Search Results: "andy"

Eric Dorland: watch files considered helpful

I spent some time yesterday putting watch files in most of my packages. Watch files have been around for a long time in Debian, but hasn't reached the exposure it perhaps deserve. They're used by uscan to check for newer upstream versions of the source. What's even more useful than running uscan is the Debian Watch Health Status pages (which are also helpfully linked from the QA developer's page, but that functionality appears to be broken at the moment) which parse the watch files as well and provide a nice web interface to look up your packages and others and see where upstream is at. Unfortunately, for this to work properly the package needs a watch file, and according to the statistics, only ¹/₃ of all packages have watch files. So here's a quick tutorial, just plop a suitably modified version of these examples into the debian/watch file in your package and you're off to the races. If you're packaging foo and the source tarballs are on ftp.foo.org your watch file will look something like this:

version=3
ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub/foo/foo-(.*)\.tar\.gz

Some things to note: the version line is just there to allow for future enhancements without breaking backwards compatibility. For the location specifier, the last part after the final / is a regular expression (notice the .'s are escaped). The pattern inside the parentheses is what gets parsed as the upstream version number. For HTTP the syntax is almost identical:

version=3
http://www.foo.org/files/foo-(.*)\.tar\.gz

This snippet will download http://www.foo.org/files/ and look for href's corresponding to the rest of the pattern. For projects hosted on Sourceforge, there's a handy syntax for that, and uscan will take care of figuring out its annoying mirror system. If it's project bar, and the source is called libbar:

version=3
http://sf.net/bar/libbar-(.*)\.tar\.gz

There are many more details in the uscan man page. I think it would be great if more maintainers put watch files in their packages. It's one of those touches that really sets Debian apart from the rest.

Erich Schubert: Why I'm proud of Debian

This is another example why I'm proud of Debian. I sometimes have the impression, that some distributions try to package stuff with as little effort as possible. Debian however has to support tons of different architectures, build daemons and pbuilder that mostly ensure you've got the build dependencies complete, tons of users of unstable and testing that will send you bug reports when you don't have the runtime dependencies right and so on. We have a really good quality assurance. On the very first day my selinux-basics package entered unstable, I already received feedback about the udev integration. So you might ask me, why I think this is really different from other distributions. There are of course distributions which have similar properties, but I think Debian has the biggest crowd. And Ubuntu is so closely tied to Debian that these things aren't that separable. Most Ubuntu packages are largely unmodified Debian packages. And changes done by Ubuntu - which for example tracks Gnome closer than Debian - will often be fed back into Debian again. For example fakeroot, or pbuilder are further examples on Debians best practises to do quality ensurance. Sane software shouldn't require real root privileges for building. The current Debian Vote on the GFDL is another example. I'm confident it will boil down to "Debian refuses the GFDL, because it contains too many restrictions for our users". Debian cares much for it's users. And the users of our users. And the users of our users of our users. ;-) As a whole, not just the majority which will probably never even consider changing a GFDL-licensed document. Of course, people are frequently annoyed by e.g. Debian not having the latest X.org betas in unstable, so they could try out Xgl, Aiglx and this other eye candy. Sorry about that, but I do think that the X task force knows how to set its priorities right, and you could probably just get these beta version from Ubuntu and run them on your Debian. Or build your own packages and offer them to others who want to try it, too. Or wait, like I do quite often (for example for ekiga, which is stuck in the NEW queue currently). It doesn't really hurt much to not have the newest, fancies toys. In fact, you are likely to be more productive when you don't care for these things.

Uwe Hermann: Greenpeace, E-waste, Linux Ecology-HOWTO

Greenpeace has asked companies to minimize the usage of toxic substances (English article) in computers and other electronic devices at this year's Cebit. Hewlett Packard, LGE, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony and Sony Ericsson have assured Greenpeace to reduce toxic substances in their products in the nearer future. However, many other companies have ignored Greenpeace so far. For example: Acer, Apple, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Lenovo, Panasonic, Siemens and Toshiba. I'm listing the names of these companies here in the hope to increase public pressure on them a bit ;-) Although I'm not a member of Greenpeace (yet?), I do support the ideas and work of Greenpeace, and especially the above E-waste article made me think. We're all using more and more computers, PDAs and other gadgets — especially the geeks among us. I think we all should (at least to a certain degree) care about how this affects the environment. I have fired up a search engine and looked for some hints about what you can do as a computer geek in order to help save the environment — guess what... there's a HOWTO for that, the Linux Ecology-HOWTO! (I'm beginning to think that there's no topic out there anymore, which hasn't been covered in a HOWTO by some Linux geek ;-) (via netzpolitik.org)

Aigars Mahinovs: 60 rants (2)

Hospitals overcharging uninsured people http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/02/60minutes/main1362808.shtml The bulk of the story in not really that hospitals make uninsured people pay more, it is that they make insurers pay less. It looks like it is common practice in US hospitals to charge their patients for work and materials with 300-500% profit margin. Only most of the country does not know it because they have either health insurance or Medicare and those insurers and government programs negotiate for themselves discounts in range of 75-90%. Also noone can find out the prices of specific procedures in different hospitals making going to a hospital look like blind shopping. In my mind two thing must be done legislatively about this: demand that all price lists of all publicly accessible hospitals also be freely accessible by the public, ban any kind of discounts or bulk prices that hospitals could give to insurers or government programs. That will ignite a price war and bring the prices down considerably. And in the mean while make a court case that any uninsured person receiving medical attention can demand to be charged as much as Medicare would be charged for the same procedure.

Willie Brand and torture in Afghan prisons http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/02/60minutes/main1364163.shtml There is just incredible amount of lies buzzing around the current US administration especially with relation to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that just from shreds of evidence that leaks out despite military discipline. Now top generals claim that prisoners have never been tortured or hanged from ceilings in Afghan prisons run by US army forces, while guards at those prisons claim that the same generals saw the procedures and did not disprove of them in any way. Now the generals blame everything on the guards themselves and even their direct captain claims that he did not see anything. Bullshit! It is long time that NATO and ANO should step in and report USA to the Security council and impose sanctions on USA for breaking the Geneva convention. Because, if USA can do that and go unpunished, why should other countries uphold human rights of their prisoners?

The Prince of Pot http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/02/60minutes/main1364163.shtml A Canadian is being charged with drug trafficking by USA for selling marijuana seeds in his shop in Canada. It is formally illegal there, but even if charged, he would only have to pay a fine. However if he is extradited to USA, he would face up to a life sentence. The man is a leader of marijuana legalization movement in Canada. It may come as a surprise, but I agree with him. Marijuana no more harmful then alcohol or tobacco. Some even argue that marijuana is less harmful to the body and mind then alcohol or tobacco in same doses. If those two substances are allowed, then marijuana should be allowed too, in the same regulated manner as those two. If marijuana is banned then alcohol and tobacco must be banned too - be consequent. By pushing marijuana into the black market governments only make the black economy stronger. Also marijuana acts as a gateway drug just because government says it is as bad as heroin, so people after trying marijuana start thinking "Well marijuana is not that bad, maybe government is lying about heroin too". And after a few months a new unalive junkie is formed out of what could have been a contributing member of society.

Andy http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/02/60minutes/rooney/main1363712.shtml Andy rants about outsourcing this week. Fear not Andy - it is easy to outsource labor intensive jobs, but outsourcing creative jobs is much harder - no asian guy can replace you (well maybe except for George Takei :)).

Clint Adams: Did I get turned into a horse?

In the sack: Sweet strawberry ammonia candy Wet: Bread-in-a-can. You remember bread-in-a-can, don't you? Dry down: OOS with reluctance The touch: Crazy oil goodness The feel: Orange groves, lemon groves, lime groves, but no citrus to be found. Tonsils, sweet tonsils. A frozen banana. The magic of our lives: Homegirl done grunted at the maksha router. Final verdict: To be stapled in.

Andrew Pollock: [opinion] On movie advertising

Robert Collins: Actually no, we don't pay enough at the movies so that we don't have to be inundated with advertising. In fact, it's getting harder and harder for movie cinemas to make a buck, that's why the candy bar has such outrageous prices. It's the advertising that is their bread and butter, not the ticket sales.

Arnaud Vandyck: MDR is not DFSG-compatible

Wolfgang was right about SPL not being free. MDR is a library that ArgoUML will use. ArgoUML is in contrib at the moment because of Swing issues so it can’t be built and run with free software, but there are a lot of progresses in free Classpath based runtime. But now that ArgoUML will switch to MDR, we have another problem: SPL. It seems that SPL is not DFSG-compatible. Bad. I filed an issue on the Netbeans website (Issue#73161) to ask if they could change the license to one DFSG-compatible. If it’s not possible, I’ll have to package MDR to non-free and leave ArgoUML in contrib.

Arnaud Vandyck: FOSDEM2006

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing

. So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing

During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry

Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny

I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy

, nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy

). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

Aigars Mahinovs: 60 rants

To get my blogging up to a more regular schedule and also give you something to read that everyone could relate to, I decided to start regular commenting on the latest in 60 minutes

Stem Cells http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/23/60minutes/main1341635.shtml I must say that I have not been following the stem cell research closely enough in last couple of years and I am very amazed that we can now actually tell a stem cell to develop into a particular type of cell. The sight of a bunch of cells grown into a slab of heart tissue was especially fascinating. First of all there are at least two problems that I see with the research as it was shown in the program: they are not using cells from the patient, they are simply injecting the cells "in the general direction of the problem". The first is probably a problem caused by politics - in a perfect world we would take a cell sample from a patient, take nuclei of those cell, put them in place of the nuclei of the stem cells and we would basically have cloned stem cells of the same patient that we plan to be treating. There would be no problem with nonacceptance of donor organs or confusion of living with another persons DNA inside your cells. Politics block those developments. The second problem is mostly the simple immaturity of the field of research and microsurgery in general - it is still very hard for us to grow a full slab of heart and surgically replace damaged tissue with it. There are pros and cons to that approach too. Injections do have lower level of post operational risks in the area of effect - there are no tissue scars to worry about. However, having heart tissue flowing in the blood stream does seem quite risky in that it could have unforeseen consequences in other parts of the body. For better or worse. However, even taking in consideration all that problems (that the scientists of the field) surely do know about very well, it is just plain ridiculously stupid how much the religious right in general and that incompetent president of theirs is grinding all the research to a halt. And do not tell me about that last weeks of him touring bio-diesel facilities, I will come to that too. In short - go California, but I would rather see Bush just getting his marbles together and banning stem cell research in USA altogether, so that all those scientists can come to us, to EU and other places with more reasonable legal systems, because otherwise it seems that they are just asking for trouble there. Trouble that will slow the research to half of its possible speed for next 10 years or so.

Port security http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1344473.shtml I can only say one thing about security and USA - 90% of the USA security forces only work to ensure that people feel secured: that they see the police, that they are searched regularly enough, that they are stopped from time to time to answer some questions, that they are being "protected" on the Internet (read: being spied upon), that they are feeling harassed enough to feel safe. If the regular people are harassed enough they will never forget that the police is there and they will assume that the real criminals get harassed even more. That instills both content and fear: content for being protected and fear because there is clearly something to be protected from. After four and a half years of this treatment people are becoming very cattle-like, i.e. easy to govern. And in the same time the real experts can easily see that for real terrorists all those protection measures are completely irrelevant - real terrorists do not try to hijack planes with matches or nail clippers. Real terrorists have people inside, good supplies of profession equipment and have all the information that your government will not tell you "for security reasons". Cocaine is being smuggled into USA by tons. If put a nuke or two into that stream with enough "green" wrapping, no one will notice anything. Anyone having enough resources to buy a suitcase nuke will have enough resources to get it into USA even if you implement the strictest police state measures the likes of which have not been seen before. Even if you mandate all citizens to implant RFID chips that could be used to track their location from satellite and shoot on (satellite) sight anyone without such chip, there will still be ways to nuke any place in USA if there were any motivation. Clearly there is none. This again show that only thing that are considered "ok to be debated upon" are being raised in USA nowadays - there has been more debate about that duck hunt incident then about millions of Americans being spied on by their own government. That says much about any country. I want to bring just one quote from this segment - "It is impossible to do proper inspections of everything without basically stopping all international commerce".

Montana coal diesel http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1343604.shtml The idea of making diesel from coal is new to me, but it really is just an old, forgotten technology put into action by Nazi Germany at one point. The idea is a nice plan in the local perspective (cheap gas, lots of jobs, ...) but from a global perspective that is a very dangerous idea. Anything that prolongs the inevitable transition to pure hydrogen economy is. I think that only thing that has a big future is pure electric power with storage in some kind of metallic hydride. You see, I am worried about global warming quite a lot. And burning any kind of fossil fuel bring carbon that has been laying in the ground for millions of years and throw it back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO ₂). That both speeds up global warming and reduces the amount of oxygen that we have left for breathing. Does look bleak in the long term perspective, doesn't it? Yes, digging up coal in your backyard is better then fighting wars halfway across the globe for oil, but not too much.

Dogs This week Andy was talking about dog shows. Not for me that kind of thing - I like cats much more. And not those lazy show cats, I like simple cats that must rely on their smart to survive (at least be calling their owner to feed them when they are hungry :)). So here we have the end of my first coverage of 60 minutes. Lets hope that it is not the last and lets also hope that you foud at least something here to be of a value to you. As always, feel free to comment on what could be done to improve all this.

Ross Burton: Let The Battle Commence

AIGLX is very, very interesting. I think this is a superior solution to the current Novell hack-fest (Xegl is where the love is but that doesn't work at all, and Xglx is just so sick) that I'm very interested in having a play with this. As Mallum said, the Great 2006 Novell vs Red Hat War Of The Eye Candy has started. The the battle commence! NP: Songs In The Key Of Life (disc 2, Stevie Wonder

Joey Hess: moreutils

Following up on my other posts about new unix tools, I've uploaded the moreutils package to Incoming and alioth. Currently it includes isutf8, sponge, vidir, ts (timestamps stdout) and vipe (discussed below). Hopefully this collection will grow to include other useful unix tools no-one thought to write 30 years ago.

vipe is my new personal best at writing a generic unix tool. It allows you to edit the contents of a pipe in a text editor. For example: find foo -type f vipe xargs rm Sorta handy as a way to make ad-hoc changes to data in a pipeline, or even just to examine it.

Tollef Fog Heen: i18n done the wrong way.

From evolution's widgets/misc/e-dateedit, a custom date field:

    e_utf8_strftime (buffer, sizeof (buffer), _("%m/%d/%Y"), &tmp_tm);

You see that _("%m/%d/%Y") there? That means you'll only have a sane (that is, non-American) date format if you're running with LC_MESSAGES set to the format you prefer for dates and such. It also means extra work for the translator as well as possible errors due to translators having a personal preferred way to write dates. Using "%x" instead fixes the problem (verified by binary patching /usr/lib/evolution/2.6/libemiscwidgets.so.0.0.0, since I don't have a very recent evolution source handy) and gives me nice and (semi-)sane dates. Bug not yet filed due to me being aboard an aeroplane. Now I just have to fix the way to write dates in nb_NO.UTF-8 into the same as ISO-8601, but that should be easy enough. Update. I meant %x, not %c, of course

Dan Weber: M$ Access, the root of all evil

Friday my coach (very computer illiterate, maybe illiterate too) asked me to print out an access database of names. He hands it to me on a cd, and says Monday I want to see it printed out.

First I attack it with mdbtools and find there are 30 tables, which am I to choose? I look through all of them and find Names which seems to have what he wanted. I dumped it in CSV to a file and then did my magic with awk to get names addresses and zip codes. Of course with handy cups-pdf installed I run it through pdfprint. It turns out theres 192 pages. I say fuck that and leave it as is in a pdf and email it to him.

Of course that couldn't be the end. I get a response back from the mailserver tailing me his email account is full. Spectacular, he must have a quota of 5mb for these crap school accounts. So I then upload it to my webserver, send him another email saying its there and thats what happened. All will be found out tomorrow. M$ Access suuuuuuuuucks.

Daniel Stone: [travel] daniel's handy traveling hints

Here's another handy hint: if you're lugging a complete computer on a plane, including sizeable tower case, don't bother checking whether it fits in your suitcase until just before you leave. Of course it'll fit.

In unrelated news, my lovely silver case now has a massive broken dent in it.

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: Opinions and free software

Since interviewing the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, I've been thinking a little more about what he calls "opinionated software." That handy little phrase seems to sum up what attracts me to a lot of technology, at all levels. What I like Free software--it's not really economics that drew me to free software, but the principles and aims. When you release or use free software, you're exercising your right to free speech and adding your voice to an argument. Desktop environments--GNOME 2.0: The move from GNOME 1.0 to version 2.0 was highly opinionated (Mac users, think OS 9 to OS X). Complexity of user interface was thrown out in favour of sensible defaults. Web standards--CSS, RDF, XHTML: not only is there a right way to do things, but it turns out to be better too! I don't automatically fall in love with everything that emerges from the W3C, but some things are so obviously the right way it's impossible not to love them--warts and all. Muine music player--this player throws out the paraphernalia of iTunes clones and gets you close to the music. Queue, play. What I want to do. Epiphany web browser--a simple text bar does for bookmark lookup, search and URLs. The bookmarks work like del.icio.us tags. Despite the lure of Firefox extensions, simplicity and efficiency keeps me with Epiphany. Make friends and enemies The thing about opinions is that people are inclined to disagree with them. Opinions won't please everybody and, being opinionated, you will never carry everybody with you. But opinions give you something with which to scythe through indifference. In both my writing and software development work taking a particular stance enables me to create interest, and gives direction to my projects. I tend to get bored easily, and if I'm bored, then my readers and users will never make it. Being opinionated in software development is easier when there's a strong leader, or it's a one-person project. It's more of a dilemma if you're running a free software project with multiple contributors. Such projects need such contributions, but run a risk of losing focus and style. I think that there we need to be brave again. If being opinionated means losing potential users, it also means losing potential contributors. Opinions help in dealing with users, too. It's obvious that the mere act of listening to users isn't good enough. They often won't say what they mean, or their requests mask a deeper issue. How often have you given your boss exactly what he asked for, to find it wasn't what he wanted? A combination of reading-between-the-lines and having opinions helps cut a way through the noise of user feedback. Stirring the pot Here are a few wishes for some free software projects that I want to see succeed further, but which really need to get opinionated to be effective. These projects aren't failing, but they're not reaching the potential I know is there. Each of them are infrastructural in some way, and that's probably where the temptation to avoid being opinionated is strongest. But here's the genius: the rewards of being opinionated here are high. Ruby on Rails is the existence proof.

Beagle, live search technology for GNOME. Needs to decide where its primary use will be, and get on and hit the 1.0 point for that use only. Choose one or two neat applications for integration, and be so utterly cool that every other app author flocks to integrate too.
Synchronization. First MultiSync, then OpenSync, have rumbled on for ages, without ever being truly effective for any particular device. My take: choose a few "must-have" target devices--say, iPods and Nokia phones--and make them work completely. Nearly-but-not-quite pleases nobody.
Mono. Mono's great, but where's the story? There's loads of potential in the people and the ideas behind the project, but playing catchup with Microsoft isn't very inspiring. Early projects like Muine helped Mono's cachet here, but we need more. My personal favourite option would have been a completely free alternative to ASP.NET for web applications. (I've seen a project called MonoRail, but don't know if it's the one...)

What's better? A handful of users with the "right" idea about how fundamentally important you are to everything, or loads of users who only see a portion of the capabilities of a project? Copy the experts It may seem like cheating to copy Apple's lead, but a lot of what they've done in OS X is to take a stand on what's useful and not. On many occasions this has inconvenienced people, but it's not eroded that special lure that Apple products hold. There's not harm in asking "What have Apple done?" with some of our projects. Another poster-child for being opinionated is Ubuntu Linux. Technically, it's only marginally better than other Linux distributions. Strategically, it's miles ahead. Its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, had very solid opinions about where Ubuntu should go, and pursued them. Over time, these have pervaded the product itself, but at the start it was the message and the style that made the difference. Opinions not expressed are rarely effective.

Edd Dumbill: The Web as it was meant to be used

Since giving XTech 2006 the tagline "Building Web 2.0", I've received a few questions as to how wise this was. The Web 2.0 label has been accused in some quarters of being a vague, marketing-oriented, term. Perhaps an attempt to kickstart a new bubble. I was going to write further, defending my choice: that, practically speaking, Web 2.0 encapsulates a combination of technologies and practices driving the web forward. Yes, it's a label of convenience, but the implementation trends are real. The maturation of XML, a revival in browser technology, a willingness to share data openly and new web development frameworks. Just as I embarked on distilling these thoughts into a fuller form, Paul Graham published an excellent essay on Web 2.0. In it he analyses the Web 2.0 term:

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.

So what's the reasoning that means we don't need the term? Graham writes: "Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used." There's nothing fundamentally new, but there is a groundswell of understanding of what's been there all along. For me, that's a wonderful encapsulation of both current web trends and my aspirations for XTech. "Web 2.0" is a just a handy label for this. "The Web as it was meant to be used" will strike a chord with many web practitioners today--whether it's sensible use of web services with REST, improving user interaction in web design, or open semantics and data interchange. If you're involved in using the web as it's meant to be used, consider submitting an XTech proposal.

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: Opinions and free software

Since interviewing the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, I've been thinking a little more about what he calls "opinionated software." That handy little phrase seems to sum up what attracts me to a lot of technology, at all levels. What I like Free software--it's not really economics that drew me to free software, but the principles and aims. When you release or use free software, you're exercising your right to free speech and adding your voice to an argument. Desktop environments--GNOME 2.0: The move from GNOME 1.0 to version 2.0 was highly opinionated (Mac users, think OS 9 to OS X). Complexity of user interface was thrown out in favour of sensible defaults. Web standards--CSS, RDF, XHTML: not only is there a right way to do things, but it turns out to be better too! I don't automatically fall in love with everything that emerges from the W3C, but some things are so obviously the right way it's impossible not to love them--warts and all. Muine music player--this player throws out the paraphernalia of iTunes clones and gets you close to the music. Queue, play. What I want to do. Epiphany web browser--a simple text bar does for bookmark lookup, search and URLs. The bookmarks work like del.icio.us tags. Despite the lure of Firefox extensions, simplicity and efficiency keeps me with Epiphany. Make friends and enemies The thing about opinions is that people are inclined to disagree with them. Opinions won't please everybody and, being opinionated, you will never carry everybody with you. But opinions give you something with which to scythe through indifference. In both my writing and software development work taking a particular stance enables me to create interest, and gives direction to my projects. I tend to get bored easily, and if I'm bored, then my readers and users will never make it. Being opinionated in software development is easier when there's a strong leader, or it's a one-person project. It's more of a dilemma if you're running a free software project with multiple contributors. Such projects need such contributions, but run a risk of losing focus and style. I think that there we need to be brave again. If being opinionated means losing potential users, it also means losing potential contributors. Opinions help in dealing with users, too. It's obvious that the mere act of listening to users isn't good enough. They often won't say what they mean, or their requests mask a deeper issue. How often have you given your boss exactly what he asked for, to find it wasn't what he wanted? A combination of reading-between-the-lines and having opinions helps cut a way through the noise of user feedback. Stirring the pot Here are a few wishes for some free software projects that I want to see succeed further, but which really need to get opinionated to be effective. These projects aren't failing, but they're not reaching the potential I know is there. Each of them are infrastructural in some way, and that's probably where the temptation to avoid being opinionated is strongest. But here's the genius: the rewards of being opinionated here are high. Ruby on Rails is the existence proof.

Beagle, live search technology for GNOME. Needs to decide where its primary use will be, and get on and hit the 1.0 point for that use only. Choose one or two neat applications for integration, and be so utterly cool that every other app author flocks to integrate too.
Synchronization. First MultiSync, then OpenSync, have rumbled on for ages, without ever being truly effective for any particular device. My take: choose a few "must-have" target devices--say, iPods and Nokia phones--and make them work completely. Nearly-but-not-quite pleases nobody.
Mono. Mono's great, but where's the story? There's loads of potential in the people and the ideas behind the project, but playing catchup with Microsoft isn't very inspiring. Early projects like Muine helped Mono's cachet here, but we need more. My personal favourite option would have been a completely free alternative to ASP.NET for web applications. (I've seen a project called MonoRail, but don't know if it's the one...)

What's better? A handful of users with the "right" idea about how fundamentally important you are to everything, or loads of users who only see a portion of the capabilities of a project? Copy the experts It may seem like cheating to copy Apple's lead, but a lot of what they've done in OS X is to take a stand on what's useful and not. On many occasions this has inconvenienced people, but it's not eroded that special lure that Apple products hold. There's not harm in asking "What have Apple done?" with some of our projects. Another poster-child for being opinionated is Ubuntu Linux. Technically, it's only marginally better than other Linux distributions. Strategically, it's miles ahead. Its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, had very solid opinions about where Ubuntu should go, and pursued them. Over time, these have pervaded the product itself, but at the start it was the message and the style that made the difference. Opinions not expressed are rarely effective.

Edd Dumbill: The Web as it was meant to be used

Since giving XTech 2006 the tagline "Building Web 2.0", I've received a few questions as to how wise this was. The Web 2.0 label has been accused in some quarters of being a vague, marketing-oriented, term. Perhaps an attempt to kickstart a new bubble. I was going to write further, defending my choice: that, practically speaking, Web 2.0 encapsulates a combination of technologies and practices driving the web forward. Yes, it's a label of convenience, but the implementation trends are real. The maturation of XML, a revival in browser technology, a willingness to share data openly and new web development frameworks. Just as I embarked on distilling these thoughts into a fuller form, Paul Graham published an excellent essay on Web 2.0. In it he analyses the Web 2.0 term:

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.

So what's the reasoning that means we don't need the term? Graham writes: "Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used." There's nothing fundamentally new, but there is a groundswell of understanding of what's been there all along. For me, that's a wonderful encapsulation of both current web trends and my aspirations for XTech. "Web 2.0" is a just a handy label for this. "The Web as it was meant to be used" will strike a chord with many web practitioners today--whether it's sensible use of web services with REST, improving user interaction in web design, or open semantics and data interchange. If you're involved in using the web as it's meant to be used, consider submitting an XTech proposal.