# (1) 03 Jan 2010, 09:24PM: Ramping Back Up To Work-Time:
Last day of vacation. Went to the Guggenheim for the Kandinsky exhibit, then WD-50 for dinner (where we overheard a waiter disingenuously saying to another table that he doesn't know why people think it's a molecular gastronomy joint).
I could use another week to clean, declutter, mend, sort, and meditate. But Leonard has been trying to convince me that my vacation wasn't wasted. I visited three museums (New York Historical Society, Cooper-Hewitt, & Guggenheim) plus the old World's Fair grounds, had three fancy dinners out (Craft, Blue Hill, & WD-50), hosted a New Year's party, visited friends in Connecticut, spent lots of time with friends in Manhattan and Queens (including a storyreading), posted some blog entries, fiddled with my N900, recorded some video & played with PiTiVi, recorded an anthem for the International Year of Natural Fibres, read random RSS feeds/magazines/book chapters, listened to a bunch of podcasts, sorted email, donated to charities, put up a bunch of old interviews, socially bookmarked some misc links I had lying around, and watched One, Two, Three (again) and several Psych episodes. Most of this was quality time with Leonard, too.
Writing all that out assuages my anxiety a little.
# 06 Jan 2010, 12:07AM: Simple Pleasures:
Today's complicated pleasure: The Known Universe, a horror film about the end of the universe. OK, not intentionally, but Abbott's nonchalant narration seemed fine just until he got to the bit about what'll happen in a few trillion years. I'm really not used to hearing "this horrible doom approaches" without a "and therefore we should..." suffix.
The last few days, I've been enjoying simpler pleasures: Puzzlefighter (a game Mike Carns introduced me to eleven years ago) and essays by Andy Rooney. Yes, the stuff from the end of 60 Minutes. I loved them when I was a kid; a few minutes from the end of 60 Minutes, every Sunday night, my parents would holler for me and I'd run to catch his comments.
Upon reading Years of Minutes I begin to see as an adult what I adored as a child. He's really direct and honest about the little things in life, like a cross between Jerry Seinfeld and Mr. Rogers. He cares about details; over and over, he looks up statistics and puts them in context (especially about defense spending, taxes, and government in general), or goes somewhere, tries a whole category of consumer products, or experiments in some way to get at the experiential truth of things. He played football in high school, and served in the Army, which puts him on the other side of the jock-nerd spectrum from most writers I knew of. And now that I've done the weekly column bit, I find Rooney's consistency worthy of respect. I'll have to think more about his views & what I find in him once I've finished the book.
I find myself thinking of Rooney as an influence, alongside Dave Barry, Square One TV, Amar Chitra Katha, several teachers, Star Trek, my family, and P.G. Wodehouse.
# 14 Jan 2010, 03:49PM: Some Recent Collabora Open Source Development:
Has it been three months since I provided a snapshot of Collaborans' open source work? Too long! Here's a taste of our work from the end of 2009 & the start of this year (and there's a lot I'm leaving out, like a bunch of Maemo work, because otherwise this entry would go on forever! I'm already several days out-of-date):
The photos here are all from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year, which was warm and fun. January (here in the Northern Hemisphere) is a good time to remember how nice that was.
# (4) 16 Jan 2010, 12:18PM: My Worst Inhibitions:
As a Christmas gift, Leonard got us the DVDs of the first three seasons of Psych. We're in season three or so. Some observations:
Wow the pilot feels way different from the rest of the show. Shawn's more hypercompetent, the tone is darker and less funny, fewer pop culture references, Detective Lassiter's nearly neutral evil (instead of the lawful good he turns into later in the show), Shawn's dad is "back" in town (instead of having lived in Santa Barbara continuously since working for the SBPD), Det. Barry is more skeptical than Det. O'Hara is, etc., etc. I like the general tone of the later episodes better, but Leonard and I both miss Barry.
Psych as Sherlock Holmes homage: Shawn uses keen observational and reasoning skills, J Watson & Burton Guster are both medical folk known by their last names, and they have a weird relationship with the legitimate police. Leonard also stretch-suggested that, just as Holmes was addicted to cocaine, Shawn is addicted to pop culture references. The constant stream of references, only some of which I get, is one reason that Leonard likes this show -- like Mystery Science Theater 3000, it provides quantity and variety in pop culture jokes. (Leonard also likes their episode titles.) For example, in Anupam Nigam's Season 1 episode "Game Set...Muuurder?" the tennis star is "Deanna Sirtis" which is a really obvious reference to Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Nigam tends to write interesting episodes that use characters well, and is Indian, whoo!)
Yeah, basically ALL of Psych fails the Bechdel test massively. Even when [Interim] Chief Vick and O'Hara talk, it's usually about one of the guys. "Who You Gonna Call?" made me cringe a bit in how it treated a trans character, and none of the show's treatment of non-hetero folk has ever struck me as especially winning. I think the show treats Gus's blackness in a non-fail manner but I may not have caught things.
Henry Spencer is, in the more formulaic episodes, basically Wilson from Home Improvement.
Leonard and I usually sing along to the theme song as though we are happy guinea pigs named Enthuse and Happy (way too bizarre and one-off to put in the slang dictionary). Leonard thinks the song's lyrics make very little sense. I've unsuccessfully argued that the song is from a true neutral to a lawful good, trying to persuade the listener to live and act in the fruitful ambiguity of method and purpose. Steve Franks (not to be confused with household favorite Steven Frank) created the show to have a nice light comedy feel, so I speculate that his song is also a message to darker, less referential & over-the-top shows.
I'd watch a version of Psych that was 90% Detective Lassiter. I am resisting reading all of Timothy Omundson's in-character blog, but found this four-year-old interview interesting (mostly so I can give thanks I'm not a worker in the Byzantine industry that is mass media entertainment). Lassiter likes to believe he's a paladin (Julia, Moss, thank you for showing me episodes of The Middleman), but he's more of a lawful neutral. I am in idle moments working on a taxonomy that compares and contrasts Lassiter, Fraser from Due South, the Middleman, and Captain Carrot from the Discworld novels.
OK, now Leonard and I are just going through all our old episode titles and deciding which ones could be Psych episodes. "Mentos: The Deathmaker," "java.util.Murder," and "Death With Jeeves" are all probably unsuitable for various reasons. "Part One: Mur" I still adore. A quiet Saturday at Gunlinghorn.
# (8) 16 Jan 2010, 02:34PM: Nineteen Letters:
Keep those name misunderstanding stories coming! From the comments: I'm especially amazed that "Sarah" turns into "Sharon" and thoroughly enjoy "Mir. Like the space station." Together with your wife Kat, you're a meerkat!
I seem to have neglected to mention my name hassles. When I was young, sometimes "Harihareswara" didn't fit on standardized test forms, so I imagine there are a bunch of 99-percentile algebra scores filed under Sumana Hariharesw. I also got very used to helping out substitute teachers by listening for a long pause after, say, Erin Griffith's name got called, and saying "That's probably me." I used to pronounce it "Hurry-hurry-sure-ah" to make it easy for USians, but now I pronounce it rather more authentically, basically as "HA-ree-ha-RAY-shwa-ra" but with enough nuance and trilling that I probably need to brush up on my IPA to do it justice. Best joke about my last name (old pronunciation): middle-school colleague and my-bus-stop-sharer Levi Tinney's "Hurry hurry rush me to the hospital." Best joke about the new pronunciation: no real contenders yet! Operators are standing by.
I used to spell out my name in letter groups of four-four-five, but this caused problems as people got confused about where the I and the E went, and whether my name was Hareswara and I'd misspoken. Then my mom or dad suggested I use "H-A-R [pause] I-H-A [pause] R-E-S [pause] W-A-R-A" and that works pretty well. I usually specify "S as in Sugar" to make sure people don't hear it as an F. When I was at Salon, though, Tom Fuhrman sat in a cubicle near me and mocked "S as in Sugar," saying I sounded like a breathy hooker. I switched to saying "S as in Salon" when he was around.
I like it when big names in US politics or media have names that news anchors have to learn to pronounce, like Blagojevich, Shyamalan, Sotomayor, or Stephanopoulos, because there's some part of me that identifies with them. If I have fantasies of fame, I can always put in that cinematic detail where a pretty face is getting its makeup done and chanting my last name thirty seconds before the camera rolls.
I basically don't care how people pronounce my first name -- where they put the stresses, what kinds of vowel sounds they use, whatever. Some people find it helpful to think of the "Suman" part as rhyming with the English word "woman" but native Indians often make more of an "ah" sound in the second syllable instead of an "eh" or "uh" sound. But really, I've gotten jokes about "Summer," "Sumer," "Somalia," "Sumeria," "Soma," and one gym teacher who wanted to call me Sue (better than the other gym teacher that year, who asked in frustration if he could call me "Hiyakawa" - some kind of Native American pastiche I assume?). So any good-faith attempt is fine by me.
But as I said, I'm not fussed about people pronouncing it "SOO-mah-nah" or "suh-MAH-nah" or "SUM-ah-nah" or what have you. It's more irritating when random strangers or customer service folks hear my name and take like two minutes asking about it and iterating pronunciations, even when I tell them it doesn't matter. This is one reason I prefer to use "Vikki" when I can -- when random waiters, or other people who will only ever know me for an hour, insist on taking my time to learn to pronounce my name correctly, I get irritated. It's a novelty to them; to me, it's just another reminder that I'm Different. Why are you placing your comfort over mine? These are often the same people who say "what a beautiful name! where's it from? what does it mean?" When Salon customers did this to me, I usually responded by answering, then exoticizing them right back. Where does your name come from, Jeff or Allison or Keith or Emily? What does your name mean?
Now, I don't want to make my friends worry here. If you actually know me I don't mind helping you learn to say my name. I just don't want to spend time every day teaching strangers about it. I'd rather be teaching them about open source.
# (1) 18 Jan 2010, 06:00PM: For Smiles' Sake:
Some things that have made me happy recently: the BBC's Ask About Britain podcast (straightforward 6-minute explanations of Eton, bargaining, choosing a husband, &c.); "The Sake Period" from the You Look Nice Today podcast; and Jonathan Corbet's predictions for 2010 in Linux.
# 21 Jan 2010, 01:52PM: Tales of the Unexpected:
Remember Thoughtcrime Experiments? A scifi/fantasy anthology that Leonard and I put together early last year and published in the spring of 2009?
The TE email address just received two submissions.
On the same day. About eleven months after the deadline.
I asked them where they'd seen the call for submissions, so I could go correct whoever needs correcting. One responded: the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
The SFWA Bulletin currently shows, as the only sample issue you're allowed to view, the February/March 2009 issue. About 1/3 of the three-page market report is a version of the TE call for submissions. It mentions a 2009 deadline. Either there's a more recent Bulletin that thinks we're open for business again, or the writer in question saw the market report, saw the date, and missed the year. I'm sure I've made that mistake before.
Anyway, I just thought this was odd enough to comment on. Kind of like the moment in the Amtrak station a few weeks ago when the escalator stopped with a jolt as I was walking up it. This is why they say to hold on to the handrail!
Thoughtcrime Experiments, published in 2009, is eligible for various awards; perhaps I should go through the criteria to figure out how people would nominate the various stories and art, categories we fit into, etc.
# 22 Jan 2010, 10:43PM: Ask Your Doctor If Herring And Sweet Potato Pie Is Right For You:
I actually knocked off work at a reasonable hour today, after some useful conversations with colleagues. Then I cleaned up a bit and decided to tackle a few clothes that needed minor mending. Beth came over earlier than I'd expected, saw my needles and thread out, and did some fixing of her own. Now I have two more pairs of slacks in my rotation and her coat is all properly buttonable. Lucian arrived, we ate Sac's pizza and drank wine and water and root beer, and we gabbed and watched Kiki's Delivery Service. Lucian hadn't ever seen an OK Go video (he's of my cohort, it makes no sense) so we showed him the treadmill dance, the side-by-side comparison with a high school talent show re-creation that's more faithful than a nun, "This Too Shall Pass", and "WTF?". And, for good measure, OK Go frontman Damian Kulash meeting Kermit the Frog.
They left, we played a bit of Puzzle Fighter, now it's bedtime. Before I retire -- this week I posted a new piece at the Geek Feminism blog: "FLOSS inclusivity: pragmatic, voluntary, empowering, joyous".
# (2) 24 Jan 2010, 11:06AM: Upcoming FOSDEM & UK Travel:
I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, the first weekend in February. (Something like twenty of my Collabora colleagues will be there, including some I've never met before.) I've been to England & to Russia, but you can waffle around as to whether those are really Europe. But FOSDEM is in Brussels, Belgium! Very European, and makes its own waffles. I'll be arriving in Brussels a day or two before the conference proper. After it ends, I'll ride the Eurostar train (!) to England and see my Cambridge colleagues for about a week.
This is a management discussion trip and a seeing-people trip; as helpful as occasional facetime is for developers, it's essential for a manager like me. So, if you live in a bit of Europe or England such that it's easy for you to visit Brussels or Cambridge, I'd love to see you. And if you're giving a FOSDEM talk I absolutely must see, let me know! I'm interested in checking out:
- the Mozilla folks - I've mentioned the work Collabora's doing on Firefox for Mobile, and I'd like to learn more about WoMoz
- the Jabber/XMPP developers' room, including talks like "The Extraordinary, Magical Powers and Possibilities of XMPP", "PubSub Gone Wild", and of course "Multi-User Jingle: Voice and Video Conferencing with XMPP" by my colleagues Dafydd Harries & Sjoerd Simons
- Introduction to the GNOME Bugsquad
- My colleague Daniel Stone's "Polishing X11 and making it shiny"
- A variety of talks on optimizing performance -- MySQL (my previous notes on the subject), sysadmin tools Flapjack & cucumber-nagios, identi.ca, and Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, Scribe, and Thrift. I like learning about systematic performance monitoring and optimization.
- "Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company"
- Smuxi, "an advanced IRC client that solves the 'always available' problem in a graphical environment"
- "Hidden Pearls": "uniquely useful" code OpenOffice has that other projects should consider reusing
- "Tor: Building, Growing, and Extending Online Anonymity"
- Defending the development of no-future alternative OSes using insights drawn from queer theory
- Lightning talks on GNU Savannah (sort of a Launchpad competitor?), OpenERP, and the Kaizendo customizable schoolbooks project. I'm also oddly compelled by the mysterious "Open-source software: Blaming the unknown, or a constructive approach to technology".
- The Linux distributions developer room: "How to be a good upstream", "Mobile distributions and upstream challenges", a study of how Nokia and community folk govern the Maemo project together, and most excitingly, personnel management within Linux distributions
(I'll have to put together a list of all the Collabora talks soon.)
Family continuity note: Seven years ago, Leonard went to Belgium for the European Python conference. I helped him brush up on his French, he hung out with Jarno Virtanen & Taina Prusti, etc., etc., etc.
# (1) 24 Jan 2010, 01:07PM: Like The Producers Even Care What I Think:
New season of Project Runway is happening. Last week's challenge (make a nice party look OUT OF BURLAP SACKS) provoked decent innovation, which pleases me. But I predict that no more than 20% of the challenges this time round will make the designers make clothes for real men and women with healthy normal bodies. As I've said before, that's just dumb.
I find the majority of clothes created on the show unwearable and ridiculous. Zillions of overly revealing skirts and dresses, nearly no pants, forget about pockets, and evidently menswear is some dark continent. On the rare occasions that designers serve as models, and therefore must create clothes for men, they and the judges commiserate over how rare and difficult it is. That sounds like utter crap. Please e-mail me if it isn't.
Here's an idea: just learn to make pants, and menswear. Then you'll learn a skill that no one else evidently thinks is as important as frippery for like 3% of the women in the US (much less the world), and you can carve out a niche as the magical wizard who can make clothes for the majority of humanity!
# (2) 25 Jan 2010, 03:17PM: Turn Style:
"Is that your MetroCard?"
"Yeah, it has 50 cents on it."
[examining magstripe] "Oh, I didn't know you could put music on these now."
# 26 Jan 2010, 12:18PM: Like A Focus Group, But Useful:
Rachel, Kevan, Holly, other Londoners - Canonical will pay you to come by and test a chat program this week or next.
# 26 Jan 2010, 06:11PM: Tacky, Metacity, Encryption, tp-qt4, and Maemo:
A few things Collabora folks have been working on recently (along with the constant stream of Telepathy-related releases):
Daf Harries released tacky, a simple python-based paste web app. Basically it's like a simpler version of pastebin, and you can install it on a private server in case you're talking about something confidential in private chat/IRC.
Thomas Thurman is looking for new contributors to mentor to help with Metacity (a window manager).
Cosimo Cecchi posted his TODO list for "a Telepathy implementation of the XTLS protocol, an end-to end-solution to crypt communication over XMPP". Cosimo and Eitan Isaacson are both working on encryption; Eitan has been plugging away at interactive certificate verification.
Andre Moreira Magalhaes is blogging to raise awareness of Telepathy-Qt4, a convenience library for people who want to use the Telepathy framework in their Qt applications.
And we've all been playing around with our N900 devices (Collabora company gifts). Tollef Fog Heen provides scripts & procedure to move SMSes and contacts from iPhone to N900, Felipe Zimmerle wrote an inclinometer, Jonny Lamb released a file transfer app and extra goodies to help you chat with people on lots of networks, and Thomas asks for testers for his new version of robotfindskitten.
Because we're hacking around, some of our apps you won't find in the default software repositories in the N900's applications manager. Here's a short guide:
Maemo Extras contains quality-controlled applications written by the community. It's installed on the device, but disabled by default.
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu, find "maemo.org", and untick Disabled.
Maemo Extras Testing contains the applications developers are preparing to update. There are lots of applications here and all need help in testing and validating. People can vote good applications up by visiting the application list; once enough people do that, an app moves to the regular Extras repo.
Still, these are not quite ready for prime time, so be cautious! One colleague offers this tip: "if you want to just find good quality applications within Extras-Testing, review this packaging list and find those with the most QA votes."
To enable: Within App Manager, select "Catalogues" from the menu. Click "New" and add the following details:
- Catalogue Name: Maemo Extras testing
- Web Address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing
- Distribution: fremantle
- Components: free non-free
("Fremantle" means Maemo 5, the version of the Maemo operating system that the N900 runs. "free non-free" tells the manager that you want both open source and closed source applications; change this if you want.)
Maemo Extras-Devel: contains untested and wildly variant applications that might harm your system. Use this repository sparingly since the applications are unstable.
To enable: follow directions on the maemo.org wiki.
# 27 Jan 2010, 09:52AM: A Reminder:
Amanda Marcotte, thinking about the phrase "pro-life" (the rest of the post is much more controversial):
...Life, for most people, is about being in this world. It’s about enjoying food, enjoying sex, having goals, making plans, creating relationships, loving each other, developing beliefs, thinking thoughts, learning, enjoying a good night’s rest, listening to music, enjoying drama, enjoying quiet, kicking your feet up and petting the cat, diving into your work, making a difference, helping others, selfishly hiding away and doing for yourself, falling in love, grieving a loss, the thrill of winning, the sorrow of losing, the ambiguities of the human spirit, the bright light of reason, the joy of discovery, the curiosity inspired by mystery, a walk in the park, a Christmas with family, a loud concert, a good book.
# 28 Jan 2010, 11:06PM: Grace:
Comfort music: Tally Hall's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, They Might Be Giants' "Thunderbird" (from Spine). There's a moment in "Thunderbird" that always snatches my heart and holds it up to the light -- Linnell's "am" in
Man oh man my throat is dry
Man are you thinking what I
am
well what about it then
Comfort TV: InfoMania, Rotten Tomatoes Show, Psych, Leverage. Eitan and I stood in toe-numbing cold for hours yesterday to get standby tickets to Colbert, and got in. You can hear me in the audience, the only one clapping when Arthur Benjamin reveals why 2520 was his childhood favorite number. I thought more people would be with me on that one.
N.K. Jemisin's third gripping sample chapter for her upcoming fantasy novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is up, my ex-boss is spreading the gospel that software testing is a neat career for nonprogramming geeks, Erin Ptah's "Castle Down" is highly entertaining magical Colbert/Stewart slash, and John Darnielle is (as always) passionate and enthusiastic about something:
Well, I stumbled across it somehow, I'm not sure how, and I watched it, and I had one of those experiences you have sometimes with a band you've never heard playing a song you don't know. One of those transformative reaffirming experiences, which you then get religious about, even if religious isn't exactly the word you'd use but trust me it's the word you actually mean: you start thinking, everything should be like this all the time, anything that's not like this is a ridiculous waste of time, I want peak experiences and only peak experiences because life is all about peak experiences and people who consent to have less than constant peaking epiphanies all the time are missing out, etc., etc., all infantile nonsense of course but as feelings go a bracing & pleasant one. The permanent reoccurring 19th summer is a nonstarter as a governing aesthetic stance, but as a tool in the kit it's not without some merits.....
...[the song] becomes a radiant source of self-regenerating power and wonder and lights start to go off in corners of the room where a guy didn't know there were actually any lights, and the guy goes, wow, this is so cool, I didn't expect to run across anything this cool today and I'm so glad I did, I'd really love to run across more things like this during my daily walk down toward the grave.
# 29 Jan 2010, 12:18PM: "Of The Other Insectoid Worlds, I Shall Say Nothing":
Just finished Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker after a year or two. I was reading it at about two pages a day. But more happens in two paragraphs of Stapledon than happens in most entire novels. Entirely ordinary example (Ch. 8, "The Beginning and the End," Section 2, "The Supreme Moment Nears"):
The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing.
Filed under:
Comedy Reading
# (2) 30 Jan 2010, 02:41PM: Insta-RSS Feeds: A Case Study In Freedom:
If you use Google Reader, now you can subscribe to any webpage as though it had a feed and thus automatically get alerted whenever it changes. When the Colbert Report free tickets page opens up new dates, or my slang dictionary adds items, you'll know.
Leonard started providing a version of this service years ago with his Syndication Automat. Now he only needs to use it to generate one feed: new publications from Dover. Sites have gotten sensical and started providing their own feeds. If you want something to run on your own server to make RSS feeds for pages that don't have them, you can use his free Scrape 'N' Feed code.
(I learned of this Google Reader feature via Matt Cutts, and his readers imply that there are paid services the change will undercut. Just another reminder that packaging up a free open source script with lovely UI can make you some cash -- for a while, until it turns up as a free feature in a popular app or OS. That's the S-curve of innovation, or temporal arbitrage.)
An RSS feed gives you data in an easy-to-mess-with format. For example, it would be easy enough to plug an RSS feed into a version control system so you could track diffs, reading the change history as easily as if it were a wiki page. Or you could use it in something like the Launchpad bug tracker's remote bug watch. You can enter a bug in Launchpad and if it's a duplicate of a bug in someone else's bugtracker, Launchpad uses that other bugtracker's API to keep an eye out, and lets you know when the remote bug's status changes. Enlarge your scope from software to something like MediaBugs (an RSS feed is basically the simplest possible RESTful API) and you can set up your system to automatically watch for particular journalists citing the same sources over and over, or calculate the proportion of an e-publisher's new releases that come un-DRM'd.
If you want to do forensic economics like Suresh Naidu, then the ability to get an RSS feed of any random webpage is especially cool. And do you remember the people who used Leonard's Beautiful Soup code to catch an international arms dealer? Quote from the lead investigator:
Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I've been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of these place all movements on the Web, but neither of them provide anything like an RSS feed, which is why I began scripting, in order to save checking them myself.
Whether it's deliberate or negligent, making a webpage without an RSS feed is a way of disempowering readers, and of making it slightly harder to vacuum that data into the market-flattening maw. It's like how certain archives will keep a controversial document in a room and only let people read it in that room, no cameras, no notepaper. Google plays nice with these kinds of restrictions, so site owners can opt out and then Google Reader users won't be able to make or read feeds for those pages. Not an antifeature, per se, but definitely a technical restriction on the user to enforce other people's whims. Scrape 'N' Feed has no such scruples, of course. If you don't want me to know what's on that page, don't put it on the web.
[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.
Collabora continued working on Fennec, a.k.a. Firefox for Mobile. Specifically, Collabora is helping re-architect Firefox to be multi-process, via the "Electrolysis" project. After Electrolysis separates out processes in Firefox, each window/tab will live in its own process. If it crashes or needs to be killed, then it won't take down the rest of your browser with it. Plugins will also live in their own process, which also improves your security: Electrolysis puts them in a sort of sandbox, so a badly written (or malicious) plugin can't hurt you too badly. You might have heard of this innovation in Google's Chrome browser. (Chrome is based on the WebKit engine, and Firefox is based on the competing Gecko engine.) So Electrolysis will make the UI more responsive in Firefox for Mobile, but it's not just for Firefox Mobile -- once this separation gets implemented in Gecko, your desktop Firefox will get those stability and performance improvements as well.
We released telepathy-gabble 0.9.3, with several bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for details). Telepathy-gabble is the Jabber (XMPP) connection manager for Telepathy. The development version of Gabble currently uses Wocky, a new XMPP library we're developing that makes it easier to provide more modern XMPP features. Sjoerd Simons's, Vivek Dasmohapatra's & Mike Ruprecht's recent work on multi-user Jingle (Muji) includes a lot of work with telepathy-gabble -- we're working on multi-user chat support that'll eventually allow multi-user video chat right from your desktop. Sjoerd and Vivek especially have been getting Wocky multi-user chat code into telepathy-gabble and are quite excited about it.
Ian Molton now has a working reimplementation of AF_UNIX as AF_DBUS, towards an goal of implementing in-kernel D-Bus, and Will Thompson hacked on the D-Bus specification and daemon. D-Bus is an inter-process communication system that applications use to communicate -- Telepathy among them -- and getting D-Bus running in the kernel will help performance by avoiding context switching. At the moment, AF_DBUS changes are fully buildable and operational, but lack a bus topology.