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).
Category: Bongo (Page 1 of 9)
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. Cooper splits these into “humans” and “homo logicus”. Those who don’t grok computers are destined to never be able to program;
- there are people who are paid to cut code, and who simply can’t – they rely on auto-complete IDEs, cut’n’paste library code, etc.;
For the purposes of this post, I’ll separate between these different concepts: the “goats” (people who cannot code, at all), the “sheep” (people who code, perhaps professionally, but poorly) and the alphas. Sheep and alphas are collectively referred to as coders.
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. Sutton, the local town, had some windows broken by youths, but to be honest this isn’t exactly exceptional behaviour in Sutton.
(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. If you read various reviews, the changes in accessibility to file management and the lack of desktop icons are quite often brought up as serious issues, and as a relatively heavy user of the desktop file space I imagined that this would be the thing which would hurt the most.
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. Other than that, I’ve not really used GNOME 3 / gnome-shell in more than passing. I called this post “Drag me to shell” quite deliberately: honestly, I’m happy with GNOME 2. But, I’m somewhat forcibly trying to move myself to GNOME 3 full time. (Yes, I have seen these various KDEs and Unitys an other desktops. No, I’m not interested, and this isn’t meant to be taken as some kind of comparative to other systems. Also, I’m running this on what is to become Fedora 15, which has changed like wind blowing sand recently, so there’s stuff in here that may well change before the final GNOME 3).
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?” of a month ago. I’m quite clearly going to side with latter-Mark on this one: internal competition is generally not healthy; in fact, in my experience, it can be of the most damaging things you can do to a group of people. That’s not to say that it’s always a bad thing – to a large extent, it works for the Linux kernel (who I think are a special case in this regard) – but in a community telling someone their contribution isn’t wanted is a hurtful thing. You can see the hurt if you read what Mark S. is saying, it’s both implicit and explicit. Internal competition isn’t a solution to this, though, of course – it’s the equivalent of taking the disagreement outside and settling it mano-a-mano, swapping one hurt for another. It’s a red meat solution, a particularly macho form of solving problems.
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. Nokia are a $40B business: decision making doesn’t work like that. What is true, though, is that occasionally the free software community gets the benefit of large corporations putting resources into developing software, and occasionally those corporations change their mind later. We celebrate the former and mourn the latter, it’s only natural – I’m a big GNOME fan, but it seems that GNOME Mobile, MeeGo, and the various related stacks are basically dead in the water at this point.
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. To be clear, this event is held over two working days, and is in the middle of London: not the end of the world for me, I could take time off work, but others I know are consultants and would be literally losing money by going. I have to say, I’m glad I didn’t spend much longer there than my lunch break today allowed.
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!
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. You can check a release of Bongo quite simply:
