Category: Uncategorized

Please remove me from planet-gnome

Please remove me from planet-gnome: I’m nothing but trouble.

I want to create a new era for GNOME. The last few years at GNOME have created only desperation.

You guys invested heavily in Woman outreach programs and it didn’t create any meaningful innovation

You invested in …, oh right, you only invested in woman outreach programs.

I’m sorry, I wanted to make a list. But there is none. You could have invested in gnome-shell?

But also gnome-shell is by now being rightfully replaced by MATE. After several years, gnome-shell just doesn’t work.

I always understood that I’m the underdog of GNOME: the guy who the group wants to hate. That’s ok for me. Having worked on the core component of Tracker, tracker-store, you all rely on my code anyway. Please do me a great favor and rid yourself of my code: make the Tracker for gnome-shell: system() calling grep and find in a textbox which appears only if you figured out that you need to press a button with a gear icon. Perhaps always store all of the user’s documents in a public cloud storage and let google.com solve it half an hour later? Given the direction GNOME-desktop is taking; it isn’t an insane suggestion.

I need to speak up. Last time I tried using GEdit I had to fallback to using Pluma Text Editor to get any stuff done.

The so-called GNOME desktop is in an unusable state.

PADI Rescue diver

For this one I worked really hard. Buddy breading, relaxing people in panic at 20 meters deep, keeping yourself cool. And that in Belgian waters (no visibility and freezing cold). We simulated it all. It was harder than most other things I did in my life.

Mr. Dillon; smartphone innovation in Europe ought to be about people’s privacy

Dear Mark,

Your team and you yourself are working on the Jolla Phone. I’m sure that you guys are doing a great job and although I think you’ve been generating hype and vaporware until we can actually buy the damn thing, I entrust you with leading them.

As their leader you should, I would like to, allow them to provide us with all of the device’s source code and build environments of their projects so that we can have the exact same binaries. With exactly the same I mean that it should be possible to use MD5 checksums. I’m sure you know what that means and you and I know that your team knows how to provide geeks like me with this. I worked with some of them together during Nokia’s Harmattan and Fremantle and we both know that you can easily identify who can make this happen.

The reason why is simple: I want Europe to develop a secure phone similar to how, among other open source projects, the Linux kernel can be trusted. By peer review of the source code.

Kind regards,

A former Harmattan developer who worked on a component of the Nokia N9 that stores the vast majority of user’s privacy.

ps. I also think that you should reunite Europe’s finest software developers and secure the funds to make this workable. But that’s another discussion which I’m eager to help you with.

“You’re just making an excuse” is a relative phrase

I recently stumbled upon this marvelous piece. I title the quote “making an excuse“:

Saying that you’re forced to do something when you really aren’t is a failure to take responsibility for your actions. I generally don’t think users of proprietary software are primarily to blame for the challenges of software freedom — nearly all the blame lies with those who write, market, and distribute proprietary software. However, I think that software users should be clear about why they are using the software. It’s quite rare for someone to be compelled under threat of economic (or other) harm to use proprietary software. Therefore, only rarely is it justifiable to say you have to use proprietary software. In most cases, saying so is just making an excuse.

Bradley M. Kuhn – 2010, on his blog

I’ll translate this for you to Catholicism. You can definitely adapt this to most religions (for some, add death penalties like stoning here and there):

Saying that you’re forced by your nature to masturbate when you really aren’t is a failure to take responsibility for your actions. The church generally doesn’t think masturbaters are primarily to blame for the challenges of sexuality — nearly all the blame lies with pornography. However, I think that people who masturbate should be clear about why they have sex with themselves: It’s quite rare for someone to be compelled under the desire of sexual pleasure. Therefore, only rarely is it justifiable to say you have to masturbate. In most cases, saying so is just making an excuse.

The translation

There you go.

RDF propaganda, time for change

I’m not supposed to but I’m proud. It’s not only me who’s doing it.

Adrien is one of the new guys on the block. He’s working on integration with Tracker’s RDF service and various web services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, picasaweb and RSS. This is the kind of guy several companies should be afraid of. His work is competing with what they are trying to do do: integrating the social web with mobile.

Oh come on Steve, stop pretending that you aren’t. And you better come up with something good, because we are.

Not only that, Adrien is implementing so-called writeback. It means that when you change a local resource’s properties, that this integration will update Flickr, Facebook, picasaweb and Twitter.

You change a piece of info about a photo on your phone, and it’ll be replicated to Flickr. It’ll also be synchronized onto your phone as soon as somebody else made a change.

This is the future of computing and information technology. Integration with social networking and the phone is what people want. Dear Mark, it’s unstoppable. You better keep your eyes open, because we are going fast. Faster than your business.

I’m not somebody trying to guess how technology will look in a few years. I try to be in the middle of the technical challenge of actually doing it. Talking about it is telling history before your lip’s muscles moved.

At the Tracker project we are building a SPARQL endpoint that uses D-Bus as IPC. This is ideal on Nokia’s Meego. It’ll be a centerpiece for information gathering. On Meego you wont ask the filesystem, instead you’ll ask Tracker using SPARQL and RDF.

To be challenged is likely the most beautiful state of mind.

I invite everybody to watch this demo by Adrien. It’s just the beginning. It’s going to get better.

Tracker writeback & web service integration demo / MeegoTouch UI from Adrien Bustany on Vimeo.

I tagged this as ‘extremely controversial’. That’s fine, Adrien told me that “people are used to me anyway”.