Older blog entries for bolsh (starting at number 103)

Luis made a couple of points I agree with about an eventual leap to 3.0.

One of the major reasons for what he calls the fear to fail is the fact that the 6 monthly release cycles, which were necessary to stabilise the 2.0 work, and have been a huge boon overall for GNOME, are not suited to 3.0 work. They are just too short. For a platform as big as GNOME, to get any big user-visible features in a release cycle, it needs to be at least 9 months, and perhaps a year.

I know I'm not the first one to have said this, but I'm more & more convinced that the 6 month cycle has outlived its usefulness.

Having been shamed by Edd, I spent some time today on the GUADEC wiki, organising things into sub-pages that made sense.

As always with wikis, your help is needed to make the wiki a useful resource. We need more people offering lifts, accepting lifts, more Stuttgarters, and more information on sleeping, eating and drinking in Stuttgart.

Thanks for your support.

Wiki update

Several people recommended the C based Didiwiki (although I must admit that coding a wiki in C is not something I would have considered): http://didiwiki.org

potwiki (a VIM based wiki) also got a vote, and will be tried: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1018

Christian: The point of the whining isn't that a change has been made. The point of the whining is that a change has been made (1) which sucks, and heavily imacts the user experience (2) two weeks before a release, and (3) in everyone's new favourite distribution. Oh, and (4) from the looks of the bugzilla comments, as a unilateral decision by the boss.

I would have preferred if they had added a toggle in the preferences, and defaulted to the other "standard" Nautilus behaviour of the browser. In addition, that would probably be much more pleasing to the vast tracts of Windows and KDE users out there who seem to expect that and find Spatial annoying. Then I could just switch on spatial, and be done with it.

Personal wiki solution

I'm looking for a wiki-like program which has the following characteristics:

• Easy - I don't want to spend time on the program
• Just for me - not publically available on the web
• Persistent - I've been using sticky notes, but they are just not persistent enough - not versioned, and they really feel like they should be thrown out regularly
• Works everywhere - Windows at work, Mac and Linux at home
• Hierarchical - I want to link from "stuff to do" to "how to do task X"

Really, a wiki is ideal, except all of the wikis I know need a web server, and what I really want is more like a cross-platform Tomboy. Does such a thing exist, and I just don't know about it?

Update: Thanks to Emmanuel Touzery and Stewart Smith for quick answers - Emmanuel reccommended Instiki (which I believe Nat mentioned a few weeks ago too). 2 clicks, and I was away. Exactly what I was looking for. Bummer that it doesn't use the same wiki text as moinmoin, but you can't have everything ;)

Paul Graham on high school

What you'll wish you'd known

Particularly amusing are the footnotes:

If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.

Dissipation

One of the problems of free software is dissipation. Because of its success, there are many avenues of communication, many projects. It has become hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise.

This works both ways - developers feel they're not getting quality feedback, and users often don't have any way to know what's good and what's not in terms of applications and communication channels.

We also have more blogs, planets, user communities, news sites, and on & on.

The enthusiasm in the free sofware world is not constant, it's growing all the time. But it is limited. And as time goes on, the average temperature of our universe is going down.

GNOMErs in Stuttgart

Here's a special request to Stuttgart GNOME people - could you sign up to guadec-list, and declare yourselves on the wiki, please? We really need more people with local knowledge to help people figure out stuff like where to stay, how to get around, and what there is to do.

This is hillarious. My favourite bit of the pamphlet is point 4, where he says "notice the breasts are violently pierced".

Funny supply & demand curves

RML: Supply of employment is not a linear entity, nor is demand. People must work to eat. Employers must hire people to have the resources to make lots of money.

In addition, the minimum wage only affects a certain class of job. A computer company will not be able to hire anyone at the minimum wage to hack kernels, because that is a different market to the one in which the minimum wage plays a role.

In the market where the minimum wage might play a role, it's more like perfect competition. There are N low-wage job positions to be filled, and an infinity of people willing to fill them. At 5 dollars an hour, all N will be filled. And at 6 dollars an hour, all N will be filled.

The question is what is the minimum quality of life we as a society want the bottom wage earners to have. If a mother has to get 2 jobs at your alleged point of equilibrium just to be able to pay rent & buy groceries, that's a problem. The minimum wage is set very simply - what is the minimum someone needs to be able to be paid to survive? If people are working full-time for less than that, that's society's problem.