and I ate at Legal Seafood's yesterday and had this little message on the bottom of our bill:
PLANNING A REHERSAL DINNER? MAKE YOUR ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE UNIQUE. JOIN US.
Where I come from, rehearsals are things are things that, by definition, happen more than once. When they do happen, it's usually with an a between the e and r. Of course, I have to respect Legal for so succinctly combining a redundancy and a contradiction on the same topic.

15 November 2005

Jordi Mallach: Not that Cambridge

As predicted, the morning was not productive at all. At one point I slightly became concious and saw sladen fetching his bike, opening the door and saying me "Back in two hours!". We didn't know anything about him until 24 hours later. As we started waking up, we tried to think of a plan for the day. The morning was gone, though. Clint took us to a restaurant two blocks away for breakfast, or actually brunch, because that was the only food in many hours. I ate some "pancakes" with banana in them, and barely could finish them; they are very filling. We went to the promenade for a last look at the Manhattan skyline and took some pictures while we tried to figure out what to do.


A last view over Manhattan Mako was developing a plan in secret, though, which involved micah and his car. Micah found out soon after. We went back to Clint's, expecting to find sladen somewhere, but we didn't. I packed my things, and when we really needed to go, we resolved to put his things in the entrance so he could find then and do whatever he wanted on his return. We went on the Metro to Union Square, where, hear this helix, I saw TONS of raperos doing their break-dance thing (ok, maybe not tons, but I did see them). And two blocks away, we arrived to the most incredible book store. Mako has blogged many times about buying very rare books at the Strand for ridiculous prices, but this was totally unexpected. The Strand is huge. On the outside, there's carts with hundreds of second-hand books, all for one dollar. Mako used to go there and browse the books to find interesting stuff. The Acetarium is full of them! Most of the dollar books are total crap though. A very high percent talk about god, religion, "our troops" and stuff like that. Mentally filtering what might be good and what is not is not easy when you haven't done it before. Mako started scanning the shelves as soon as we arrived, and every now and them he'd pick some totally stupid title. I was on my own shelf, missing many good stuff, while mika, Clint and mako did their own. Clint found quite a few titles, but mako didn't find anything good. I got lucky though, and found the precious book of the day: The Spanish Anarchists. The heroic years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin. Although old, it was in very good condition, and mako immediately asked if I was taking it. :) I won! The inside of the Strand was incredible too. Three very big floors packed with books, plus the half-priced "reviewer's copies" at the basement. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of books I'd be interested in buying, and the limited weigh I should be carrying back, so I did my best not to look too carefully. For a few hours, I didn't have a too clear idea of what mako's plans were. At some point, micah phoned him and we rushed to the PATH, the train that goes to New Jersey. Apparently we were meeting micah at Newark, but I still didn't know why we had to go there. During our ride, I could see how pleasant New Jersey is to the human eye. Miles and miles of heavy industries. I'm pretty sure it's the ugliest place I've ever seen. What I couldn't see, and I'm still disappointed, is any of the viciously arrogant rats of the New York metro system. Mako had told me about how they look at you, like saying "if you come down here, you'll be left with 9 fingers", and the incredible number of them on the tracks. Unfortunately I couldn't see any. I blame Michael Bloomberg. At Newark, micah appeared in his car, and we all hopped into it. We apparently were going by car to Boston... including Clint. I was puzzled, as he had to work on Monday, but he'd said that he'd simply "come back". There was a problem though, mako had dilinger's keys, and he was going back to NYC from Boston, and we didn't have time to get to Boston before he left, so we had to find a way of leaving the keys in NYC so he could get into his appartment. Finally, mako resolved that Clint would be left in a cold street, in a rough area of NYC, and he would handle the keys problem. I still didn't understand what was going on. We headed North, and I quickly fell asleep on mika's nap. I'm getting old. When the car stopped again and I suddenly woke up, I looked ahead and... HORROR! We were at the door of a McDonads. WTF WAS GOING ON? So it seems that when you're on the road, there's no much other choice than shit food. After a quick discussion with mako about how badly those burgers taste, I quickly went back to sleep, until we were in Boston. It took a while to find a parking spot, because all of them "permit only". It's impossible to park if you come from somewhere else. I was finally at the Acetarium, a very cool flat in Cambridge, 15 minutes away from the MIT. It was 3:30 in the morning. The day after, we woke up pretty late, and as I opened my laptop and found a privmsg from sladen, he was was knocking at the door. This man has an incredible ability to disappear and reappear when he's most unexpected. Apparently he managed to grab his stuff in NYC, fetch the bus and arrive at 2 in Boston, meeting dilinger at the station, and mako as he went out to MIT. micah and I went to explore Boston, but never managed. We consumed a few hours when trying to ship some equipment to micah's colo, and then trying to find food. When we were ready to go, micah got a very badly timed call, which made him go back to the Acetarium: a server at work was dying or dead. At one point, it was late enough that going to Boston wasn't worth it, so we went to visit the Media Lab instead. On our way there, micah and I kept chatting about this and that, and found out how small the internet is. We both know a bunch of common people from uncommon places like Per , from our involvement in social projects in the net like Indymedia and Sindominio.net. The MIT is incredible, specially the Stata Center by Frank Gehry. We wandered around as we only got voice mail from mako, until an hour later we found we was like 20 metres away from us. He gave us a tour through the Media lab, and it was incredible. I had never seen something like that. Every lab was colourful and fun, and very cool developments were going on everywhere. I also saw the coolest mame box ever, with an arcade case and everything.


The Stata Center, right next to the Media Lab After the tour, micah and I headed back, while sladen stayed to have a look at one of mako's projects. When we got back to the flat, there were a few people already there for mika's sushi party, and I rolled my first sushi rolls, which was fun. A bunch of Debian people joined us, including zufus and gravity, and had a great chat with them. The party ended way too late and after too many beers. sladen used his secret disappearing abilities, and a few colleagues from mako crashed, so there was a bit of overbooking. Mako's solution was simple. mika, him and I could share their bed. I can't say I have slept too much, because mako would keep pulling the blanket and leave me out in the cold, and I was trying not to squish mika. But it went ok, although we discovered too late that mika was hot while I was cold, and we swapped our places too late. Today, we'll go find the Freedom Trail and walk a bit around it, meet gravity and zufus for lunch, and I will sadly have to go back to Cambridge, quickly pack and head to the airport to catch my plane. My hours in North America are expiring.

Per-Arne Hellarvik: Hopefully working.

After a chat with Mithrandir, with a following mail to Mako,
I have (hopefully) now a HackerGotchi on p.d.o.

Smile, you're on line...

14 November 2005

Jordi Mallach: The source of all evil

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun. Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan's skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can't picture them too well in my mind.


The skyline of South Manhattan We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can't go past the Town Hall. "Security reasons", of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It's like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn't make me feel safer. After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with mikah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not. We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it's missing a key. After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge. And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a "public space" in JP Morgan's building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it. As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.


The New York Stock exchange and it's black evil aura of Capitalism I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn't let us in for "security reasons". Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It's curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn't know is the "friendly" symbol of how Capitalism works.


I had Capitalism by the balls We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.


The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn't seen until we got back home. Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an... ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can't stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn't so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI's lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group. Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door. After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn't look like the morning after would be very productive...

11 November 2005

Jordi Mallach: The East Coast Road Trip

Tomorrow I leave Montr al, Qu bec and Canada and will move down to the US, on my way to New York City. This part of my stay in North America is a bit (others would rather say "totally") improvised, and the plans are not too accurate even now, 8 hours before our departure. The first idea for this was to travel on a night bus from Montr al to Boston, meet mako and mika and then move to New York City during the weekend. The unavailability of any buses that did this route in less than thirteen hours made me look for alternatives. Chatting with mdz, I found out he was flying with Mark and Jane to NYC very early on Friday night, on the private jet. Sounded like a plan. Only it had a big flaw: non commercial flights entering the US require visas for everyone aboard, apparently. If you don't have it, the reports say you're really, really fucked up. So, having no visa as I don't need it in normal conditions, this was discarded too. Finally I learned that jblack was driving down to Pennsylvania after the conference. I asked him if it was possible to go with him on his way South, and he said yes. He could drop me in the nearest point to Boston, or drive me straight to NYC. As NYC is the easiest for me and jblack and Clint has no problem with hosting me one extra day, that's what we're going to do. (After having everything more or less clear, Paul Sladen came along and proposed yet another plan involving a bicycle and hitch-hiking. I was able to say no, though.) Here starts this crazy road trip. Wish me luck, and see you in NYC!

10 November 2005

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber: Debian Linux Kernel Handboook

Jurij Smakov et al have published the Debian Linux Kernel Handbook, which will help in documenting the internals of the Debian Linux Kernel build process. The document is still work in progress with a lot of sections missing, but it's a giant step in the right direction.
Continue reading "Debian Linux Kernel Handboook"

2 November 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: Double Occupancy

Last night I was out in Dublin and, due to the length that the night dragged on, I invited my friend to crash in the extra bed in my Hotel room in central Dublin rather than return to his place in the suburbs which, at that point, may well have been impossible. When someone came by to clean the room in the morning, they noticed both beds full and reported this to the Hotel managment who called me up to say that they knew the room had been "double occupancy" last night and that they wanted to know if it would "single occupancy" the next night. That's a pretty strange way to talk if you think about it. There is an extra person in my room and the Hotel complains that my room has somehow changed into a new state that they are unhappy with. I suppose this circuitous way of speaking is designed to avoid any potentially embarrassing discussion about who the extra body is and why they are there. That said, this type of obtuse conversation is difficult for patrons to puzzle through immediately after being awoken. Dublin, of course, is great.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Quote of the Day

Antiquated technology makes for emancipatory possibilities.

—Alan Toner (2005)

Perhaps a truism. Perhaps merely what I fear is a prescient statement.

30 October 2005

Jurij Smakov

My hobby corner is now fully operational.

27 October 2005

Martin F. Krafft: Hatschi

Mako, going on a tangent for a second: I've always thought it was curious that US people sneeze "Achoo", whereas over here in Europe, we sneeze "Hatschi" ("Achee"). Must be some genetics at work.

26 October 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: Achoo

If one is in a public or shared restroom at a urinal or in a stall and the person at the adjacent urinal or in the adjacent stall sneezes, is it appropriate to say "bless you" or "gesundheit" or another culturally appropriate post-sneeze statement? Is it appropriate to say nothing at all? It's cold season at the lab and the fact that I do not know the answers to these questions is becoming a source of stress.

24 October 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: <em>Talk:</em> The Ubuntu Project: Overview and Development Model

My talk at BLU seems to have been carried out successfully. The talk was nothing new for folks who follow this blog and know my other Ubuntu talks. It was a long (nearly two hour) number given to an audience with mixed experience with Ubuntu. As such, it covered a lot of ground by pulling from both my introductory Ubuntu talks and my To Fork or Not to Fork talk that I gave several times this summer. The talk was given at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Steve Ballmer gave a talk at Sloan two days later. His talk was better attended. Of course, I doubt he told people how to get free copies of his projects OS offering shipped to their homes at no cost. Slides and notes follow. Slides: Talk Notes:

23 October 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: Darklight Film Festival Symposium

Next month in Dublin is going to be the Darklight digital film festival. In preparation for the festival is a now traditional symposium that has a reputation for bringing together a collection of interesting people to, "identify, profile and respond to the current transformations in the distribution of cultural production enabled by the proliferation of digital and wireless networks." I'm thrilled to have been asked to attend and give a speech there along with fellow Media Lab inhabitant Barry Vercoe (of course, he helped found the lab -- I've only been there for a month). I'll be talking about intellectual property and will try to describe some of the history of the current mess we're in, offer a rough classification of the types of solutions that are being offered and then go into some depth on the Free/Open Source Software model. I'll talk about the reasons Free Software has been successful and try to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying this model to the production of other types of creative works. You can check out the symposium schedule and register now for a free spot in the audience. Please keep in mind that registration is limited. If you will not be able to attend but are in Dublin and would like to meet up (for keysigning, chatting, etc.), please get in contact and we'll work something out. I've never been to Ireland before am excited. The one (major) downside of course is that this talk will mean I will not be able to attend the most relevant parts of Ubuntu Below Zero conference and so am currently not planning to attend at all. I send my regards to the rest of the Ubuntu team. I'll see you at the next one am looking forward to the tsunami of new specs that will define Dapper and am looking forward to participating in whatever way I can from remote.

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