Silicon Island

RE: Finite resources, infinite growth

Philip proposes that we should modify the entire human race for them to have fewer possibilities to reproduce as a measure of birth control. As a prerequisite you will need to modify every single newborn, if we had the resources to influence how every single new person is born, we would actually be at the point where we could stop thos non desired borns in a much simpler way...

Anyway, there's an easier way that actually has many other upsides. Philip, let's solve poverty instead of proposing sci-fi :-)

Shame on us all!

Check out this 1991's video, starting minute 23. We are in 2009 now. After you've watched it, repeat with me:

To everyone building open source desktop development tools:
SHAME ON US ALL!

Evince outreach the Windows platform

In february, I made a post about how nice a proper Windows port of evince could be. Well, seems like some lads have been actually working on it in the meantime and finally all the patches to make it work are in place. Special mentions goes to Alan Horkan for starting the ball rolling, Hib Ebris for doing all the work and Carlos Garcia Campos for reviewing and committing all the patches.

The only reamaining task is to create an easy to use installer and make it part of the standar release process, Hib and Jody Goldberg are already working on it. Once that's done we'll be ready to add Evince to the FSF PDF readers page.

First day at Codethink!

Last week I left Dublin and moved to Manchester and last Monday I found a flat already! However, the paperwork involved is still keeping me to move in. In the meantime I'm staying at Rob's place, who's kindly hosting me. I still have to get a National Insurance number and a bank account, then gas, electricity, broadband... the boring side of moving abroad.

Manchester City

Anyway, I'm already getting up to speed on Codethink stuff, the work environment looks great and the workmates are awesome! Cannot talk much about the project I'm going to be working on, you know, SecretStuff(TM), but it's gonna be really cool! Stay tuned :-)

On competition (Was RE: Back Home)

Just come across on this post from Rodrigo Moya, beloved GNOME hacker and friend. He is sort of upset by the amount of duplicated work and he is sort of sad about the feeling of competition between free software projects and the duplicity of work that it implies.

Somwhat Rodrigo thinks that we would be better off if we worked together instead of competing among each other. Up to some extend I agree that a level too high of fragmentation is not any good as long as you pursue the success of the freedesktop.

However, I do think that competition is essential, and instead of discouraging it, we should try to understand why peolpe have to start so many different projects to get something right. I would like to share some thoughts about this:

• Building a team of developers is hard, for a team to work well there should be some sort of complicity, vision and easy going atmosphere in a community. And that means that the group of people creating a project have to share the bulk of a common vision. This involves having good leaders, good software architects and perform a good promotion of the project among the open source community.
• Competition and fragmentation are two different things. Ideally competitors have to follow a certain set of common rules, and more importantly, they should participate in the process to set the rules (standards), this is, if competitors pursue the best for their users. Fragmentation only spreads confusion ammong users and makes downstream projects' life harder (there is where the duplicity of work comes from).
  
• Competition is our key differentiator against the closed source model. Is the one thing that makes us appealing. Of course it has its downsides, but our efforts shouldn't go towards constraining that competition, instead, enforcing a set of rules that we all agree about, and commit ourselves to those rules.

I think that companies like Canonical, RedHat or Novell have a lot to say about this, if we have 16 different libraries for a single purpose, don't you think developers would stop using most of them if these 3 key players decided not to distribute them anymore at some point? As long as these libraries get distributed, developers won't make the effort needed to keep a sane dependency tree, and if they don't even then, we are better off without software that is poorly maintained.

Farewell Sun

It's been two years since I moved to Dublin to work as an intern in the desktop virtualization group, and they have been by far the most exciting years of my life. Lots of stuff have happened since then, I've got promoted to full time engineer, my team has grown to more than double since I got in and we've been building an incredible product right from scratch that is actually quite successful, Jan Schmidt moved to Dublin to work in my team, Carlos, Luis and Adrian all of them college mates, best friends of mine and three brilliant engineers, came to work at Sun as interns last year and we moved together, I've lost 26 kilos... I cannot think of a better way to start my professional and personal life after college.

When I look back, I can only see positive things about the decision to leave my home land and work in such a great company, among such a talented group of people and with two great managers Dirk and Geoff that have always trusted me and from whom I've learned a lot. Actually it's been feeling too good for a while, I would like to try risky things before I get too old to be able to do them and also there's a whole skill set of mine that I can't apply to my current day job and that's sort of frustrating. And therefore after loads of thoughts I have made the move:

In three weeks I will be moving to Manchester, UK, to work with Rob Taylor and the rest of the codethink team! How cool is that? Exciting times ahead!

Tip when booking your flights to the Desktop Summit

If you can't find the Gran Canaria airport in the autocompletion field for your tour operator, airline or flight search site of choice, try with Las Palmas or LPA.

On a side note that I don't know whether if helps or makes things even more confusing:

• Gran Canaria: name of the island
  
• Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: name of the city
• Las Palmas: name of the province, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are the islands that belongs to tha province.

To make it a little more confusing, people usually refer to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, as just "Las Palmas" which has ended up to be the most common way to refer to the city as most times people don't talk about the province.

Yes, we like to mess things up with names, that's what you get when you are a fragmented piece of land :-)

New York's Museum of Natural History

That's a quite recent version of Gtk+ for a natural history museum :-)

Always look at the bright side of life!

As most of the people that know me, I was against of the choice of git as the DVCS for GNOME. I still find kind of unfortunate that we went for that choice for reasons that I have already stated on this blog.

However, I must say that the activity around the migration, and the prospects of lots of branches with really cool stuff already getting their way into the main repositories is actually really cool. Also, the quality of the documentation that is getting on live.gnome.org/Git is actually really good for the most important usecases and the sysadmin team is doing a great job (with the subsequent improvement of the overall sysadmin situation).

So it's turning out that what looked to me to be not the best decision, has a lot positive side effects. Don't overlook the benefits of community excitement for the sake of other abstract criteria. Kudos to everyone involved in the migration.

Deep and Comprehensive Review of Gran Torino.

I loved it! Go and watch it.