# (1) 01 Oct 2009, 03:18PM: Useful Links:
MediaBugs, Scott Rosenberg's awesome new nonprofit, is hiring a Drupal designer and an associate director/community manager.
My pal Stuart Sierra [who's an expert on The Cloud and graduates from Columbia next year with a master's in CS, (cough) recruiters (cough)] gives two talks on Clojure and Hadoop in the next few days.
My Collabora colleagues will appear at a bunch of conferences this month, usually giving talks: Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, Boston GNOME, and an embedded Linux conference in Grenoble.
I've now discovered that LWN, formerly Linux Weekly News, is invaluable in grokking the entire Linux ecosystem. It's helped me get an overview of areas I thought completely inaccessible to a nonprogrammer. Everything's free to read, except special subscriber-only content that goes public a week after publication. But a subscription's just $5 per month, less if your company gets a group rate, and it's way worth it. (Valerie Aurora writes for them quite a bit.)
What We Know So Far plays NYU on October 9th. Thanks, Biella. By the way, she has the best troll excuse ever:
So I am about to violate list rules but as an anthropologist, I am
well aware that violation and transgression can be productive
activities...
In November, a bunch of Colbert Report writers talk at the Paley Center; I'd like to go.
If you live nearish Oxford in England, and you'd like a fancy costume or dress sewn for you, may I suggest my colleague's wife Karianne? She might also available for FLOSS translation/community work, if you can drag her away from the horse farm.
Jen & Zed are rockin' intelligent simplicity at Frugal Culture, from philosophy to finance to recipes to politics to education.
At Year of No Flying, Anirvan & Barnali are spending a year traveling without airplanes, "traveling across continents, and talking to people exploring solutions to transportation and the climate crisis." They just crossed the Pacific on a container ship.
My colleague Thomas Thurman has a new light fantasy book out: Not Ordinarily Borrowable, "the story of a scholar whose studies are interrupted when her library books are stolen by a dragon." I have the PDF and hope to read it this weekend.
Flea of One Good Thing, sadly, has to move her blog; email her this week if you want the new URL.
# 03 Oct 2009, 09:04AM: "Not Ordinarily Borrowable: Or, Unwelcome Advice" by Thomas Thurman:
My colleague Thomas Thurman wrote a light fantasy story called Not Ordinarily Borrowable. It's 106 pages, available as a print-on-demand book via CreateSpace (like Thoughtcrime Experiments), and delightful. You can read the first chapter online (and Google Books has the first half of the book but after that you'll have to buy paper or ebooks; I got to read a PDF on a mobile device, and it was fine). Excerpt:
Now in order to become a doctor of something, there is a simple rule to follow. You must find out something new, something nobody in the world has ever seen or known or thought before. You might suppose that with all the many people there are in the world, and with all the thinking that goes on every day, it must be difficult to find a new thing never thought before. But everyone has ideas every day, and there are so many different ones that, sooner or later, everyone must find something new. You yourself saw something nobody had seen before the last time you cracked open the shell of a nut.
After you have found out your new thing, you must write a book about it, a big, heavy book called a thesis. Then, last of all, you must explain your ideas to the other scholars, and the other scholars must be happy with your work. One day, when Maria had finished doing all this, she would be allowed to call herself Dr. Maria, and allowed to wear a scarlet robe instead of her black one. That way, everyone would know how hard she had worked to find out something utterly new.
But that day was still quite a long way in the future, and Maria still had a lot of work ahead of her before it would come.
Maria goes on an adventure that features a dragon, a bike, a mayor, and missing library books. It's charming. Lucky me, I got to call up Thomas yesterday on work pretenses and babble at him for twenty minutes on the following topics:
- Every minor character has light but consistent and sensible characterization! And no one's an idiot. And since some of them are kind and smart and others aren't, I can't trust my reflexes regarding who will join Maria on her adventure, and how they'll behave. I wouldn't say my expectations are subverted so much as put aside lightly. It's a light book.
- The story carried me along; it's great when a plot feels surprising, but inevitable in retrospect. Again, it's sensible and logical, down to the level of individual interactions. My suspension of disbelief never got rattled.
- The setting! Lightly fictionalized Cambridge University! Biking through English villages and asking if anyone's seen a dragon! Incidentally, my favorite story about a grad student's thesis research since "Jump Space".
- It's lovely to get a fairy tale that doesn't make me cringe in its gender issues. It's a matter-of-fact given that all the women and men in Not Ordinarily Borrowable are people, and how refreshing that is!
- I'm going on and on about mechanics and "wow, he didn't get that wrong," but really I'm just enchanted that a colleague of mine just popped this much fun out and reading it was a high point of my week. It's like the universe left me a bonus.
If you enjoy Naomi Novik's Temeraire books and/or the Hereville comic How Mirka Got Her Sword (Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl Comic), you might like Not Ordinarily Borrowable (and vice-versa).
# 06 Oct 2009, 10:12PM: Half-Sentence Reviews:
Tricked (graphic novel) by Alex Robinson and Whip It (film) are more gripping & fun than they have any right to be.
# (1) 07 Oct 2009, 09:10PM: "The Life Of The World To Come":
For about the next 2 hours, if you hit the Colbert Nation website, you can stream the entire new album by The Mountain Goats. (Might be US-only.) I'm listening now. No doubt I'll buy it.
Even after this offer expires, the band's site offers "Genesis 3:23" as an MP3. If you love the Mountain Goats, you'll love "Genesis 3:23."
# (4) 08 Oct 2009, 11:44PM: An Oversimplified Cliffs Notes To Telepathy:
Lots of people have never heard of my company or its projects -- even fairly plugged-in geeks often say "who?" or say "Oh yeah, the Subversion people." (No, that's Collabnet, where Leonard used to work.) So this post is specifically for my friends, to help explain one thing my company is doing that is cool. I'm going to simplify a lot so I hope my colleagues and other hard-core geeks don't wince too much.
It is annoying to have to log in to a bunch of different chat services to reach all your friends. MSN, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Bonjour, blah blah blah. You may not think this is related, but it's also annoying that if I want to work with someone on a document and we're at different computers, I can't use my regular word processor, I have to load up a web browser with Google Docs. And it's annoying to have your cell phone text messages (SMS) in a different place from your other chats.
These are all aspects of real-time communication. As my colleague Danielle put it,
The Telepathy project is helping solve all these problems. Telepathy is a project aiming to give desktop applications (like word processors, jukeboxes, CAD programs, and games) a way to painlessly integrate instant messaging and VoIP (voice over IP) telephony features. In more technical language, in Telepathy, Collabora aims to develop a real-time communications framework for the desktop and embedded devices.
My boss, Rob McQueen, was one of the Telepathy inventors, and I work for Collabora, the company he co-founded. We hope programmers will use Telepathy to improve your computer and cell phone and get rid of the annoyances I mentioned above, and create neat applications and services. We've already gotten started.
Here's one way of viewing the Telepathy framework. It has three essential parts:
- a bunch of Connection Managers, each handling the interaction with a protocol, such as Google Talk, XMPP, various VoIP (internet phone call) services, or AOL Instant Messenger
- Mission Control, managing accounts and channels (the individual protocol-bound pipelines that your messages go through)
- a specification, telling all the parts how to interact (very technical)
This design gives Telepathy a lot of flexibility. If a new interesting service comes along, like Facebook chat, we can just write a new Connection Manager for it and bam, anything that uses Telepathy can now interact with it. And there are a lot of text, voice, and video chat networks! Who knows what other interesting collaboration or communication networks might hook into Telepathy someday?
Another important aspect of Telepathy's architecture is D-Bus. Telepathy is primarily a project for the open source Linux operating system. It's built on D-Bus, a piece of Linux infrastructure that lets applications, frameworks, and low-level system components talk to each other. So that means Telepathy can act like a wormhole, not just between two different people's computers, but between unassuming regular ol' apps on their desktops. You and a friend can collaborate on writing a paper together right in your word processor, or play a game against each other. And you can do it without having to deal with a slow, limited web app in a web browser.
In case you are a geek and find this interesting: There's an entire online book with more detail, and a system overview with a pretty graphic. And of course we're an open source project and you're welcome to join us.
In the real world, even regular folks like you and I are getting the benefit of Telepathy with (for example) the new N900 smartphone. Evidence of Telepathy's awesomeness is in the addressbook -- it combines your friends' various text chat, phonecall, and other contact info in the same screen, rather than making you use separate programs.
I use Telepathy every day, because I use the Empathy chat program to talk to my AIM and Google Talk friends all in one tidy window. Telepathy has made some other cool applications possible; I wrote about them for the new Collabora website, and if people want, I'll post a little about those.
Note to self: in future posts, explain GStreamer, Farstream, WebKit, Electrolysis, and how we make money.
# 09 Oct 2009, 03:19PM: Travel Plans For The Next Week:
I'm visiting Boston Saturday the 10th till late Monday the 12th (to see colleagues in town to talk about the GNOME Linux desktop), then in Montreal till Thursday the 15th.
# 13 Oct 2009, 05:31PM: Presence & Status:
I learned recently:
Empathy is an IRC client but does not (yet?) support slash-commands. Gobby is a really cool tool to let multiple people read, write, and chat about a document collaboratively from different computers. Kazoos are different from paper-rolly party noisemaker things. Leonard did set up a category for all his walktheplank.net blog posts. Absinthe makes the sides of the back of my tongue tingle slightly. Natives don't pronounce the "t" in "Montréal."
I'm half-remembering high school French as I read signs & overhear colleagues' conversations here in Montréal. Je me souviens!
# (1) 13 Oct 2009, 06:35PM: Le Line Du Punch:
I'm planning on doing an open mic comedy show tomorrow night.
sumanah: I'm thinking scrum humor
sumanah: comparing the 3 questions of scrum to the 4 questions of passover
sumanah: it'll be a riot
sumanah: sorry, rioutte
Accidental comedy mentor Simon Stow used to perform stand-up here when he was getting his master's at McGill, so I'm coming full circle.
If I'm really on the ball, I'll see some improv tonight, too.
# 15 Oct 2009, 01:04PM: Postmortem:
Four of my coworkers gave up a night when they could have been eating or hacking and came to an open mic night to watch me perform. I knew a goodly proportion of the other acts wouldn't be very good, but I forgot that so much unfunny comedy is incredibly tired sex/sexist jokes. So that was blah. But I was passable for someone who basically hasn't done stand-up in five years.
Returning to NYC tonight. Happy that the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam went so well, even if I couldn't be there (maybe next year I'll go to that).
# 17 Oct 2009, 11:06AM: My Go-To New York Tourist Attractions:
It's a cross-blog event! Leonard took Will to museums on Thursday and yesterday I took him & his friend Martin to the New York City Transit Museum and Roosevelt Island.
At the Transit Museum, they practiced how hard it was to leap over, duck under, or otherwise fare-avoid different turnstiles throughout history. We saw tiny exhibits about Miss Subways, slugs and washers pawned off as fare tokens, and the Brooklyn [Trolley] Dodgers. And I got to explain to them where the word "commuter" comes from.
The Transit Museum now has a whole new room with On the Streets: New York's Trolleys and Buses, a cool timeline of ground transit in the city, starting with a privately-run horse-drawn omnibus in the 1800s (capacity: 12). In the words of the museum, the "gallery dedicated to surface transportation presents, in nine complementing segments, a history of above ground mobility for the last 175 years - from the early 1800s through the 21st Century." Buses in NYC were segregated until the 1870s, but the subways never were, which is comforting. A cute touch:
The central element of the exhibition is a simulated traffic intersection complete with traffic lights and coordinated walk-don't walk signs, parking meters, fire hydrants, and an array of other "street furniture."
In other words, your kid who always wants to play with the newspaper vending machine can finally do so in a safe and controlled environment.
I recommend the London Transport Museum to anyone who enjoys the NYC Transit Museum, and vice versa. Sadly, the London museum is not in a disused subway station.
If it had been a nicer day, we might have walked the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan. Instead, we took the A or F to West Fourth, ate at John's NO SLICES pizzeria on Bleeker and the ice creamery next door, took the F to Lex and 63rd, and walked to the funicular stop a few blocks away to get to Roosevelt Island. The tramway gives you such a nice view, and costs only a swipe of the MetroCard instead of whatever usurious prices the Empire State Building or Top of the Rock charge.
I think next time I'll skip walking the northern half of the island, despite the lighthouse, Octagon, etc.; the real attractions on Roosevelt Island are the views of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the ruins of the smallpox hospital, and the completely empty park-to-be grassy bit at the extreme southern tip. I've finally found a schedule that gives me more hints on when the gate to the hospital and Southpoint is likely to be open (although I can't tell whether that's a 7-day or weekday schedule). Relevant authorities have already started stabilizing the ruins and are planning a Serious Park at Southpoint: read, "aww, it's not as indie and desolate as it used to be, and soon it'll be all tame and boring." So go soon. With Will & Martin, if you can manage it.
# (1) 18 Oct 2009, 06:22PM: Happy Deepavali:
As Leonard suggests, celebrate by reading Jeff Soesbe's near-future scifi story, "The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram."
I'm surprised at how much it meant to me, emotionally, that President Obama personally celebrated Diwali this year. (My family calls it Deepavali; regional variation.) They got a nearby Hindu priest, whom my dad very well might know as a professional peer, to come chant mantras. Obama lit a flame. They partook of a ritual I grew up with (even if I don't give it that much attention as an adult). Is there a more universal ritual than that of lighting a flame to ward off the darkness?
Is this what it's like for a Christian to hear him say "We worship an awesome God"? "...and nonbelievers." "I will be your president, too." Goddamn, but pandering works on the ears and the heart and the throat. And now I understand -- what you call pandering, I can now call healthy inclusion.
# (3) 20 Oct 2009, 05:51PM: Collabora Open Source Development Overview, 4-20 October 2009:
Collabora, my company, does open source development. We don't just build on top of open source frameworks; every day, Collabora developers are hacking in the open on multiple projects.
I decided to blog about some of what we've done in the last couple of weeks.
First, our flagship project, Telepathy:
- David Laban's new echobot helps test text and audio chat in Empathy.
- Mike Ruprecht got the telepathy-haze connection manager to do audio-video calls successfully; people on more and more networks and protocols will be able to use Empathy for audio and video chat.
- Andres Salomon backported Empathy to debian-stable (lenny).
- Will Thompson, Rob McQueen, and Sjoerd Simons drafted a Telepathy spec for encrypted channels and how that works for off-the-record conversations.
- Siraj Razick, Simon McVittie, and Dariusz Mikulski worked on cleaning up some Telepathy-on-Windows code; Dariusz is making sure the contributions the RealXtend developers have made can make it upstream.
- In the oFono world, Olivier Lê Thanh Duong shepherded an oFono patch through, and Andres uploaded oFono 0.8 for Debian.
- Jonny Lamb uploaded new Debian packages of Empathy and telepathy-gabble (Telepathy's Jabber/XMPP connection manager, which can handle single- and multi-user chats and voice/video calls), in addition to lots of other Empathy work.
- Vivek Dasmohapatra worked on telepathy-gabble and wocky (XMPP library).
- And several Telepathy components saw new releases:
Collaborans also worked on Tubes, Teamgeist (part of Zeitgeist), Maemo packages, GStreamer, Farstream, and other projects. Just a few items, because it would be exhausting to cover everything:
Collabora also encourages its staffers to go to conferences to talk about open source. Last weekend, participants in the GNOME Boston Summit and the Amsterdam Maemo Summit led several discussions (Marco Barisione's Telepathy on Maemo slides are especially valuable).
And more FLOSS conferences are coming up soon: Gustavo will be at a WebKitGTK+ hackfest in Spain in December, and Helio will be at Latinoware 2009 later this week in Brazil.
Sorry to those I left out or didn't link. This list is obsolete even as I hit Post...
# (1) 24 Oct 2009, 10:41AM: Foremost:
Leonard and I have been together for eight and a half years, and today was the first time he took me through his high school yearbook. (Triggered by me reminiscing about various unusual academic experiences in my schooling, triggered by others' hyperlexia and dealing with disbelieving or frustrated teachers.)
Evidently Leonard was the male voted both "Most Likely to Succeed" and "Most Disorganized" by his high school classmates. The latter surprises me; the former does not.
Update: Leonard reminds me that he was also Most Likely To Be Famous. He's probably the most Internet Famous of anyone in that graduating class.
# (2) 26 Oct 2009, 09:27PM: Seemlier Sumana:
I use Ubuntu Linux for most of my computing these days; it's what runs on my work laptop. Each version of Ubuntu has a codename consisting of an adjective and an animal name (e.g., Breezy Badger, Intrepid Ibex, Dapper Drake). The upcoming release is 9.10, "Karmic Koala", and I don't care for the adjective. It continues an unfortunate tradition of using "karma" and derived words in completely nonsensical ways. And it's certainly not as positive as previous adjectives (Edgy, Dapper, Jaunty, &c.).
The Ubuntu Release Name Generator has better suggestions, such as Kindly, Keepable, and Keyless Koala. It also suggested "Seemlier Sumana" and "Localizable Leonard," which are fun.
All kidding and grousing aside, I am looking forward to Karmic, which hits the streets on Thursday the 29th. My colleagues who have beta-tested it find it an easy upgrade (with a few exceptions). And it comes with Empathy built-in as the default chat client, which gives me a little hometown pride since Collabora's Telepathy is the engine behind Empathy.
And with all the uncertainty in life recently -- health care reform, the should-we-move-to-England discussion, new and challenging tasks at work, even small decluttering choices about what items to discard -- it's nice to anticipate something about which I can be unabashedly enthusiastic. Three days till Ubuntu 9.10!
# (1) 31 Oct 2009, 08:36AM: More brainwanage:
I decided to pony up my $5 and join MetaFilter. So far I seem to be answering a lot of questions about technology. You'd think I was a geek or something.
[Main] You can hire me through Changeset Consulting.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sh@changeset.nyc.
