The WordPress blogs were recently alive with discussion about whether or not having pay-for themes, plugins, etc., was a good (or even legal) thing. Jeff Chandler recently pointed to a post entitled What’s the point of community? which I think goes back to the discussion I had with Tarus Balog of OpenNMS fame a while ago, about social norms and market norms. Basically, one of the points from Dan Ariely’s excellent book “Predictably Irrational” is that when you mix, or confuse, one set of norms with another you inevitably end up with problems.
So, Christmas is now over for another year pretty much – and it has been good fun, albeit interspersed with slight bouts of snottiness.
Amongst some of the very lovely gifts I was given, I have a really nice selection of books that I need to make time for:
- The Art Of The Start, by Guy Kawasaki – very little to say about this one since it is so well-known, but I’ve been meaning to read the full thing since I was given a precis of the first chapter by a friend.
- Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes, by Daniel Everett – this is a story of language and life experienced by a missionary living with a tribe fo Amazonians. I haven’t read any of this yet, but was captivated by an abridged version read on the radio.
- Making History, by Stephen Fry – this Fry’s only work of fiction I believe, and I have very high hopes for it. Reviews have been invariably flattering, but then Fry’s name alone commands a good amount of benefit of doubt.
- The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – an explanation, of sorts, of randomness and how it affects our lives. I’m not totally sure what to expect of this yet.
- Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini – again, a relatively well-known book which doesn’t need an awful lot of discussion here.
I’m looking forward to reading all of these, and will post small reviews as I get there. Slightly interestingly, to me at least, the last book on the list – Influence – was actually recommended to me by the same friend who passed on the TAotS precis, but too late for Christmas. Somewhat bizarrely, I had already put it on a list of books I was interested in sometime in November, and the list was very short and little thought was put into it – indeed, I re-did my list in early December from scratch, “Influence” didn’t make it back in and I didn’t think about it again until I received it on Boxing Day.
Mark Shuttleworth recently posted about the work Canonical are doing on application notifications, and a couple of things struck me.
The first thing that struck me is that even though what they’re doing is quite pretty, it’s intensely pointless. Designing a notification system that will spew out messages that the person using the computer doesn’t need to see is making the computer less useful: it’s another piece of UI vying for my attention, and every time something interrupts what I’m going I’m losing concentration. It’s not helpful for productivity at all, in fact, it’s helping destroy it.
This is based on Miguel’s desire for an IMAP interface to his Evolution mail, but isn’t really focussed on that particularly problem: rather, the more general problem of where “collaboration brains” belongs. One of the things which I think seems to be a bit worrying about free software mail clients is that there is this continuing move to smarter and smarter MUAs.
Miguel is actually asking for something which is much closer to what KDE are doing: the Akonadi project, as I understand it, is basically almost a full-blown local groupware/collaboration server. It uses a private MySQL instance, and has everything “built in” to this middleware which can sit on top of existing mail / contacts / etc. stores.
Unlike Jono, whose experiences with Tbird 3 are worth a read, I’ve been a loyal Thunderbird user for a few years now – in fact, we’ve had it deployed at work relatively happily for a while now (I say relatively – the mail client is fine; lack of calendaring is a bit of an issue…). I also tried the Tbird 3 beta recently too, although I think I met with even less success.
You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on my blog over the past couple of months. This has been for a couple of reasons: primarily, I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been sort-of locked out of it while my laptop was out of commission. I was a Blosxom user, which is a lovely piece of software and very simple, and I chose it because it’s very easy to integrate into another site – however, that has now bitten the dust.
So, somewhat little advertised and somewhat exclusive, Linux Live Expo 2008 in London has been taking place. Friday was day two of three; for the first time it’s on a Saturday as well – and we’ll see how that goes tomorrow, I guess. But the first few days have been interesting.
Thursday started relatively slowly, although Bongo was sited next to the awesome OpenNMS guys – who travelled a lot further than I did to get there, and are exceedingly friendly. They have some interesting ideas about coloured shirts for contributors and stuff like that which I’m very keen on shamelessly ripping off, and Tarus is an incredible ambassador for their project (and the other guys are ok too ;).
Today wasn’t a great day for software patents in the UK: the judgement in the appeal of the Symbian patent application GB 0325145.1 has been put up on Bailii, and the news is that the appeal was rejected. That means that Symbian’s patent will now be valid in the UK.
For those unaware of the patent, it’s effectively a patent on dynamic library loaders. It allows people to patch the binary interfaces (ABIs) of libraries in a manner which still allows you to load them quickly.
We’re probably going to see 0.3 this week. I’m planning on releasing 0.2.94 today, at which point we’ll be back on SVN trunk, and then 0.3 sometime by the weekend. There are going to be a few known bugs not fixed, but it won’t be in terrible state by any means.
Want to see Bongo?
I’ve just realised that there’s going to be a lot of Bongo in the community over the next few months. We don’t have an events page on the wiki – someone needs to fix that! – but just to run-down through them:
It’s not often that I’m reading through some article online and come across someone using my own words in print (as it were), but that happened this morning!
It is a very strange feeling. I was reading Free, Open and Eating its Young – the premise of the article is that many free software communities have significant proportions of essentially anti-social contributors. Both Pat and I have blogged about this before – something that is important to me is that the climate of the Bongo community be extremely welcoming.
