I pay my telephone bill to British Telecom by Direct Debit — it's taken from my bank account directly, under their control (albeit with fairly decent safeguards).

Strange, therefore, that I got a call yesterday from their missing payments department chasing up my last bill, which they hadn't bothered to take for some reason. They left a message with a number to call them back on, and a reference number. Yet when I called, the person there seemed unable to do anything useful like checking why they hadn't bothered to take the payment. She just said she'd have to get someone more clueful to call me. I wonder why I wasn't asked to call that person in the first place?

Immediately after the call I checked my bank statement, and it seems that the Direct Debit was actually taken — yesterday. So I helpfull called back and told them that, since they didn't seem clueful enough to work out for themselves what they were doing.

Today I got another phone call, and another British Telecom representative lied to me by telling me that the bill was still unpaid.

Fucking Useless Telco.

• For this year’s GSOC, I will be mentoring Julen Ruiz Aizpuru, who will be working on Effective user experience for Pootle.
• I badly needed a break this week, and so three of us from college went for a trip to Mandarmani, a sea side resort around 200 km from Kolkata. It is still somewhat isolated compared to the other sea side resorts nearby, and the last 7 km of our trip consisted of driving over the beach, and getting stuck in the sand, which was fun. However, due to Mandarmani’s isolation, and since we went there in the middle of the week (no weekend tourists), we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for the next two days, and it was an awesome experience. Some pictures
  
  
  
  Driving on the beach

Desolate beach, dotted with red crabs

The beach

Sunset

Amaya, developed by W3C, is a web editor/browser that creates and updates documents directly on your website. W3C (WWW Consortium) needed a framework that could include as many of their technologies as possible and Amaya was developed for that purpose. What started as an HTML editor now supports XML, XHTML, MathML and SVG, allowing those to be edited in compound documents simultaneously. Amaya is open source and users are encouraged to contribute ideas and fixes.

Amaya is unique in several ways, one of which is the ability to edit multiple documents simultaneously on the web. This is a great feature for webmasters; Amaya allows the user to browse and make web pages from scratch or copy and paste content from existing sources. Editing and browsing are combined in a single tool. It has a collaborative annotation application that lets you add comments or remarks to any web document or add them to a part of the document that you select.

It also contains a contextual menu and the user interface can be customized by accessing Preferences. It has Amaya themes, a style panel for documents and template support. The editor isn't limited to HTML anchors; XLINK allows any MathML and SVG element to be links as well. It includes TrueType fonts, but there are others that you can add. Amaya comes in seven other languages besides English and uses HTTP PUT to support remote publishing. Support for WebDAV is limited.

Summer of code 2008

I’m going to mentor three Summer of Code applications.

• E-mail activity for OLPC by Shikhar Bhushan
• Seahorse integration in Evolution by Zhang Shunchang
• SuperRandom, a predictive listening plugin for Rhythmbox by Charlotte Curtis

One of the Igalians who developed Modest and among many of his Tinymail contributions implemented the libcst implementation for handling certificates in Tinymail, José Dapena Paz, is going to mentor Zhang Shunchang’s application together with me.

Picking up what I left in 2005

I also just picked up AsyncWorker. I made it a little page and with the help of Tinne I improved its API documentation. Perhaps I will do a release someday (I never did, actually). Thing is that I hate the work involved with releasing. Especially since most of our development tools stink.

Note that my super fantastic lovely girlfriend, Tinne, has her own blog now. It contains a bunch of photos of our stay in Durham UK. In a few minutes, she just told me, she will put online a funny photo of me holding a fish bowl filled with cocktail.

While I was gathering some info about a DBus related task that I’m doing at this moment, I wrote down whatever I found about DBus’s glib bindings in tutorial format.

A few other people have done similar things in their blogs. This one explains how to use org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async a little bit too.

If you find any mistakes in the document, it’s a wiki page so please just correct them.

It’s easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom over OLPC’s future. But keep things in perspective: they aren’t as bad as they seem.

To the developers at OLPC, and the tireless volunteer community contributors unsettled by Nicholas’ plans — remember that no matter what happens, your work has not been for naught. Far from it. You brought the smiles to children’s faces in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, Uruguay. Your work astounded me with the results, after little more than half a year, in the mountains of Arahuay, Peru. Bryan Berry’s team is kicking ass on establishing a pilot in Nepal because of your work. And if you haven’t read the linked articles yet, now’s the time. Nothing can take away the real, palpable impact you’ve already had on children’s lives.

To those on the outside and looking in: remember that, though he takes the liberty of speaking in its name, Nicholas is not OLPC. OLPC is Walter Bender, Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Mark Foster, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Mary Lou Jepsen, Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Michael Stone, Tomeu Vizoso, John Watlington, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, and the community, and the rest of the people who worked days, nights, and weekends without end, fighting like warrior poets to make this project work. Nicholas wasn’t the one who built the hardware, or wrote the software, or deployed the machines. Nicholas talks, but these people’s work walks.

Remember that even when Nicholas talks, it is all to be taken with a fistful of salt. The SD card slot didn’t get added to the XO for Microsoft, as he is fond of saying, but because we were getting terrible read/write performance with our solid-state storage. Hardware architect Mark Foster designed a dedicated chip to speed things up; that chip, as an unanticipated bonus, made it easy to attach a camera and an SD slot. Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way” is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone. So yes, there was no architect, but that’s because Nicholas didn’t want one. If he believes that’s the cause of Sugar’s problems, he has no one but himself to blame.

Perhaps most of all, remember that OLPC is not just a company, but also an eponymous movement. We owe Nicholas a collective debt of gratitude for starting it, but good movements are far larger than their leaders. Richard Stallman started the free software movement and helped it get on its feet, but the movement now has a life of its own — one most assuredly not beholden to Stallman’s opinions and proclamations. The One Laptop per Child movement is no different. Nicholas and Walter made people care about using technology to help education in the developing world on a global scale, and forced the industry’s hand on catering to that market despite the razor-thin margins it promises. That was noble and revolutionary of them, but the genie is now out of the bottle and taking on a life of its own.

I spent my time with people on the ground. I was the person OLPC sent to make both deployments work. Let me tell you — the people in the countries get it. They get that buying laptops is the trivial problem, and that deploying them and using them to create compelling and sustainable learning and teaching experiences are the really hard problems. That Nicholas no longer wants to tackle the hard problems because they’re hard makes not one bit of difference: they’ll get tackled without him.

Things could be better. The company could be sticking to its principles and doing what’s right. Sad as it is that this isn’t happening, it’s also ultimately immaterial. The company doesn’t matter, because the movement marches on. And learning will win. Freedom will win. Children will win. Walter is making sure of it, and I will do everything in my power to help him.

You can’t stop the signal.

This needs a label

The person that comes up with the best label for this picture of Greg will get themselves a shiny Fedora T-Shirt.

Nicholas, with all due respect, I think you're pretty seriously mischaracterizing the nature of OLPC's problems. Laying the blame for OLPC's shortcomings at the feet of "open source fundamentalists" is misinformed at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst.

Now, to be clear: when you say that "Sugar needs to run on many platforms," I completely agree with you. I couldn't possibly agree more. But moving from that point, which is clearly correct, to an ad hominem attack on the open source community as a whole, is a frustrating and dangerous non-sequitor, and a slap in the face to the people who have been your most strident supporters for many years now.

When a man like Walter Bender walks away from your shared dream because he feels like you are choosing the wrong path, then maybe you should consider being a bit more introspective, instead of lashing out at the big bad free software fundies. Did Walter, your friend for 30 years, the guy with whom you built the MIT Media Lab, turn into a fundamentalist whack job over night? Really?

OLPC's goals have been extremely ambitious from the very beginning. The possibility of failure has always been very real, even had you made all of the right moves from day one. Most of the issues you face are the issues that are inherent to solving really hard problems. Fundamentally changing the computing metaphor from the noun-based "file" metaphor to the verb-based "activity" metaphor is a really hard problem. Building the *only* major networking stack using the 802.11s standard for grid networking is a really hard problem. And your reliance upon open source has, to date, been one of your most effective levers in solving those problems.

From my perspective, your biggest problem has been that you have not relied *enough* on open source principles to build Sugar.

First of all, your organization has been notoriously opaque. I'm absolutely certain that this hasn't been deliberate, but when you're running a community project, your first job -- and your second job, and your third, and your fourth -- is to make damned sure that when volunteers show up, you have something useful for them to do. Volunteers, in the open source world, are gold. For most of the history of the project, you haven't treated them that way -- not out of malice, but out of neglect. There were always "more important" things to do than to help a newbie contribute.

Second of all, until very recently, Sugar only ran reliably on the XO itself. From *day one*, it should have been a priority to have stable, checkpointed releases of Sugar running on Fedora *and* Debian *and* Ubuntu *and* every other distro, all installable with a simple yum or apt command. "Release early, release often" -- have you heard that before? Instead, if someone wanted to run Sugar on their own system, it involved running jhbuild, which involved installing a half-dozen different SCM clients and almost continually rebuilding from broken source repositories. Which made it devilishly difficult to write robust activities for Sugar. All understandable mistakes, to be sure. Mistakes common to young open source projects. Mistakes that are now being fixed.

The irony of your rant is that porting Sugar to many platforms, thereby increasing the number of potential users, thereby increasing the number of potential contributors, is an obviously correct move that will help you leverage open source more effectively. To conflate that correct message with an attack on "open source fundamentalists" is misguided, and diminishes your ability to recruit community talent at the very time when your project most desperately needs it.

So cut it out already. The folks at 1CC have enough problems to solve. They are really good, good quality people, and they're certainly not "fundamentalists", whatever that means. They've worked like dogs for you. They've sacrificed their personal lives to help make your noble vision a reality. Maybe you should think a little harder next time before you, Great Leader, slap them in the face in such a public and mean-spirited way, because *you* can't figure out how to close deals. It's a shitty thing to do to people, and you ought to be better than that.

My friend Katherine, commenting on the above unposed photo which was randomly snapped in the studio at Carnegie Mellon University while I was helping out with a shoot:

I like the “brooding in the shadows” photo. You’re saying “Look at me! See how thoughtful I am? I am thinking in shadows. You, you don’t even think. Imbecile.”

The best part about having friends is that they know you so well.

Hydra IRC, an open source chat client, is quickly gaining a stellar reputation. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) used to be only for the computer literate but Hydra makes it easy for anyone to enjoy it.

Hydra has a remarkably long list of features including DCC support, file transfers, dockable floating and autohide windows and an event viewer. Audible notifications can be set to the user's individual needs. Hydra can connect to as many servers on as many different networks as you wish and is able to maintain multiple user identities. Users can also bookmark channels, change color schemes and create their own themes.

If you like the appearance of Windows, you'll love Hydra IRC. The interface is very easy to use; it was originally developed to address the shortcomings of other IRCs whose bugs and difficult navigation can be frustrating.

Although Hydra is an ongoing project, it certainly doesn't appear to be or run like one. This lightweight application installs smoothly and the friendly, clean interface promotes quick learning. There are pre-loaded IRC networks if you don't wish to add your own. The Hydra website has online support in a forum, but you are more likely to get support through thier IRC channel. On the rare occasion there's not a human there when you need them, a bot named Spocky will do its best to answer your questions!