Category: bongo (Page 1 of 9)

Speculation on Google’s “Dart”

Just yesterday people jumped on the biographies and abstract for a talk at goto: the Keynote is Google’s first public information on Dart, a “structured programming language for the world-wide web”. Beyond knowing a couple of the engineers involved – which allows a certain amount of inference to take place – there’s also some speculation that Dart is what this “Future of Javascript” email referred to as “Dash” (this seems entirely possible: a dash language already exists; Google already used ‘Dart’ for an advertising product but have since stopped using that name, potentially to make way for the language).

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Who can program?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the above question for a number of different reasons. For people who really study programming, like I attempt to, there are a number of claims/myths/legends/tales that are commonly held about people who cut code for a living, such as: some programmers, the “alphas”, are as much as ten times more efficient than the common programmer; there are people who “get” computers, and those who don’t.

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Short thoughts on the riots.

Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se, but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north.

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Drag Me to Shell, p2.

(this is part 2; you may want to read part 1 before reading this) I said last time I would go into the file maangement side of GNOME 3 a bit more, and I think I would be right in saying that there are a number of people who think this is probably one of the weakest aspects of the release. The first thing to say is, I vaguely surprised myself by the lack of problem in this area.

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Drag Me to Shell, p1.

This is part one of what will be a multipart blog series: how tremendously exciting, eh?! In all seriousness, with GNOME 3 imminent, I thought rather than do a review of the desktop it would be much more interesting to talk about it from the perspective of a relatively hardened Linux enthusiast actually using it within a business environment. First up, disclosures: I’m an extremely happy GNOME 2 user. I have a copy of Fedora 12 on my Eeepc 901 netbook, with what is now a relatively ancient version of gnome-shell on it, but to be honest the shell is little more than an interface for launching Firefox on that machine.

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Fedora 15 & Gnome leadership

It has been an incredibly interesting week in free desktop-land, in that kind of “interesting like a soap opera” kind of way. I guess it’s not news that different participants have different recollections of the same series of events, but it is a bit sad to see it writ so large on a public stage. Timing-wise, it’s quite co-incidental, but it’s enlightening (I think) to read Mark Shuttleworth’s latest “Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership” alongside Mark Wilcox’s “What happened to Nokia?

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Thoughts on Nokia & MS

As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia are tying a knot of sorts, and all sorts of people are extremely disappointed by this news. I’m an Android user right now, but I’m particularly disappointed because Android just isn’t the free platform it claims to be. A lot of people are blaming Microsoft and dreaming up “entryism” conspiracy theories. These people are entirely wrong; the decision to go MS was signalled a long while ago by Nokia’s board.

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Open Source Expo 2011

Today was Open Source Expo day. While I had been asked by one of the organisers whether or not I could propose a .Org to exhibit there, I decided against it for a couple of reasons: mainly, because I hadn’t heard very much about the exhibition, was a bit worried about the timing, and questioned whether or not it would be a good use of time for me or anyone else involved in an open source project to attend.

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Updates to bongo’s storetool

One thing that has always bothered me is that there has always been little way of getting data in and out of Bongo stores easily. Well, no longer (sort of): I’ve upgraded the storetool a bit to make this easier. Some examples are better than words: It’s not totally complete yet: we need some commands to remove, move documents, fiddle with types, flags and properties too – but it’s a start!

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Potential Gna! issues

It looks like someone has been attacking Savane-derived hosting platforms. Recently Savannah has been down, and the page that has now gone up confirms that they had a security breach. Unfortunately, Gna! has a similar code-base, and their site now confirms that they are investigating an issue too. This has a knock-on issue for Bongo, since we use Gna! hosting. Our download area appears to still be alive, and thankfully we have always signed the releases.

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