Older blog entries for malcolm (starting at number 97)

GNOME Summit 2004

The summit was fun. Possibly surprisingly, this was my first dedicated GNOME conference and it was nice to finally attach faces to some people that I have been communicating with via email and IRC for three or four years (in some cases). It was also a productive three days for me in that I had a few conversations with people to discuss some things that would have taken dozens of emails to work through normally.

As noted already by so many other people, the Stata Center was quite a strange building, with some very odd ergonomic quirks. But it was a good venue for something like the GNOME summit in many ways.

So, good talks, good company, good fun. It was worth the trip over to the US to attend, I think. :)

Ankh: When I was starting to mess around with XML to the point that I wanted to read specs and write programs with it (early 2000, I guess), XLink seemed like one of the more interesting specs being produced. I could imagine a browser of some kind that would allow me to create annotated versions of documents that were otherwise read-only to me. I would just have to create a file of arcs between two external targets -- a point in the source document and the annotation document. I could write the annotation myself or just use this feature to connect up two different pages in a way that was useful to me.

Standard support for this sort of thing would be great. Instead of browsing document A that describes the connections between document B and other places, I could just go through B and have the links available as I go -- much more useful to somebody who works like I do, synthesising a lot between different information sources.

So much to write at some point; probably will never get it all down.

Just quickly, though: if there is anybody in the Sydney, Australia area who wants to work with Python on Linux doing "cool stuff", we are hiring. Get in quick to avoid the rush.

I have put up a brief write-up of my linux.conf.au week. It will only stay live for about a month, since it is not really GNOME related and that machine is a bit abused these days, so read fast.

(There may be some small issues with the photo captions on IE 5.x/Win, but the document is not important enough for me to bother tracking down some way to test that.)

And so another year's conference is over and we have to wait nearly 15 months until the next one.

Three days of interesting talks have gone past in a whirl. Every talk I went to was worth the time; speakers were well prepared, the equipment generally worked well and the rooms were comfortable enough, even when full. Havoc gave a fantastic keynote this morning about putting Linux on desktops everywhere. This is not to say Bdale and Maddogs' keynotes were not also interesting, but they said similar things to other talks of theirs that I have heard. I had not seen Havoc in full-flight advocacy mode before and it was an impressive performance.

I had a lot of conversations over the last three days of the conference with people who are interested in developing GNOME applications. One guy admitted to staying up until 0300 playing around with the Java bindings and discovering just how complete GNOME has become as a development platform. This kind of feedback is extremely rewarding and reflects well on everybody who is involved in GNOME development. Unfortunately, many of the conversations I had also highlighted the embarassing gaps in developer education materials we have, but that is kind of a known problem already. We just really, really need to fix it.

Extremely tired now, so tomorrow will be Recovery Day before returning to work on Monday.

Day two of the pre-conference program (yesterday) flew past for me. I gave a couple of talks at the Python mini-conference. The first one went fairly well (I have given it a couple of times now -- talking about using Python in business situations), the second one slightly less well, but that was entirely my fault; I could not think of enough practical Python tricks to talk about and it kind of meandered towards the end. Still, it seemed to be fairly well received and nobody threw fruit or anything. Wound up with a slightly impromptu talk at the GNOME mini-conference and then being roped into the question-and-answer session at the end.

Completed my speaking commitments today with a GNOME tutorial which attracted a reasonable audience who seemed to be interested enough to ask questions throughout. This is the kind of tutorial I think GNOME contributors should be trying to give at every single conference, so it was an interesting experience to see if I could talk about GNOME at a sufficiently high level to be interesting to "third-party" developers (Gstreamer guys: I pushed somebody in your direction who is interested in writing developer-level documentation. Don't frighten him away!)

I had a bit more time to talk to people today (and last night at the speakers' dinner). Much of my enjoyment at conferences like l.c.a comes from just catching with people I see once every year or two, so I am looking forward to just relaxing over the next three days, listening to talks and participating in the group discussions. I am completely blown away by the quality of organisation at this conference each year and the organisers this year have taken things to the next level again. Just little things like having areas set up under large tents so that we can sit out of the sun and talk makes the whole experience very enjoyable.

I am at linux.conf.au this week, along with a few hundred other people (glynn, jdub, hypatia, jamesh, mrd, havoc, ... the list of familiar faces is endless).

Gave my first (of four) talks (paper here) at the Linux and OSS in Government mini-conference this afternoon. I managed to avoid embarassing myself and some people stayed awake long enough to ask questions. One cannot ask for more.

The government mini-conference is really quite impressive. All day, it has been one speaker after another giving case study style presentations about the succesful use of Open Source software and ideas at both the state and federal level. Mine was the only talk all day that was not about a existing government installation or project (I was doing an advocacy talk). Normally, I suspect this kind of stuff would drive me up the wall, but the presentations have been very interesting and the between-talks talk (during coffee breaks) very motivating and intelligent.

QA in "other projects"

This posting by a gentleman (called Joe) inside Microsoft's testing division is interesting. It is a fairly well written blog entry about the testing and bug-fixing process inside Microsoft. A few things jump out at me from this post:

• Firstly, more comments at the end than I would have expected are of the "Gee whiz!" variety. Are there really that many people who are taken aback by the process of fixing bugs and the fact that even when a problem is understood the fix does not come at zero cost? This is just as applicable in the open source world as in corporate environments, so maybe it is something we need to get the word out about.

• Secondly, his comments about internationalisation are interesting, at least when you compare it to open source desktop projects. The application he is talking about is translated into a dozen languages. That is comparable to a minor GNOME application (for example) and far below the norm for a major one. Some of the problems he talks about such as checking the phrasing and translation accuracy are common to all projects. Other things, like making sure it works when the locale is set at runtime and making sure text is not clipped and the UTF-8 encoding is accurate are things that many open source projects handle as a matter of course: locale setting Just Works(tm) at the C library level and programmers know how to use it. Widgets and text handling libraries like Pango are designed to allow easy and correct text layout (you can still get into trouble if you use fixed width and height dialog boxes and they are small enough, but people know not to do that). The time required for translation is a bit less in open source projects due to the massively distributed nature of the various translation projects (gnome-i18n, kde-i18n, GNU Translation Project). In short, it appears that Microsoft have some problems that open source projects have already seen it is necessary to solve in this regard.

• Finally, the rest of the entry: evaluating the impact of a bug (this was a reasonable low probability bug) versus the cost of fixing versus the proximity to the release date are issues that all projects have to solve. The views expressed in that article seem to be pragmatic and match what a project like GNOME does.

So, all in all, an interesting piece: both for confirming some of my suspicions (and probably prejudices) and for the information it contains.

I have some other things to say about Joe's writings, but I shall save them for later. For now, his follow-up posting is more food for thought and analysis.

"Professionals"(sic)

I saw a piece last night about performance enhancing drugs in US Major League Baseball. Nauseating. It pays to remember that professional only refers to the fact that the players and officials are paid, not to their level of behaviour.

Based on the figures mentioned in that report (five to seven percent of players use steroids and the like), if you are in the USA and go to a MLB game next season, on average, at least one of the players taking to the field in the first innings will be a drug cheat. It should be a fun game to play with your kid when they are there doing a bit of hero worship -- spot the slimeball.

Baseball administrators have adopted the attitude that it is better to be seen doing something than to actually do something. So they have carefully removed the possibility of punishments acting as a disincentive, random testing being used in a fashion likely to actually catch or discourage the cheats, or of testing being done by a credible organisation with experience and resources necessary to keep up with the ever-changing field.

Dave Hyatt accurately lays out one corner of the taxonomy of (software) bugs. It is sadly so easy to find examples of these kinds of bug reports.

Many people have come up against the problem of open source software not being accepted because it was "not invented here". Often this is disguised behind the ludicrous excuse of "nobody is responsible for it" or "no support if available" because, aside from the erroneous assertions, every time their Outlook mail client throws a fit or their machine needs reinstalling, they just know they can give Microsoft a call and the problems will be instantly fixed ... not. Well, here is one success story that deserves great recognition. To the credit of the management described in that email, they remembered the initial estimate that used freely available software and eventually came around. That puts them a few steps ahead of a large number of companies.

Remember to say "Thankyou!"...

Just a reminder boys and girls: say thankyou every now and again to the people who write the software you use. They will appreciate it.

Just before going to bed last night, I received a nice note from somebody at Wipro who had found a document I wrote useful (he also pointed that a link was broken and included a fix). When I woke up this morning, somebody else had sent a similar note about a different document. Much cheerfulness ensued on my end. :-)

...and try to coordinate your work with others

Unfortunately, also in my mailbox this morning was a nice note from the artist formerly known as gman (now performing daily over here). He politely pointed out that one of the documents I was editing was also undergoing extensive revisions by him and had I read his diary I would have seen that he pointed it out (together with a link to the rewrite) two weeks ago. In my defence, I can only say that that would have required me to learn to read and I don't have those lessons scheduled until next year.

As punishment, I get to merge his changes and my changes and the original document into something coherent. I would like to tell you how much fun that has been today, but it would involve lying and I'm not meant to do that.

Information Revisited

My post yesterday elicited a couple of pieces of mail and some feedback here, so I only wasted everybody minus four peoples' time.

haruspex: I saw some OpenDoc stuff a few years ago (on a friend's OS/2 box). The mostly seamless blending of pieces that seemed to promise is part of what I am talking about. However I had not seen CyberDog, so I'll admit my statement that nothing exists properly may have been overdone. However, component technologies (be they OpenDoc parts or Bonobo components or ActiveX objects or whatever) are not quite living up to the image in my head. But it's a good match in some cases and very close to what I am thinking about; certainly a component-based architecture would be part of something like this.

Good Idea of the Week (GIOTW?!)

DV made a really good suggestion on the libxml mailing list today. If a couple of dozen people who use libxml2 regularly all contribute one or two code samples of how to use things, we will quickly develop a large repository of answers to the "how do I do that?" questions. This would certainly be a way for a lot of us to pay back Daniel for his superb work on this library. The code samples are already accumulating.