The Life of RubenV (Ruben Vermeersch)

Mono @ FOSDEM 2012: Slides

Ruben — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:50:12 +0000

Slightly overdue, but here they are, the slides from the 2012 Mono Developer Room @ FOSDEM:

Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields) [ODP]
Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza) [PDF]
Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio) [ZIP]
Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Olivier Dufour) [PDF]
IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara) [PDF]
MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy) [PDF] [Video 1] [Video 2]
XWT (Lluis Sanchez) [PDF]
MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza) [PDF]

Thanks for attending everyone, we had a great day!

Awesome details

Ruben — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:14:23 +0000

I like small details in software. Here’s a nice one I spotted the other day:

The Amazon Kindle app for iPad changes its background depending on the hour of the day. It even has some very nice effects, for instance, when switching to the night view, a falling star flies by.

Small details and nice polish shows your users that you care. Don’t be happy when it works, go the extra mile.

Mono at FOSDEM 2012: Schedule announced!

Ruben — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:00:19 +0000

The schedule for the Mono devroom at FOSDEM 2012 has been finalized:

(11:00 – 11:45) Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields)
(12:00 – 13:00) Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza)
(13:00 – 14:00) *** Lunch break ***
(14:00 – 14:30) Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio)
(14:40 – 15:25) Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Bertrand Lorentz & Olivier Dufour)
(15:40 – 16:25) IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara)
(16:40 – 17:30) MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy)
(17:45 – 18:15) XWT (Lluis Sanchez)
(18:30 – 19:00) MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza)

Full details (with talk abstracts) should be available on the FOSDEM website. As always, if you want to see a talk, show up early, once the room is full, you’re out of luck!

Date to put in your agenda: Feb 4, 2012.

Mono @ FOSDEM 2012: we still need talks!

Ruben — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:40:26 +0000

Mono hackers of the world, if you are planning on attending FOSDEM 2012, be aware that there is still a call for presentations up for the Mono Devroom. Go submit your talks now, you have until the end of the year to do so.

On F-Spot maintainership

Ruben — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:00:41 +0000

From the category of news I’ve been planning to send out for months, yet never got round to doing:

With ~~life~~ work getting in the way, it’s been impossible for me to further maintain F-Spot. Fortunately, Stephen Shaw has offered to pick up the task. Expect new stuff soon.

Alternatively, check out Shotwell, which has been making excellent progress lately.

As seen in an Amsterdam bar

Ruben — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:30:54 +0000

Linux-powered cigarette machine. Looks like they nailed it in terms of user experience.

Also on Twitter

As seen in a Berlin hotel

Ruben — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:13:11 +0000

As seen in a Berlin hotel:

Arrow towards door: fails, arrow pointing away from door: door opens (click for full size)

Whoever made these things needs to re-read his usability 101 book.

Mono Developer Room at FOSDEM 2012: CFP

Ruben — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:38:54 +0000

Great news! There will be a third edition of the Mono devroom @ FOSDEM. The event will take place on Feb 4 and Feb 5. We have the devroom the entire afternoon, for 6 hours (from 13:00 till 19:00). As I am not planning to fill up all that stage time on my own, we need your talks and presentations to make this day extra interesting.

Talks on any topic are fine, as long as it’s related to Mono and open-source. These do not need to be life-changing project announcements either: deeply technical things or pet projects that will make us all giggle with hacker joy are just as desired.

Please send your talk proposals using this form: http://bit.ly/vK2WC6

You have until Dec 31 to send in talks. A final schedule will be made available on Jan 10.

Not that we get more talks than we can schedule each year, so we’ll unfortunately have to make a selection.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me.

Quarter of a century

Ruben — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:33:37 +0000

As of today I’ve passed the mark of 25 years of existence. And what a ride it has been:

Started out as one cell, then gained about 1m78 in height.
Went from illiterate and unknowing to a university degree and a slightly better insight in the way of the world.
Started a PhD, abandoned it and started a company (going strong! [1]).
Saw parts of the earth and while doing so found out that I have much more to explore.
Found a bunch of friends and the most wonderful girl on earth.
Met a huge amount of interesting and inspiring people along the way.

I cannot wait to see what the next quarter of a century will bring!
To anyone I’ve encountered: thanks, it’s been a pleasure.

[1] And growing, more on that soon!

Surviving on OS X when you’re used to the terminal

Ruben — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:51:17 +0000

If you’ve spent some portion of your life with Linux on your computer, you’ve undoubtably discovered the usefulness of the Linux command line. Sometimes it’s just quicker to get something done by pulling up a terminal and entering a one-liner.

The GNOME file manager makes it trivial to open a terminal at your current location, if you have the nautilus-open-terminal package installed:

Going the other way around, from terminal to GUI is also easy:

Open current folder in file manager: nautilus .
Open any file with default application: gnome-open myfile.xyz

If you’ve grown into this habit, you’ll feel lost whenever you need to use a Mac. No such option in the file manager and no gnome-open command (obviously).

Don’t worry though, it’s all possible. Here’s how.

Opening a terminal at the current folder
Opening a terminal at the current folder requires you to make a small change to the preferences. Open the keyboard preferences, go to services (on the keyboard preferences page) and enable the two services shown below:

Once you’ve done that, you can simply right-click any folder and find the option under the services menu:

Opening any file from the file manager
Need to open an image from the command-line? Or a PDF? Or any other document. Simply use open: open myfile.xyz

To open a finder window and show the file in the file manager, use the -R (reveal) flag: open -R .

At least now you can switch back and forth between command-line and GUI quickly. Try Homebrew if you need to install your favorite missing tools.