Posted
about 1 year
ago
So this is the proverbial it. FOSS.IN/2008 starts today. We took some hard decisions to come upon the current format. We have an amazing lineup of stuff that’s happening through every day (don’t believe me? See the schedule). All systems
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are, in fact, go (I feel more redundant with every passing year). I think this poster sums it up the best (shoutout to Hari for the awesome artwork!):
In the unlikely event that you’re still wondering what FOSS.IN is all about, and whether you should come, just head on over and check out the little video we’ve made. It should answer any questions that you have about what the 2008 edition of FOSS.IN is all about.
Time to head to the venue now, see you there!
p.s.: I like this one too :-) … [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
Today, the VTU (the university that granted me my bachelor’s degree) did something incredibly smart. In one fell swoop, they have achieved what Kerala and Andhra Pradesh have been trying to do for years, in vain.
That’s right
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— the VTU has done the one thing that will ensure that no student of theirs will ever learn a Microsoft-related technology — a ton of Microsoft software is now part of the official curriculum.
Thank you, VTU!
Aside …
Reminds me of the “Basic Computer Skills” Lab in 3rd semester, where we had to create a document in Word and a presentation in PowerPoint. The external examiner expected you to remember exactly under which menu each random feature lay. It took her about 10 minutes to figure out that I was searching through the menus blindly after every question. :)
Not to mention 5th semester, where our DBMS lecturer tried to strong-arm me into learning Visual Basic for a project on databases. This one I managed to hold out on, and did my work in PHP MySQL. [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
I know that my blog has been pretty quite the past few months (I’ve been super-busy!) but kubasik.net was never really meant to host the traffic this blog was generating, so to make things easier on all 6 of you who read it, I have moved the
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blog to WordPress.com. There are still redirects at Kubasik.net/blog as best as it can, but let me know if you are finding dead links!
[Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
Thursday night at dinner, one of Stephanie's colleagues gave me a puzzle to play with.
The idea is to twist and turn the little blocks until they form a 3×3x3 cube. This morning, after messing with it for a few minutes, I decided I
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didn't want to brute-force it manually. So I wrote a little script.
And that, my friends, is just about a perfect Saturday morning.
(The script is here.) [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Robert Love)
I will be live-twittering tonight's election results.
Boston, mid autumn
As I wrote four years ago: If you are informed and have an opinion, please vote. Laziness is not an excuse. Although voting for Ralph Nader is.
Posted
about 1 year
ago
I predict the rays-phillies world series to be the least watched since the invention of television.
– Me, on October 20.
It was the least-viewed Series by a significant amount.
– NY Times, on October
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30.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they should not play summer or fall baseball in Florida. [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Robert Love)
The Economist endorses Senator Obama for President.
The why is summed up in part by the endorsement—"if only the real John McCain had been running"—and in part by last week's Conservatives for Obama, so-called
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Obamacon:
The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended "war on terror," and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights.
Of course, the endorsement should be no surprise. The Economist has a history of endorsing the other party: Governor Reagan in 1980, Governor Clinton in 1992, Senator Dole in 1996, Governor Bush in 2000, and Senator Kerry in 2004.
With this heady endorsement, the Illinois senator might just win. [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
FOSS.IN/2008 delegate registration is now open — what are you waiting for!
Posted
about 1 year
ago
Karl,
There is no code for the Association Browser, unless that’s changed in the year since I’ve been gone. I remember the idea was first devised during a series of brainstorming meetings among the desktop hackers, probably in
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2004, and Jimmac (I think? Maybe Garrett) created this first-pass mockup one day:
There may have been an internal wiki page about it, but certainly no code.
The idea with the association browser was that you’d have a “focal object” (in this case, “Brand Grub”) and you’d see items directly related to that object in a way that was appropriate for that data. This was somewhat similar to how Dashboard worked — each piece of data looked different and specific to its type: emails looked different than documents and addressbook contacts, for example. But unlike Dashboard, this would be a fully-fledged application you could use to navigate your data. If you wanted to shift your focal object, say from “Brand Grub” to “Bilbo Baggins”, you could do that easily… I think we called that “rotating”.
The purpose of showing this in my old GUADEC talk was to illustrate the kinds of interesting applications people could build on top of Beagle beyond the obvious and boring all-encompassing search tools. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s happened. From my perspective, both Beagle and Tracker ended up focusing way too much on the backend (storage and retrieval of metadata just aren’t that interesting to most people) and not enough on making users’ lives easier.
So there you have it. The “code” for the association browser. Next time, feel free to email me about it first. [Less]
Posted
about 1 year
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Robert Love)
Via my coworkers at the Android Developers Blog: Android is now open source.
Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile
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applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.
Across my career, I am most proud of Android—as a platform, as a family of phones, and as a catalyst for change in an otherwise closed industry. But the most exciting part is what's next. Download the SDK and start hacking. [Less]
