Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 16)

I really love this time of year- I had a great time in NYC this weekend seeing old friends and doing more of the virtual-names-to-real-faces thing, and it'll be very good to be back in sunny Miami this weekend. But I fear I'm reaching the point that lots of other monkeys have reached at some point or another- I'm looking forward to vacation too much. :/ We all started in this company because we absolutely loved every minute of what we did. And so we did a lot of it. We didn't even take much vacation, because why take vacation when work is the most fun thing in the world? But... ATM I'm practically running away from work. That's a real shame. :/ It's nothing intrinsically wrong with Ximian or Novell- both companies are pretty much committed to doing the right things, both for their products and for their employees. But I'm spending way too much time in meetings[1] and too little time doing the bits that I actually love and got into this business for. :/ So I really need time away, and that sucks- I love free software, and I love GNOME, and they each should help destress me. But I just can't focus on them right now because work just has me so stressed/overloaded. Shame. Hopefully when I get back from break I'll be refreshed.

[1] some are fun, and some are productive- not slamming them all.

On the one hand, it's great that QT supports accessibility- making Free Software available to all people is important.

On the other hand, I'm a little disappointed by the misleading KDE announcement that they have accessibility. The toolkit having accessibility is only one small step towards being accessible. Just a few off the top of my head, and I'm not even close to being an expert:

• every app must be audited for use of keybindings, color, and sound.
• every custom widget in the application stack must have new code to support ATK, not just the stock QT widgets.
• custom themes for colors/font sizes/icon designs/etc. must exist.
• every app must comply to centralized settings for things like theme, font size, etc., and it must be possible to configure those settings and other a11y tools in one place, more or less.

GNOME is far from perfect on these counts, despite Sun pouring man-years into exactly these types of issues. Novell's internal highlights of the accessibility guidelines run to eight pages, and base toolkit is not really mentioned at all- every guideline must be enforced and checked per-application. For KDE to claim that they are accessible now (or for GNOME to rest on it's laurels and think that it is accessible) risks us ending up with no accessible desktops at all.

It's pretty exciting to open up planetgnome in the morning see a bunch of new faces.

Sri: thanks so much for re-starting the summaries. They are a really necessary thing for those among us who don't open up planetgnome as their first link in the morning or spend all day in #gnome.

Robert: again, in a slightly more public forum, welcome on board. Good to see you on planetgnome, and great to have you on our team.

Thomas: Ximian and Novell definitely understand that multimedia is a huge part of what we need to offer in the desktop. You'll note that the full gstreamer-based media stack is in xd-unstable. :) Our problem is that we can't just say 'here is totem' and expect our customers to be happy- the media players we distribute must be able to offer codecs like DVDs or mp3 which are encumbered. Which is a headache, and has prevented us from being more aggressive. Hope that clarifies.

Nailed Dave's bald head with a few snowballs this evening. It felt good. BTW, Provo in the snow is beautiful.

murrayc: I can't speak for everyone, but I have been helped a lot by talking to people from all over the world who share my sense of emptiness right now. Thanks to everyone who has messaged and shared.

Ettore passed away suddenly last night. We will all miss him- it's very hard to be a Monkey right now.

I used to tell people that open source was a great working environment, because when I first got involved with open source (through LegOS) I met with and talked once with an Italian, and I thought that was the greatest thing ever- to meet and talk with someone so far away. Then I got even luckier, and I got to work with an Italian every single day. And that was incredibly exciting, because he was just an awesome person to work with and around.

It's hard to post this- my words don't at all do him or the tragedy justice. But I guess I can say I tried. We'll miss you, dude...

[Later] Finally found a picture of Ettore that does him some justice. If anyone has the picture of him that used to be on duderino.org, please let me know- archive.org seems to have lost it and it's sort of the way I'd like to remember him, odd as that may seem to anyone who saw it.

[Much Later] I've never had so many message tabs open before- lots of people really wanted to share memories and ease pain. Ximian is very much a family, and GNOME is too, even if that is only background noise behind the technical bits sometimes.

[Even Later] I found the duderino pic and put it here. That's always going to be the ettore face, to me.

Finally posted some Summit and GUADEC pictures. My favorites are probably this one, this one, and probably this one.

Spent some time discussing/arguing free software with RMS today. Was good, I think, all things considered- he's clearly a bright guy, and though we have major disagreement about tactics and probably some minor disagreements about end goals, I think I understand him better now, and I hope he understands me (and maybe even GNOME) better.

Outside of that, the summit/hackfest has been good. Not perfect- certainly we've learned lots of lessons for next time, which I'm writing down tonight and will send to the board and organizational list tonight. But all in all I feel like it's been useful for me and I hope fun and/or useful for most of the people who came.

In the 'small world' category, a lawyer sat next to mibarra and behind me on the train to the GNOME Summit today. He asked why there were 15 people in front of him, all apparently madly hacking. Mibarra explained a bit about who we were, and eventually he mentioned that he was aware of the problems of compatibility with Microsoft, since his firm had just been forced to switch from wordperfect to Word. Oh, and then he casually mentioned that he'd cross examined 'that jerk Johannsen' for the DVDCSS case. On the side of the Industry, of course. Weird. On challenge, did seem to firmly believe that I had the right to watch DVDs I'd owned on any platform that the industry chose (had to try hard not to roll my eyes at him) and seemed surprised when I told him that, no, in fact, we don't all have zillions of ripped movies on our hard drives.

The summit should be very good. I look forward to beating some people over the head in person, and drinking with them later. ;)

FWIW, I think people are over-interpreting the Joy quote; it seemed to me on reading it that his thrust was 'open sourcing the code later does not impact the initial innovative moment.' i.e., open source is not magic innovative pixie dust, it still takes some mixture of inspiration and perspiration to make good ideas happen whether they are open or closed.

jfleck: Very cool. libxml, the gnumeric and abi folks, moz/ephy, and (IMHO) above all the folks working on multimedia and multimedia codecs *cough*DeCSS*cough* are doing really important work.

RandomThought: I'm currently watching some football, and just saw another Dell ad pushing Linux on the server. Hope to see those for Linux on the desktop at some point soon. :)