My Growing Skillset

I can pick locks now.

Yeah.

Woah

Eric Pukinskis just gave a super-awesome presentation entitled "Web apps are killing free software! (and how to save it)". His surprising teaser answer: a web-based IDE.



I went in to heckle, I came out totally energized. In my opinion, the IDE is the least important part of the whole thing.

I'll post more later. Hopefully he'll set up a website or upload the code or something soon.

Quote of the Day: Paul Graham

We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don't beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.

-Paul Graham, The Future of Web Startups

BarCamp San Diego

I'll be attending BarCamp San Diego next weekend (November 10th-11th), which will be my first experience with anything like that. I'm extremely psyched...I hope the massive overtime I'll be putting in next week won't impair my ability to hack. A friend of mine (and rock climbing partner!) will be there, too...she has an awesome idea for a web app to hack on, which would be a pretty neat change of pace for me.

Will any other GNOMEers be there? They say if it's your first time at BarCamp you have to present (sounds familiar). I was thinking about talking about Mono or leading a discussion about how .NET should be approached by geeks, considering its source. People are writing a lot of free software using the .NET framework (I'm not even talking about Mono here), so it's an interesting topic to me.

If anyone's interested in hacking, doing some sort of GNOME-related presentation, or just meeting up, let me know.

Tomboy needs your help!

I just mailed tomboy-list to let everybody know that I won't be around to help much this release cycle (stupid real world!). The big bummer here is that I won't be able to work on automatic background synchronization, which Tomboy really needs to bring sync to the level of AWESOME.

So, as I said in my email, if you've been waiting for the perfect moment to dive in and be a free software hero, then now is your chance. Mess with the wiki page I linked above, send in patches, draw mockups...do whatever it is that you do so well! I'll help by reviewing patches and doing whatever polish/integration work I can do in January before the UI/string freezes.

Oh, and keep in mind that we're still looking for a hero to revamp our tagging UI, too.

With your help, Tomboy sync in 0.10.0 will be legen-

...wait for it...

-dary!

Planet Ben Collins-Sussman

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone link to these great recent blog posts by Ben Collins-Sussman of Subversion fame.

This discussion on why DVCS is currently too much to ask for 80% of programmers (not necessarily 80% of free software developers) was a great read, especially with the comments. I once moved a 30-person project from Visual SourceSafe to Subversion, and I had to face a political battle with process folks in addition to resistance from some 80%ers. Most 80%ers just didn't care, because all they ever needed/wanted to know was "svn up" and "svn commit" (in TortoiseSVN, of course).

And here's a really informative post on consuming meat responsibly, sustainably, and ethically. You don't have to read it if you're allergic to non-technical posts.

And just in case anybody hasn't seen it, here's a link to the fantastic "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)" talk he did with Brian Fitzpatrick. I refer to this whenever I'm in doubt about how a maintainer should behave (since it's kind of new for me).

Burned *again* by Google Reader

I really like Google Reader. But one "feature" keeps biting me in the ass:


When viewing 500+ unread items, I'd say the "Mark all as read" button (Destroyer of Worlds) is just a wee bit too close to the frequently poked "Refresh" button. The first time I got burned by this I wrote a nice email to the Google Reader team, but I guess they still think it's a good idea. I guess it's not a big deal that I have no way of finding out what those 500+ items were that I had yet to read/skim/star/share/skip. Yesterday I took matters into my own hands:


Thank you Greasemonkey. You can find my little script at userscripts.org. It is based on this other script by Scott Cowan. I never thought I'd use Greasemonkey, but Google Reader is just far too dangerous in its unaltered state!

I will say, though, that the addition of search in Google Reader helps to alleviate the loss of all those unread items. It was a long time coming, but it works great. :-)