as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

We’re at Guadec!

The mighty and great LugRadio team have put out the first of five daily episodes of LugRadio while we’re here. Recorded (mostly) in Jokosher, too!

It’s been rather cool indeed. I did my Jackfield lightning talk and didn’t die on my arse, which cheers me up quite a bit. There are some real coding powerhouses here, too. Edward Hervey’s a mighty cool guy in person, despite his beard, and the Fluendo chaps are just quality. I say this because we partied hearty on the beach last night until 4am on their dime, with a free bar. Very pissed. Very pissed. And got a lift home with a lunatic Frenchman. Quality. Many photos around: Paul’s are on flickr and Jono has a load.

It’s pretty cool to see how many people have at least heard of LugRadio, too. The Jokosher talk may have helped with that; certainly it has excited interest in Jokosher!

I’m having a great time here, I have to say. The restaurants are for shit, mind. Bah. Ade is especially unimpressed, since “I am a vegetarian” here means “I eat fish, and I don’t mind getting some fish in my dinner even if I specifically ask to not have any meat or fish of any kind”. On the other hand, a random bloke selling sunglasses on the street did accuse Jono of looking like Ali Baba, so it’s not all bad.

Niamh and Sam would love it here, I think, except for the food. I think we should come to Spain. Not this year, though, ‘cos this year we’re going to Caorle in Italy again!

It’s fascinating seeing all this stuff getting done. Daniel Holback decided to package Jokosher for Ubuntu and did it during Jono’s Jokosher talk. You don’t get that at other technical conventions.

Oh, and there was another guy here with an atmedia2006 bag! After the minor awkwardness where I thought he’d stolen my laptop, he turned out to be a cool guy. This is, of course, because he liked the JavaScript panel that I was on. Good work, fella.

Right, less writing about fun and more actual fun for me, I think. Listen out for the second day’s LugRadio tomorrow!

Well, everything’s packed, I think. Tomorrow morning at 9am 75% of the LugRadio team* and Paul Cooper from OpenAdvantage meet up in Birmingham to begin the grand trek to Vilanova. I’m ridiculously excited, yes I am. Less than twelve hours to go!
LugRadio are official media partners, which means that we’ll be prowling the halls and beaches with microphones and talking to people. Jono’s quite keen on doing a show a day, which is fine by me because I don’t have to do the editing. Watch out Gnome hackers: Lugradio is coming.

I got two pings yesterday from people curious about my IM away message, which said “At Microsoft”. That’s because I was at Microsoft. The Lugradio team were invited down to MS to talk to Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft UK, and a cast of thousands about open source software and how MS can engage with the community. It went…interestingly.
We went on a tour of the building, which affirmed my belief that (if you don’t mind the ethical issue) Microsoft must be a great place to work; free drinks, decent chill-out area full of Xboxes and pool tables, nice outdoor lake with free ice-cream, all that sort of thing. Of course, you have to be OK with the idea of working for Microsoft. That aside, though, they do treat their staff very well. We also saw some demos of new-ish projects, like Vista and Office 12. However, the interesting part (and one I wish had gone on longer) was the discussion we had in the morning. They wanted to know more about how MS are perceived by the community and outline some of the things they’re doing to enhance interoperability. We…kicked back pretty hard on that point.
The view that we put to them was that, for Microsoft, interoperability means one of two things: either “partner agreements” with specially anointed projects, or “we do what we like and you fit in with us” (as Michael Erskine reminded us, “there’s no U in interoperability”). the way to actual real proper interop is to open your protocols; that way, everyone can interoperate with you without you having to do any work. It means that I can choose Exchange as my mail and calendaring server without therefore having to choose Outlook (and therefore Windows) on the desktop. We hammered them pretty hard on this point, and I think the message got through. One chap who was there, Nick Barley (?), seemed to be pretty in-touch and in agreement.
It was all very informal; surprisingly so, I thought. This is obviously a good thing, and as far as I could tell the fluffy clouds of niceness weren’t there to obscure barbed fish-hooks. They seemed genuine. Now, I certainly wasn’t expecting to go down there and convince Microsoft to Free the Windows source code in four hours, and I don’t know whether what we said will actually have any effect, but it was interesting nonetheless. I wish we’d had more time to continue the discussion, though.

Bloody Christian Schaller has just written that “according to rumours …Stuart [will] have 90% of all Dashboard applications working in time for his lightning talk” on Jackfield. While I have nothing but respect for Christian and all his work, and I’m ridiculously flattered that he refers to my (5 minute!) talk as a cool highlight that you don’t want to miss, the figure for “percentage of Dashboard applets that Jackfield runs” is miles and miles away from being 90% at the moment. Don’t get your hopes up, although I shall be frantically hacking all day Monday by the look of it to get the number up a bit!

A new book from SitePoint: Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications. Matthew Eernisse has done a good job here, and I’m not just saying that because I was tech editor. The more good books we have from decent publishers like SitePoint and Friends of Ed and O’Reilly, the fewer people will hopefully buy “Learn To Write 1999-era IE-Specific Crappy JavaScript In Twelve Hours And Then Inflict It On The Rest Of Us” and then decide that DOM scripting is rubbish.

(23:36:30) mya_0601: Hello
(23:36:37) Stuart Langridge: hello?
(23:37:02) mya_0601: did you get my message
(23:37:17) Stuart Langridge: Not sure. What did it say?
(23:37:19) mya_0601: I wanted to become a singer
(23:37:27) Stuart Langridge: Ah. I can’t help you with that.
(23:37:37) mya_0601: okay well bye

Why can’t I search for something only in my feeds in Google Reader? Why? Why is this not possible? I never ever want to search the whole web from a feed reader. I want to search my feeds for something I read a while back all the time. Why can’t I do it? Aargh!

After much work and lots of emails, we now have the talks schedule for LugRadio Live 2006! Get over there and plan what you’re going to see while you’re at the greatest Linux and open source event in history!

Matt writes about Marketing Open Source, including some definitions of what marketing isn’t, and thoughts on what to do next to get the good word out.

Quick tip: you can do a Show Desktop from a script (from Python, in this case), with:

python -c "import gtk,wnck,gobject; s=wnck.screen_get_default(); s.toggle_showing_desktop(True); gobject.idle_add(gtk.main_quit); gtk.main()"

I’ve signed up to do a lightning talk at Guadec on Jackfield. That’s scaring me a bit, that.

We run Subversion for source control at work, with Apache2, and we use mod_auth_sspi to allow developers to authenticate to Subversion with their Windows username and password. However, we’ve got more than one domain at work, and so we need SSPI to allow you to authenticate with your Windows username and password whichever domain you’re in. The relevant stanza of httpd.conf, to authenticate against multiple NT/2003 domains, looks like this:

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath e:\svn
#
AuthName "Subversion repositories"
<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
Require valid-user
</LimitExcept>
AuthAuthoritative Off # multiple authorities
#
AuthType SSPI
SSPIAuth On
SSPIAuthoritative On
SSPIDomain domain_controller_for_first_domain
SSPIOfferBasic On
#
AuthType SSPI
SSPIAuth On
SSPIAuthoritative On
SSPIDomain domain_controller_for_second_domain
SSPIOfferBasic On
#
AuthType SSPI
SSPIAuth On
SSPIAuthoritative On
SSPIDomain domain_controller_for_third_domain
SSPIOfferBasic On
</Location>

In the sweepstake at work, we all drew a group for the World Cup. If anyone in your group wins, you win.

I got group H. Spain, the Ukraine, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia.

Without wishing to cause offence to any readers I have for those countries: my life sucks. That’s ten quid I’ll never see again. Dammit.

Mark Pilgrim switches to Linux, and fills in a bit more about his decision. I’ve got a lot of respect for Mark. He wrote the RSS and Atom feed validator (along with Sam Ruby, another Ubuntu user) and Universal Feed Parser, as well as Dive Into Greasemonkey and Dive Into Python, two freely-available online books, and I wrote four years ago about him being a clever chap, but the most relevant thing he’s written to this decision is Freedom 0. That essay was about his move from Movable Type to WordPress, which came about because MT isn’t free and WP is. Those of us who use Free Software (and Mark’s always been one, even given his previous choice of the proprietary Mac OS X) have said, rather a lot, that proprietary lock-in creates problems and stops you doing what you want with your data; Mark’s now said that he’s experienced exactly that problem with OS X, just as he did with Movable Type, and it’s prompted a move to Ubuntu.
Mark’s a high-profile weblogger in certain sections of the community, and hopefully this will cause a few other people to question their choices.
Interestingly, one of the things that makes me cringe about the free software community is the fanboy tendency; when someone in some way questions the appropriateness of Linux for a task, fanboys pile on with flame upon flame, and I hate that. It makes us all look bad, and it actively discourages people who are on the fence from coming over to our side. Well, it looks like the Mac community has similar fanboys for OS X, looking at the comments on Mark’s posts. I suspect that the Mac users I know would cringe just as much, but it’s nice to know (in a Schadenfreude sort of way) that the epithet “zealot” can’t only be levelled at the free software people.

Update: interesting response from John Gruber and followup from Mark. John’s points are mostly well taken: in particular,

Stories like that [ed: Tom Yager getting a kicking from Apple for writing that Apple have closed the x86 Darwin kernel, because Apple say that no-one cares about that] give rise to the sinking feeling that Apple’s executives aren’t merely indifferent to openness, but rather that their stance on openness is in fact highly calculated, and that the calculation is that Apple should be open only so far as necessary to be perceived as being open. I.e. that openness only pertains to marketing, and not to engineering. There’s no question that Apple is chock-a-block with engineers and engineering managers who care about openness, but that does little good without a mandate from the executive level.

That’s an argument we’ve made on LugRadio before now; it’s interesting that Gruber also thinks that it has some truth in it.

A friend of mine relates this story that recently happened. Names have been changed to protect the incompetent and the guilty :-)

Friend: Please can I have 1 $ITEM.
Equipment supplier website: No problem; it’ll be in the post.

(time passes)
(parcel arrives)

Friend: good lord, I ordered 1 $ITEM and they’ve sent me a lot more than that of them. How lucky for me!

(time passes)

Equipment supplier: We sent you too many $ITEMS. Give them back!
Friend (with glint in eye): How many too many did you send me?
Equipment supplier: <tumbleweed>
Friend: How many too many?
Equipment supplier: <tumbleweed>
Friend (slightly testily): How many too many?
Equipment supplier: We sent you one too many; you ordered 1 $ITEM and we sent you two.
Friend: Oops! What a silly mistake to make. Here, have the extra one back. Ahaha.

I’m never that lucky!

Deskbar already has an excellent example plugin to search the PyGtk documentation. Since I’ve been working on Jokosher, which is a PyGtk app, I use it all the time. It’d be useful if it also searched the GStreamer Python bindings documentation as well, and now my version does. Go and grab pygtk_api and drop it into your .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers folder (and restart Deskbar by removing it from the panel and readding it, or logging out and back in) to have it work. Just type the name of a Gst object and you’ll be able to link directly to the page describing it. (Note that some of the pages may not yet exist, but that’s because Gian Mario Tagliaretti is still working hard on the docs for the Python GStreamer bindings.)