Skip to content

Blog

It’s Gameday!

As a huge (American) football fan, it amuses me to no end how my children get into the excitement of game day. They know how much I love my football teams and want to know who the Packers (or Badgers) are playing each week, which other teams I want to win in the other games, and share my enthusiasm for the game. Jack’s knowledge of the players and the opposing teams is almost scary considering he is only 4 years old.

As a Wisconsin native living in Minnesota, they really get excited when the Green Bay Packers take on the Minnesota Vikings. (Though all real Packer fans know the real rivalry is with the Bears – a fact that Minnesotans just don’t understand. The Packer / Viking rivalry is nothing compared to that one – ask me about the time I went to a Packer / Bears game at Lambeau sometime).

So I was happy to see, that without any prompting from me, my two youngest pick out their own clothes this morning:

img_6351.jpg

Now that brings a smile to my face. We’re just minutes from game time – go Pack go!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

GNOME Boston Summit 2010 kicks off

The GNOME Boston Summit 2010 kicked off a couple hours ago. Dozens of GNOME hackers are at the Tang Center at MIT.

John (J5) Palmieri and Jon McCann helped kick off the Summit.

J5 gave an overview of what the Boston Summit is. It’s different from GUADEC which is many presentations and more formal talks. The Boston Summit is much more informal and run Barcamp style. It gives hackers a chance to hack together and get stuff done. Face to face time is very important and the Boston Summit helps facilitate that.

Jon McCann continued the kickoff and thanked Stormy for her time at the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director to a rousing round of applause.

sdc10517.jpg

He then gave an update on things he’s been working on. The Control Center is actively being developed in GNOME git, new themes for GNOME Shell are coming online, and GNOME 3.0 will feature a new font! The new font is designed by David Crossland (spelling?) who is a big believer in open design and is also hosted on GNOME’s git servers.

Jon talked about Shell briefly (and Owen will talk about it more later today). New guidelines are being written for GNOME 3 applications and wiki pages discussing that as well as compatibility and messaging are in progress. He asked the crowd how many people were running GNOME Shell now and about 25% of the hands in the room went up.

Work on the new modulesets for GNOME is in progress and there is a renewed focus on GNOME’s core and a focus on what the desktop is. One conversation that he looked forward to having this weekend is what is the Core OS versus the applications that layer on top of it. A goal is to make it easier to build the core desktop. One example of this is jhbuild – jhbuild has seen its core modules reduced from 255 to 92 modules! Jon is hoping the group will continue to brainstorm on how to make that even easier.

There are 3-5 months left for development (depending on how you look at freezes) and now is a great time for the community to come together. GNOME 3.0 is a very important release for GNOME and it will take all of us.

Lastly, Jon encouraged the community to watch the video of the talk that Michael Meeks gave at Linux Plumbers this week. The talk was about how GNOME is doing open source right. GNOME has a strong message to share and other projects look to us for things such as doing design in the open, community engagement and more.

From there, people proposed talks and sessions to give Barcamp style and we voted to help prioritize the sessions and J5 started assigning rooms and times for the talks.

  • in GNOME
  • 3 min read

Thank you Stormy

sdc10350.jpg

Most people by now have heard that news that Stormy is leaving as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation to take a position at Mozilla.

I’ve had a few people reach out to me to follow up on her announcement to make sure it has nothing to do with the drama going on in the community (it doesn’t) or concerned about the timing with GNOME 3.0 coming (GNOME 3.0 is still coming!)

Now, no one on the Board asked me to do this and I’m speaking for myself, but I believe we’ll be ok. We have a great release coming in April and the Release Team is doing a great job of overseeing that. GNOME Developers are porting apps fast and furious to GTK3, GNOME Shell is coming along nicely, release parties are being planned, docs are being written and I could keep going on. None of these activities are going to stop because we don’t have an ED.

Most of us have left a job at some point – it’s not personal. And Stormy gets to work on something she’s passionate about. I saw this first hand this past April at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit where she organized a track to talk about how the desktop should interact with web services. Cornelius from KDE spoke, I spoke, Rejon from identi.ca and more. She also received some great press from a talk she gave this past August about software freedom on the web. And now she has a chance to work to further that cause – which is a worthy one. While I’m sad to see her go, I’m happy to know she continues to work on software freedom and something she is just as passionate about, if not more so.

Stormy has always been visible to the GNOME community and transparent about the work she does with her regular updates of what she’s working on via her blog and emails to the Foundation list. But one of the most important things she did within the community was never in those recaps – and that’s the encouragement she provided to everyone who pinged her. As the face of the Foundation, volunteers would ping her to get her opinion on a new idea or a new feature. They valued her opinion, but more importantly, they wanted affirmation they were doing something right.

Stormy did that for me – in my last job I would commute to Boulder, Colorado about once a quarter, which isn’t too far from where Stormy lived. I was active in the community, but with Stormy’s gentle nudges, I was inspired to take that to the next level. Stormy made time for me and we would meet for coffee or lunch every couple of months and brainstorm and get stuff done. Stormy encouraged me to come to GUADEC in 2009 and was always there to listen to a new idea or answer a question.

I am grateful we had someone as qualified as Stormy to work for the Foundation the last 2+ years. Sure, I’m sad to see her go – not that she’s going far – but more importantly, I’m thankful for everything she has done for everyone in the GNOME community. Thanks again Stormy!

I have seen the future of TV

…and it is the ESPN app on the new Xbox 360 update that was released today.

I’ve been in the beta for the new Xbox 360 dashboard for the last month or so, and with its release today, the embargo on blogging about it has been lifted.

Since I cut the cord and got rid of cable TV last February, the one thing that has been missing is sports. I’ve been tied to whatever the four major networks want to shovel at me. And I’m a sports junkie. I’m a huge (American) football fan, cheering for both the University of Wisconsin Badgers and Green Bay packers, and as soon as football season ends I dive right into college basketball. Having been a DirecTV customer for ten years I would pay hundreds of dollars for the NFL Sunday ticket and the March Madness packages. I’ve also started getting back into MLB the last few years cheering for the Minnesota Twins. And this summer I could only watch them on Sunday afternoons – the only time they were available over the air.

The ESPN app on the Xbox 360 changes all of that. It’s amazing – especially for college football. Branding the app as “ESPN3”, it’s a repackaged version of ESPN360 with more content available live and on demand. If you have ESPN as a cable subscriber, you’ll get to watch the game they pick for you at 11am (CST) on Saturday. With ESPN3 on the 360 you have access to every game ESPN has rights to – 4 or 5 games at 11, and about the same at 2:30. Using my IP, they did blackout the 2:30 p.m. game if it was on ABC but I still had access to all the other games. And the best part was, you could choose to watch it live or you could start at the beginning if you were tuning in late. On the 360, ESPN3 offers full DVR functionality – you could pause, rewind and fast forward. A number of games are also archived for a few days and you can watch them on demand after the game was over. It was fantastic watching the Badgers beat the Buckeyes a week ago on ESPN3 – without having to pay for cable TV.

Other content available includes NBA games, a number of second tier college sports, and selected ESPN content. There is no NFL content, including Monday Night Football games – not a huge surprise, considering the draconian rules the NFL has to protect their brand. The available ESPN original content is the only thing I’m disappointed with. You only get some highlights and clips from SportsCenter – I didn’t expect the whole show, but I did expect more. But where it really lets me down is ESPN shows like Rome is Burning, Around the Horn, E:60 and PTI (especially PTI!) aren’t available. They might have one or two clips from each, though with the official launch today I can’t find PTI at all. I don’t know if it’s a rights issue that they don’t show these original shows as they features clips and highlights from the sports broadcasts themselves or why they’re not available, but I had hoped for more original content. And the updates too those clips, at least during the beta, weren’t very timely.

The only catch with ESPN3 on Xbox360 is you have to have a broadband provider who has partnered with Microsoft. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing it has to be someone who offers TV service of some kind. My dashboard shows co-branding with Comcast as I have Comcast cable internet service.

As a college football fan, and general sports fan, this fixes the one major downside I had in cutting the cable. It’s an awesome experience. Live and on-demand content available at my fingertips. This is what the future will bring once the content providers figure out their new business models. If they do.

Oh, and the Netflix app in today’s update finally added the ability to search so you don’t have to use your PC to add titles to your Instant Queue. Finally!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

Taking Snowy for a Walk #4 – Meet the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

Photo: “Untitled” by Rach

We are just two weeks away from the Boston Summit which is also the site of the upcoming Snowy Hackfest. We’re cooking up all kinds of plans for the hackfest. Our goals include:

  • An HTML5 mobile client
  • Integrating note editing into Snowy so you can edit your notes in a web browser
  • Focus on the user interface

In other news, Snowy 0.5, “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel”, was released on Monday to coincide with the GNOME 2.91.1 release and Tomboy Online was updated to Snowy 0.5. There is a method to the madness in Sandy’s choice of release names – I have a GNOME sticker (or stickers) as a prize to the first person who can tell me. (Contest not open to Snowy developers. Must be a resident of Planet Earth. Other rules and restrictions may apply but probably not. I’ll pay postage.) Version 0.5 was a minor bugfix release – expect lots of big changes after the hackfest. (Note I just say after – can’t hold me to a date!)

We received some new UI mockups – check them out on the wiki! Here’s one:

Tomboy Online mockup

The second wave of alpha invites went out on Monday. If you’re on the list, you just got a bit closer to getting our invite! Thanks to our alpha testers, we’re getting some great feedback via email and Bugzilla. Keep it coming!

Lastly, I was added as an administrator to help with new account activation. Commence evil genius laugh.

About Snowy: _Snowy is a web-based viewer for your Tomboy notes. It’s written in Python using the Django web framework, and is licensed under the AGPL.

Tomboy Online is a deployment of the Snowy software on GNOME servers, intended to provide free note sync and online note access to all Tomboy users.

Please check out our website here: http://live.gnome.org/Snowy

  • in Digital
  • 1 min read

How much should an album cost?

Fast Company has coverage of The City music conference, where Rob Dickens, the former head of Warner Music in the UK argues that the success of the MP3 single necessitates radically slashing album prices.

Dickens’ theory is albums should cost about $1.50 to increase impulse purchases and combat piracy.  Interestingly, he predicts that major albums could go on to sell 200 million albums – or double what Michael Jackson’s Thriller sold.

Read the story and look at the graph between album sales and individual track sales.    You can pretty much see the rise of iTunes.

As someone who is an unabashed fan of albums, I love the idea.  I don’t buy music singles and I don’t even really make playlists – I buy and listen to an artist’s whole album at the time.  And I also agree with the price – the bulk of my impulse music purchases are Amazon deals – either daily deals for $3 – $4 or one of the hundred $5 albums they rotate monthly.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

Help Bryen out

I can’t think of many worse ways to start a week than to read Bryen’s blog post this morning about having his equipment stolen as he travels to the Accessibility conference and hackfest. I was impressed to see how many of my friends shared the post in Google Reader to pass the news on.

I pinged Stormy to see if there was something we can do and and she let me know my co-worker Stephen Shaw was already on it. Stephen has set up a Pledgie to collect donations to help Bryen out. I’m pretty excited as I went out to lunch and after coming back I see we’re already halfway past the goal!

I first met Bryen almost a year ago at the first GNOME Marketing Hackfest in Chicago. It was great meeting him in person and understanding how he used GNOME gave me a better understanding for how important GNOME’s support for accessibility is. Since then, I’ve worked and talked with Bryen about GNOME marketing and openSUSE marketing and have really enjoyed working with him.

If you have a few dollars you can spare, please think about donating. Thanks!

  • in General
  • 1 min read

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees Announced

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees have been announced for 2011.  While there are a few good nominees, including the Beastie Boys, Neil Diamond and Tom Waits, there are the not so good.  That list would include Bon Jovi, the J. Geils Band and Donna Summer.  While each of them have contributed to the history of rock & roll, let’s put them in perspective of some of the groups and artists snubbed by the Hall of Fame:

  • Peter Gabriel
  • Depeche Mode
  • Black Flag
  • The Replacements
  • Rush

When you consider that list, especially with Rush having been snubbed for over 10 years now, the Hall of Fame needs to re-visit their process.  It will be interesting to see who is actually inducted in a few weeks.