As a reminder, the GNOME and KDE Interns Showcase at the Desktop Summit is on tomorrow at 17:15, which is in 24 hours from now (at the time of publishing). It’ll take place in the Audimax room.
The main goal of this session is to give our Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women students a forum to show what they’ve been working on in the past few months. Your feedback and support will be very much appreciated by them.
Be there or miss out on the future!
The news that as of 2012, BBC would be cutting back it’s Formula One coverage did not make my day. If you’re based in the UK, this may be quite an inconvenience and a costly one if you need to get a subscription to Sky. If you’re in a country without decent F1 coverage, this is a nightmare. My mother can provide better commentary than Belgium’s VT4 reporters.
So what are we to do? It got me thinking: why is this still bound to borders? Why is there no company that provides Netflix-style streaming access to sports like Formula One? Surely there must be a market for it?
So what is the budget needed to provide the world class coverage of the BBC? And what is holding anyone back from starting such a streaming company? Is there anyone that knows people who know people in the TV industry capable of enlightening us?
Given the global viewership of F1 (over half a billion), it shouldn’t be too hard to make a profit out of this. I’ll gladly be the first to sign up (or even help out)!
The 2011 Desktop Summit in Berlin will be starting in a week from now. I’ll be there as part of the GNOME GSoC administration team. As part of that, we’re organizing a showcase session for all GNOME and KDE students. The format will be a lightning talk session.
If you would like to know what our future rockstars are doing, this is where you should be heading! The session takes place on the first day, Saturday August 6, between 5:15PM and 6:00PM in the Audimax room.
I’ve just spent 11 days in the beautiful south of Portugal, the Algarve. In the city of Tavira, we encountered this nugget of fail:
Parking tickets on thermal paper
Parking tickets made of thermal paper, in a country where temperatures frequently go over 30° C (86° F). This means that after two or three hours in the sun, it’s impossible to read them. I’d love to meet the genius who considered this to be a good idea.
Plenty has been written about Google+ lately and one of the most common remarks seems to be “it is just like Facebook”. And I can’t blame anyone for saying that, in some regards it’s uncanny. But there’s a very important difference, which may have a crucial impact. Circles are not friendships.
When you friend somebody on Facebook, friendships are symmetrical relationships: you get to see what they share and vice-versa. The circles model of Google+ is more like Twitter: you can follow someone (and share content to them), but there’s no obligation for them to follow your activity. Not interested? Don’t listen! Like Twitter, Google+ has an asymmetrical relationship model.
This could be a good thing or unmanageably complex. I for one have always preferred the way Twitter organizes things. In that regard I can only welcome Google+: let’s get some healthy competition going!
Part of Telenet‘s digital TV offering is Yelo, an online service where you can schedule recordings. It even works on your phone and on the iPad, which means you never miss your favorite programs. Not home when it starts? Log in online, quickly schedule a recording and continue to enjoy life. Beautiful feature!
Except it doesn’t work…
Communication error! Try again later!
More often than not, you get a nice error dialog informing you that there was a communication error.
After much cursing today, I discovered that it turns out there’s nothing wrong with the communication. Whoever built this things was simply too lazy to add decent error warnings [1]. In my case the recording couldn’t be scheduled because there were too much overlapping recordings.
Building decent error reporting isn’t fun, but it is crucial to make a usable product. Whenever you’re writing software, ask yourself the following question: “Am I helping the user to solve the problem when things go wrong?”. Just don’t be a lazy bum and blame it on the communication.
[1] Or more plausible: Had to skip it because his superiors wanted to ship the thing before it was ready.
When it comes to data, I’m a pack rat. I’m one of those people who has an archive of all mails since pretty much the first day I had an e-mail address. Now that we’re putting more and more stuff into the cloud, it’s getting increasingly hard to keep this up.
I’ve been looking for a way to collect and archive my data from social networks, online services (such as Flickr) but also things like e-mail, Google Docs and regular files.
Backupify comes close, but when we’re combining this much data, I’d love to have a bit of privacy. The idea of turning over all my private data to yet another service [1] doesn’t appeal to me all that much.
Spideroak nails the privacy aspect but only seems to be doing files. In their model, it is completely impossible for them to read your data, as you are the only person holding the key (unlike Dropbox).
Anyone has some suggestions of a digital archive that is capable of combining files/folders and online services? On-site or off-site doesn’t matter, as long as it gets the privacy right. Bonus points if it has full-text indexing and search.
Update [Jun 5, 2011]: Interesting, yet very young and unstable candidate: The Locker Project
[1] Considering how even a giant like Sony screwed this up, I do not consider privacy a nice-to-have luxury anymore.
Like this one, yet digital.
About half a year ago I decided to leave my research position at the university and look for new adventures: life is too short to do things which you don’t enjoy.
In the past few months I’ve spent time traveling, read a pile of books and started swimming again. Work-wise, I’ve been talking to a couple of very nice companies, but unfortunately most of them proved to be impossible due to my inability to relocate (at least for now).
In the end, I ended up with not just one, but two new adventures:
Life is definitely different now compared to back when I was working on a PhD. I’m definitely doing a lot more hands-on work, which can be hectic, bus is delightfully fast-pace. I’m also doing loads of design work which is a nice balancer for the analytical work that’s software development. And I’m learning a ton about running and developing a business. Considering all this, I’m happy to say that the decision I made six months ago was a good one.
Do what you love doing in life. It’s a crazy ride, so remember to have fun along the way!
TagLib# 2.0.4.0 has just been released. This is the first release that includes the full photo support that we’ve built last year.
This means that TagLib# (used by Banshee, F-Spot and others) can now serve as your one-stop .NET library for handling audio, video and image metadata. And did I mention that it’s deliciously open-source, making it usable in any project you’d like?
Like Vincent, I occasionally care too much about some things. Because of that, I volunteered for the second year in a row to help out as an admin for the GNOME Google Summer of Code. My role will mainly be making sure every student keeps on track, organize a session at the Desktop Summit and try to get our students integrated into the community over the summer / during the summit.
To students that are still in doubt: Having done two Summer of Codes as a student myself, I can only conclude that this is probably the nicest way to earn some bucks as a student. Fun and interesting. The deadline for idea submission is approaching fast, but there’s still plenty of time to write-up a proposal. Talk to a maintainer and please work on top of an existing project rather than building something new.
I myself won’t be able to take up the mentoring of a student as I’m too busy founding a company (but that’s the subject of a future post). Now go submit your ideas and prepare for an awesome summer!
Co-Founder at Flow Pilots, Computer Scientist (Software Engineering), Hacker, Photographer, Earthling