Search Results: "reg"

15 January 2006

Edd Dumbill: Paul Graham, XTech and holidays

Just a quick pre-holiday update on the state of XTech 2006. We've had, as usual, some amazing paper submissions so far, so please keep them coming. Don't forget, too, that we're also asking for tutorial submissions. These should be half-day or full-day and, as well as the free conference registration all speakers get, we pay an honorarium to tutors. Deadline is 9 January at the latest. One very exciting bit of news I have is that Paul Graham has agreed to deliver one of the keynote sessions at XTech. I'm very pleased about this, and it follows in the tradition we've established of having interesting and challenging speakers, rather than putting plenary sessions up for sale to sponsors. Amsterdam. 16-19 May 2006. What could be better? As for the holidays, I hope to be spending some time catching up on my open source work, and also carrying on my work with Rails. A busy couple of months at work, combined with no fewer than two bad server hardware issues, has eroded free time considerably. So to anyone waiting on me for something, I do apologise. One final pointer: IBM developerWorks have published the first part of my examination of the future of HTML, focusing on WHATWG. Look out very soon for the second part, looking at the various activities underway at the W3C. I know that my editor at least awaits this eagerly! Thanks to everyone who's read this blog during the year, and for the many interesting and helpful conversations that have come from it. Happy Christmas!

Edd Dumbill: XTech topic musings

Compiled over the last few weeks, here's a random list of some subjects I'd love to see covered in XTech 2006. There's now only three weeks left of the call for participation -- so it's definitely time get that proposal in! Mail me if you have any questions.
  • OpenDocument vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (am I the only one annoyed by how this format is abbreviated as "Open XML"?)
  • Ruby on Rails 1.0
  • Firefox 1.5, including its many new features for developers. I loved the idea from Tristan Nitot that extensions are a way to keep Firefox successful. There's a lot of potential here. Anybody want to attend a tutorial on making Firefox extensions?
  • W3C Rich Web Clients Activity
  • XSLT 2.0 adoption and implementation--anyone but Saxon?
  • The Web Desktop. I was incredibly interested in this post of Miguel de Icaza's. For a long time I've felt RDF could hold the desktop together, data-wise, but he also proposes that HTTP and web services could do a similar thing. I suspect these are two strands of development that go hand in hand.
  • Design, usability and patterns for AJAX web applications.
  • Open Content Alliance
  • RSS and Atom: despite the release of Atom, RSS continues to grow down its own path. I reckon it's about time to sort out where each are going, and what they're best for.
  • XSL-FO: I use this technology regularly for preparing PDFs with RenderX, and the specification itself is mature. It seems time to take stock of XSL-FO and where it might go in future.
Submit your proposal here: XTech 2006 Call for Participation. XTech will be held 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Edd Dumbill: Emacs font joy

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe: Screenshot of anti-aliased Xft enable Emacs Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules : 
  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes
After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this: 
  Emacs*font: Monospace-8
You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Roland Mas: RSS aggregators again

I am once again the victim of overzealous RSS readers. Especially one called “RSS Popper", which from what I can gather is a plug-in for Outlook. I have no idea how (or even if) it can be configured, but from what I can guess from my logs, it defaults to refresh the RSS feeds every one minute and a half. Which is far too often, especially considering the capacity of my server. Apparently there are only a few people subscribed to my RSS feed using that reader, but when their Outlook is running, my poor old webserver gets noticeably loaded. I am tempted to ban this user-agent from accessing my RSS feeds, but not immediately and without notice though. So if you read this through RSS Popper, please decrease your refresh rate to something reasonable. One refresh every day should be plenty enough. Thanks.

Edd Dumbill: Paul Graham, XTech and holidays

Just a quick pre-holiday update on the state of XTech 2006. We've had, as usual, some amazing paper submissions so far, so please keep them coming. Don't forget, too, that we're also asking for tutorial submissions. These should be half-day or full-day and, as well as the free conference registration all speakers get, we pay an honorarium to tutors. Deadline is 9 January at the latest. One very exciting bit of news I have is that Paul Graham has agreed to deliver one of the keynote sessions at XTech. I'm very pleased about this, and it follows in the tradition we've established of having interesting and challenging speakers, rather than putting plenary sessions up for sale to sponsors. Amsterdam. 16-19 May 2006. What could be better? As for the holidays, I hope to be spending some time catching up on my open source work, and also carrying on my work with Rails. A busy couple of months at work, combined with no fewer than two bad server hardware issues, has eroded free time considerably. So to anyone waiting on me for something, I do apologise. One final pointer: IBM developerWorks have published the first part of my examination of the future of HTML, focusing on WHATWG. Look out very soon for the second part, looking at the various activities underway at the W3C. I know that my editor at least awaits this eagerly! Thanks to everyone who's read this blog during the year, and for the many interesting and helpful conversations that have come from it. Happy Christmas!

Edd Dumbill: XTech topic musings

Compiled over the last few weeks, here's a random list of some subjects I'd love to see covered in XTech 2006. There's now only three weeks left of the call for participation -- so it's definitely time get that proposal in! Mail me if you have any questions.
  • OpenDocument vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (am I the only one annoyed by how this format is abbreviated as "Open XML"?)
  • Ruby on Rails 1.0
  • Firefox 1.5, including its many new features for developers. I loved the idea from Tristan Nitot that extensions are a way to keep Firefox successful. There's a lot of potential here. Anybody want to attend a tutorial on making Firefox extensions?
  • W3C Rich Web Clients Activity
  • XSLT 2.0 adoption and implementation--anyone but Saxon?
  • The Web Desktop. I was incredibly interested in this post of Miguel de Icaza's. For a long time I've felt RDF could hold the desktop together, data-wise, but he also proposes that HTTP and web services could do a similar thing. I suspect these are two strands of development that go hand in hand.
  • Design, usability and patterns for AJAX web applications.
  • Open Content Alliance
  • RSS and Atom: despite the release of Atom, RSS continues to grow down its own path. I reckon it's about time to sort out where each are going, and what they're best for.
  • XSL-FO: I use this technology regularly for preparing PDFs with RenderX, and the specification itself is mature. It seems time to take stock of XSL-FO and where it might go in future.
Submit your proposal here: XTech 2006 Call for Participation. XTech will be held 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Edd Dumbill: Emacs font joy

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe: Screenshot of anti-aliased Xft enable Emacs Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules : 
  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes
After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this: 
  Emacs*font: Monospace-8
You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Edd Dumbill: A clean sweep

Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now. Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed. Redesign and reimplementation  This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice. Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further. The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.
The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing. I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts. New URLs My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for  RSS and Atom feeds: Tools used

Edd Dumbill: Paul Graham, XTech and holidays

Just a quick pre-holiday update on the state of XTech 2006. We've had, as usual, some amazing paper submissions so far, so please keep them coming. Don't forget, too, that we're also asking for tutorial submissions. These should be half-day or full-day and, as well as the free conference registration all speakers get, we pay an honorarium to tutors. Deadline is 9 January at the latest. One very exciting bit of news I have is that Paul Graham has agreed to deliver one of the keynote sessions at XTech. I'm very pleased about this, and it follows in the tradition we've established of having interesting and challenging speakers, rather than putting plenary sessions up for sale to sponsors. Amsterdam. 16-19 May 2006. What could be better? As for the holidays, I hope to be spending some time catching up on my open source work, and also carrying on my work with Rails. A busy couple of months at work, combined with no fewer than two bad server hardware issues, has eroded free time considerably. So to anyone waiting on me for something, I do apologise. One final pointer: IBM developerWorks have published the first part of my examination of the future of HTML, focusing on WHATWG. Look out very soon for the second part, looking at the various activities underway at the W3C. I know that my editor at least awaits this eagerly! Thanks to everyone who's read this blog during the year, and for the many interesting and helpful conversations that have come from it. Happy Christmas!

Edd Dumbill: XTech topic musings

Compiled over the last few weeks, here's a random list of some subjects I'd love to see covered in XTech 2006. There's now only three weeks left of the call for participation -- so it's definitely time get that proposal in! Mail me if you have any questions.
  • OpenDocument vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (am I the only one annoyed by how this format is abbreviated as "Open XML"?)
  • Ruby on Rails 1.0
  • Firefox 1.5, including its many new features for developers. I loved the idea from Tristan Nitot that extensions are a way to keep Firefox successful. There's a lot of potential here. Anybody want to attend a tutorial on making Firefox extensions?
  • W3C Rich Web Clients Activity
  • XSLT 2.0 adoption and implementation--anyone but Saxon?
  • The Web Desktop. I was incredibly interested in this post of Miguel de Icaza's. For a long time I've felt RDF could hold the desktop together, data-wise, but he also proposes that HTTP and web services could do a similar thing. I suspect these are two strands of development that go hand in hand.
  • Design, usability and patterns for AJAX web applications.
  • Open Content Alliance
  • RSS and Atom: despite the release of Atom, RSS continues to grow down its own path. I reckon it's about time to sort out where each are going, and what they're best for.
  • XSL-FO: I use this technology regularly for preparing PDFs with RenderX, and the specification itself is mature. It seems time to take stock of XSL-FO and where it might go in future.
Submit your proposal here: XTech 2006 Call for Participation. XTech will be held 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Edd Dumbill: Emacs font joy

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe: Screenshot of anti-aliased Xft enable Emacs Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules : 
  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes
After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this: 
  Emacs*font: Monospace-8
You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Edd Dumbill: Building Web 2.0 at XTech 2006

I'm very excited to announce the Call for Participation for XTech 2006. Submissions are due by 9th January. The conference itself is 16th-19th May 2006, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The theme this year is "Building Web 2.0", focusing on the technologies and issues involved in building the next generation of web applications and services. There are four tracks --
  • Applications -- "mashups", frameworks, publishing, open source solutions, aggregation
  • Browser Technology -- browsers, AJAX, design and interaction for Web 2.0
  • Core Technologies -- the XML and RDF family, RSS/Atom, databases, nuts-and-bolts tech
  • Open Data -- information design, identity, tagging, privacy, trust, Creative Commons, DRM, government
I'll write a bit more about each track in the coming weeks, but if any of this turns you on, head over to the full call and submit your abstract. Also, do read the full track descriptions -- they go into more detail than I can here. Tutorials will be held on the 16th, and the presentation tracks from 17th-19th. In 2006 I want to build on the success of last year and broaden XTech's reach into web technologies. On the technology side, I'm particularly interested in getting more in about databases, frameworks like Ruby on Rails, tagging and search. In addition to technology, I'm interested in opening up dialogue between developers, designers and information architects about the kinds of applications being built on the web now, and the issues of their design, organization and implementation. Partly to encourage this, 2006's conference will have more room for panel discussion sessions. Feel free to drop me a note with any questions or suggestions about XTech 2006. (If you want to propose a session, please use the online submission form rather than sending email.)

Neil McGovern: All aboard!

Well, as I announced, today is the final possible day that people can ask for sponsorship for DebConf6. Interestingly, it's also the last chance to get in any proposals for BoFs.
So, if you haven't registered, and want sponsorship, DO IT NOW.

Joachim Breitner: Rock die Burg

Diesen Abend war in meinem Wohnheim, der Insterburg, ein kleines Festivalchen, mit drei Lifebands. Und da ich gerade eh warte, bis die ~150 Bilder skaliert und hochgeladen sind, kann ich auch gleich dar ber bloggen.Die erste Band, die aufgetreten ist, wurde von mir vermittelt: Peer Pressure kenn ich noch aus Herrenberger Zeiten, fand sie damals schon toll, und sponsere nicht umsonst auch deren Webseite (Domain/Hosting). Man merkt deutlich, dass die vier Jungs inzwischen doch schon einie Routine haben, und die neuen Songs sind wirklich h renswert. Besonders gefiel mir “On the inside”. Leider hatten sie das undankbare Los des ersten Auftritts, und so kam das Publikum nur schleppend in Schwung - ein wenig mehr B hnenshow w rde hier nicht schaden.Das konnte daf r die n chste Band sehr gut: Los Elektrodomestikos ist eine Ska-Band in Anz gen (naja, zumindest am Anfang) und komplett mit Trompete und Posaune und war das Highlight des Abends: Nicht nur die Musik war gut, sondern vor allem lieferten die Jungs eine klasse B hnenshow, was unter anderem dazu f hrte, dass die meisten der Bilder, die ich von dem Abend gemacht habe, von den Jungs sind. Auch die Ausdauer war ausgezeichnet, was wohl auch daran lag, dass sie regelm ig die Positionen durchgewechselt haben, und so bekamen wir f nf Zugaben.Und es w hren vielleicht noch mehr geworten, h tten wir nicht die Zeit f r die dritte Band gebraucht: Brehon, eine in Karlsruhe wohl nicht unbekannte Irish-Folkrock-Band, die (ger chteweise) schon auf “Dem Fest” gespielt hat. Leider war die Musik nach der Ska-Band etwas unpassend und die Masste tobte nicht mehr. Vielleicht h tte man die Reihenfolge der Bands anders w hlen sollen, aber das ist wohl vorher schwer abzusch tzen.Insgesamt ein gelunges Fest (und die Konserven-Musik f r hinterher h re ich immernoch in den siebten Stock), das erste Lifekonzert bei mir zuhause (und ich mit Hausschuhen mitten drin) und die, die wegen einem Heizungsleck nicht kommen konnten haben leider wirklich was verpasst.

14 January 2006

Horms: About Apple

You can complain about the DVD firmware in Macs only letting you change the region 5 times. But the thing is that Apple doesn't want to be a hardware company. Or a sofware company for that matter. They want to be a music company, and perhaps a video company. Like a Sony that doesn't suck.

13 January 2006

Horms: About Apple

You can complain about the DVD firmware in Macs only letting you change the region 5 times. But the thing is that Apple doesn't want to be a hardware company. Or a sofware company for that matter. They want to be a music company, and perhaps a video company. Like a Sony that doesn't suck.

12 January 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: John Ringo: Princess of Wands

Somehow John Ringo’s latest, Princess of Wands, reminds me of another book he’s written recently. Both have the overtones of some sort of literary self-congratulation. In Ghost’s case, I counted that as a fault. In Princess of Wands‘ case, I count it as a strength. Both books are also episodic rather than regular novels, but the similarities end here. One problem in reviewing this book is that one cannot really discuss much of the setup without writing major spoilers. The cover blurb takes one approach: describe what the reader learns within the first five pages, who cares that the picture that gives one of the book is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the cover blurb is so misleading that it can make people ignore this book even though they should have picked it up. The genre is urban fantasy. The main character is a devout Christian soccer mom who finds herself in an adventure. The magic system and the ontology are quite interesting. There are battles with evil. There is a con. The publishing house itself, Pier… erm… Baen Books, as well as some of its authors, make an appearance onstage. (In fact, if you aren’t a barfly, you’re going to miss some of the fun like I probably missed a lot of it, never having visited a con where Baen people gather.) I found it a satisfying read, especially the middle episode. The final episode was so short that it didn’t feel well balanced, but it’s a minor issue. However, I would probably hesitate to recommend this book to a certain kind of Christans: if you think Harry Potter is evil, don’t come near this book. Overall, I’ll rate this book 4/5.

Joachim Breitner: Ubuntu ownz Utnubu - right from the start

Today, Andreas Tille noticed that utnubu.org points to ubuntu.org (and not, as he expected, to the Utnubu Team’s website). This made me curious and a little whois query gave away that utnubu.org is indeed owned by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. This is not strage, they have other variations registered, like xubnutu.org (which I noticed when writing German parody news on Xubuntu).What is interesting is the fact that I announced Utnubu on debian-project at Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:55:08 +0300 and the domain was registered at 16-Jul-2005 22:09:37 UTC by James Troup. I just assume that Canonical did that to give us the domain as soon as we need it, and they just reserved it for us since we don’t have money. Very nice. (But why didn’t the tell anyone? Well, I just assume they forgot, no need to wake sleeping dogs.

Sam Hocevar: No subject

School: Grrr. One of the school's lawyer is a real moron. He wants us to register every available domain (videolan.tm.fr, videolan.com, videolan.net, videolan.com.fr), to buy the trademark, and to register the source code at a notary. He is also considering suing the other videolan trademark owners, and looking for possible patents for our software. Absolute bullshit. I think people like him are really perverting our legal system. Fuck, fuck, FUCK ! Can't he understand we are doing a research job, that we want to publish it as free software, show it, share it, instead of preventing people from using it or even pronouncing its bloody name ? The craziest of all is that they'd prefer to have the project die in a corner (which is what it's virtually been doing for more than two years) than to take the risk that someone claims property on its name. Just the fucking name ! Next Badvogato plan: kill all lawyers. Linux Expo: it starts on wednesday and I still haven't seen many people volunteering to stay at the Debian booth at LE-Paris (I won't be able to, since we already have a booth). I have a bad feeling about this... Geek stuff: got my geek frog yesterday. It's so cool.

Sam Hocevar: No subject

ralsina: Nautilus doesn't really link with Mozilla, AFAIK it embeds a Bonobo component which is itself linked with Mozilla using gtkmozembed. As for other Gnome/Gtk apps linking with Mozilla, such as Galeon or SkipStone, they both have an additional distribution clause allowing linking with Mozilla. Regarding what Debian did, I won't argue whether it was right or wrong (though I believe it was the right thing [tm]), but I'm certain Qt wouldn't be GPL now if Debian had included KDE at the beginning. You may call this being anal about licenses, but IMHO it's the only way to show licenses still mean something.

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