Recently much ink has been spilled on the forms of micro-writing (Twitter, Facebook status updates, micro-blogging) that have captivated the hearts, minds, and especially keyboards of those, like me, who spend a lot of time in front of the blue screen (whether a computer or a phone). Lately, perhaps in part because I was home bound for days, I went on a status-update frenzy, updating my Facebook feed like there was no tomorrow and checking in as often to read the short nuggets left by friends.
Despite this recent bonanza, I don t admit to all my friends of this addiction as some of them seem to really dislike no the more accurate term is detest this linguistic genre. Generally, it seems to me, there are those that love these messages, and then there are those who disparage them for being inane, short blasts of egotistical information that reflect and worse, reinforce the rampant, raw, unfiltered American love with self, performing the individual, and all that related jazz. I am sympathetic with the haters and at times, I admit I feel nothing but the hate (and perhaps this is why I have yet to Twit) but after thinking about it I have decided I am not really in their camp. Why?
Well, something I do when I am thinking through phenomenon is ask: What Would Bakhtin Think (WWBT) as he is a theorist that I adore for he avoids so many of the traps, mostly of binary thinking, that befall most academic theorists. The answer to WWBT, at least from the way I read him, would be that he would dig and find something quite significant about these linguistic ephemera. Bakhtin, who was a
Russian literary critic and thinker , thought highly of the novel as a genre for, unlike poetry, it provides a window into everyday life, into the depths and heights of the prosaic, which, however prosaic, is actually where all the extraordinary stuff of life resides. For in the humdrum of life is where he locates wonder, magic, suffering, laughter, mystery, love, oppression, and joy even if its significance often slips right on by our awareness, our perceptual world, until it is unearthed by such genres as the novel (and I would add film).
You really can t get more mundane than these micro-statements, though albeit they can be fantastically funny, frustratingly opaque, devilishly satiric, and in rare occasions, poetic; and it is for all these reasons that I find them personally enjoyable and analytically valuable. So much of our life is seeped and steeped in the mundane and yet it is whizzes by us without much reflection. We certainly don t have much of a window into the mundane lives of others, especially in any real time sense. These updates are short pauses, like a temporal parenthesis (which any reader of this blog can I tell I am fond of) or a pleasant hiccup. While many say that they are egotistical blasts, I experience them otherwise, especially when I find myself smiling, laughing, wondering not at what I say but what others throw out there. For with the short update, I am transported, however ephemerally and momentarily, to your mundane world and share in the pleasures of life as is.
And for those that remain unconvinced, at least take my word that Bakhtin is worth paying attention to (that is, if you pay attention to academic theory), here is a
review essay that might convince you (subscription required but I will try to post a full copy later)
For various reasons (which in the end boil down to lack of manpower), we are quite late in the process of packaging GNOME 2.24. (This is almost finished now, I ll keep you informed.) Which is why I may sound coming a bit late on noticing this one, but I was really speechless.
The problem: session management has flaws
Currently, a session manager uses XSMP (the X Session Management Protocol) to talk to applications. What it means is that for applications supporting this protocol, it is able to do more than simply starting and killing them: it will also remember their state, and offer them a way to shut down gracefully. However, XSMP is really a shitty protocol I won t explain why here, you will find tons of better explanations on the intarweb.
The gnome-session developers, being quite aware of this issue, did what anyone interested enough would have done: they designed a new protocol, based on D-Bus, and implemented it. The new protocol is not considered stable yet, but it is simple, efficient and above all, reliable that s a giant leap forward. For this reason, I was very excited to see what gnome-session 2.24 would look like, since it brings major cleanups in the code.
The solution: remove session management!
When I first started it, it did not restore my saved session. I simply supposed that the format of the saved session had changed, and that writing a conversion tool would be in order. Wrong. Let s bring the session preferences:
In her twenty-first year, Ma t na got the blues in Sant Tropetz.
In June 2007, I bought a new 9-cell-battery for my ThinkPad notebook. Since then, I recorded, via a cron job, every five minutes these bits of information:
Open and voluntary membership is 
40319
An e-book reader where I can click on any word and enter a definition for it.
The definition will then appear as a tooltip when I hover over the word.
Take that, Iain Banks, and Neal Stephenson!
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I want Deskview X's terminal program. The one that resizes the font when
the window is resized. Except free and modern.
With modern (ie, auto-layout tiling) window managers, this is less of a
wishlist and more of a missing necessity. Ideally, it would always keep the
window 80 columns (or some other user-defined value) wide.
I've poked around in gnome-terminal's source, and this looks fairly
doable, but I have not found the time to get down and do it.
Fellow
The Debian Python Modules Team is 
And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
(hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
I wanted to report a success story with