Stories from the land of Rob

For those that haven’t heard yet, Lisa accepted my proposal of marriage this Christmas Eve on a cold night in Stockholm. I’m very happy!

Merry Christmas / Winter/ Summer solstice celebration to all and happy new year where applicable

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Result “From P^S we can determine P uniquely; in fact, we can obtain the original tableau P from P^S, by applying exactly the same algorithm - but reversing the order and the roles of italic and regular type, since P^S is a dual tableau.”

I didn’t cheat, this really was the closest book to me. Extra marks if you can guess what it was…

I just stumbled upon Chronical Recorder.

I’ve been waiting for something like this a long while. How did I miss it getting released?! Thanks Novell!

I’m at the Boston GNOME summit right now. Yesterday a lot of work got done on gobject-introspection and AT-SPI D-Bus, which is completely awesome. I had a great discussion with Dan Williams about where we should go with gnome-phone-manager, NM’s new ModemManager and OpenMoko’s gpsd. My interest here is having a consistent place for getting GSM/CDMA cell location information.

A lot of very interesting ideas have been flying around about new user experience ideas. It seems a lot of people have been thinking similar things but didn’t really know that others were also working/thinking on the same ideas. We’ve just started the future user experience hackfest, I hope out of this we can forge some common future direction and common projects. I’ll report more after the hackfest!

So it seems ars technica picked up on Codethink’s little pet project! Obviously the little amount of info on the wiki isn’t enough for everyone who’s interested and enough has changed since the GUADEC talk that I should write a bit here to clarify what’s going on and where we’re going.

First off, we’re currently not using GVFS or FUSE - the core Wizbit component is simply a versioning, distributed object store. The current plan is to later hook up with a metadata service, maybe tracker, and use this to export a FUSE filesystem using the metadata.

This core Wizbit service is just a library with its own api, maybe hooking up to gio streams for ease of use from GLib based applications.

The current focus of our work is solidifying this store and the synchronization between multiple machines. We’re prototyping its use in Tomboy. Karl is also working on making some of these pretty widgets for navigating history work.

We’re not actually using Git underneath, but using our own implementation of concepts from both Git and Bzr. This is for a number of reasons, partially that making a library from git’s code proved more trouble than just reimplementing the concepts (as things like JGit found). Also the nature of the problem is sufficiently different that things like the packed format don’t behave in a suitable way for general file system usage. The work on packing is yet to be started but we’ll probably use Robert Collin’s groupcompress idea from bzr.

I promise we’ll make the wiki a bit better when the code’s stabilised a bit!

Would you like to hack on open source for a living? Interested in cutting edge desktop/mobile technologies? We’re hiring!

If you’d like to just chat about this or anything else relating to Codethink, I’m reachable on IRC (GIMPnet and Freenode with nick robtaylor) and on XMPP and plain old email at rob.taylor@codethink.co.uk.

Well, my microblogging of GUADEC failed miserably, mainly because I didn’t seem to be able to get a DHCP lease

I hope identi.ca gets SMS support by next time. Either that or maybe just one conference where the network doesn’t keel over and die at the sight of a few hundred developers.

I was kinda surprised to find quite a few people who didn’t know about stow. If you ever need to make install something, use this.

The sides from my talk are now up on wizbit.org. The wiki’s pretty empty at the moment, but we’re slowly filling it up…

Frederico’s talk had some bits that reminded me of a “Topaz” desktop design that came up on desktop-devel-list back in ‘06. It wasn’t given much time of day back then though. Check it out.

The concept of the computer as Personal Assistant appeared in a few forms this year. Concepts like it helping you organize your information and time and managing your attention. Its obvious there’s been a few threads of thought on this bubbling away for a while now and this year you could see ideas starting to crystallize. Very cool!

Its obvious we’re going to need some good query capabilities over large RDF trees. To my simple mind this seems to basically involv unification over tuples, so prolog keeps popping into my head. Has anyone checked out SeRQL?

For my own benefit (I have a terrible memory) I’ve decided to microblog GUADEC this year - assuming that there’s some working network (Yeah, its a big assumption..). So I’ve got myself an account on identi.ca. Enjoy!