Visited Amsterdam

General

Last week I was on holiday in Amsterdam. I was so pleasantly surprised by the the place. It’s now on my exclusive list of places I would just like to visit every now and then and walk around aimlessly, along with Venice and Istanbul.

I had no idea that such a vast amount of the old city exists and in such a perfect state. There’s a functional found beauty to the rows of high narrow canal houses and repurposed warehouses. Their basic form is repeated in great numbers but each has a slight variation, and each seems to lean independently in its own direction. It’s 17th century accidental Frank Gehry in brick. And the freakish absence of curtains means that an evening at a corner cafe is full of human narrative like a gentler Rear Window. The streets are an obstacle to cars, to the benefit of pedestrians, bicycles, and general well-being.

IMG_2176  IMG_2177IMG_2183

We stayed at the north of the Jordaan area, in an attic apartment that was charming but unfortunately right next to the (surprisingly quiet) main railway line and a construction site that started pile-driving early in the morning. The Jordaan, and the area around the main canals, have lots of little clothes and furniture stores to break up the adventure. We treated ourselves to a Piet Hein Eek scrapwood stool, in the Frozen Fountain store. I really like his stuff, but it only seems to be available in the Netherlands. The Droog design store is fun too.

IMG_2227 IMGP0975We also spent a wonderful evening at the Club 11 cafe/bar with various people from GNOME Netherlands, such as Wouter Bolsterlee, Reinout van Schouwen, Kristian Rietveld, Tino Meinen (GNOME translator, Amsterdam policeman, hopefully will upload pictures) and others. Maybe Erik Snoeijs, though I’m not sure. If it was, I should have talked to him more. These are some really nice people just to hang out with.

Club 11 is hidden away on the top floor of an old abandoned office building, surrounded by a building site, accessible via a long tunnel-like corridor covered in graffiti art, and either a slow lift or an unlit staircase. So when you get to it, it’s amazing that it’s full. It’s very hip and offers stunning views over the water.

I really feel like I could live happily in Amsterdam for a year or so. I think I’d get the hang of the language after a few weeks – it’s so similar to German mixed with English if you can figure out the mapping and pronunciation.

GNOME Events Box: Mini-PC?

General,

The Events Box schedule shows that it will be used next for LinuxTag in Berlin at the end of May. We need to do some restocking before then. Our donation/sponsoring hopes for this have fallen through so we’ll probably need to buy. We’ve chosen May 1st as the final decision date.

The PC has taken quite a battering and the hard drive is now dead, so now would be a good time to replace it with something smaller. It was small, but not mac-mini-small. I chose it because we needed a 3MHzGHz PC for GUADEC streaming and 3GHz mini PCs were much more expensive. But now we have dedicated PCs for streaming, and it’s obvious that something lighter could save us on shipping costs.

So what are your suggestions for a good-enough mini PC? Note that I insist on x86 to have the most chance of everything working very easily. I also guess that Intel graphics would give the best chance of working 3D effects.

We need one new flat-panel screen too.

As ever, we are very open to the idea of donations and/or sponsorship from hardware vendors or resellers. This should be a fantastic opportunity to put your product next to GNOME heroes.

gtkmm approved for GNOME Desktop modules.

General

While I wasn’t paying attention, and without me asking, gtkmm was approved as a dependency for official GNOME applications, which is a nice surprise. Python was approved before, and Mono will be allowed on a case-by-case basis. I still think it’s unwise to have a desktop implemented in too many different programming languages, but I guess C++ is the closest thing to C, and C++ is already used partly by some official GNOME applications without gtkmm, and doesn’t present a big threat used wisely. I like C++.

Visiting Amsterdam

General

We will be visiting Amsterdam next week, from Monday April 9th to Friday 13th, for the first time. Email me if I know you and you’d like to meet.

I have spent more time recently reading the Baroque Cycle books than reading the tourist guide, so I might be misinformed.

Stock photo of Amsterdam

GNOME Summer Of Code 2007: ranking.

General

As the April 9th deadline approaches, I am becoming more brutal with my ranking of the summer of code applications. The Google web application is still not a big help with managing them, but Lucas Rocha and Vincent Untz are doing the hard work to keep us organized.

We have approximately the same number of applications as last year, but there are some signifcant differences:

  • Last year (and before) a very large number of applications were complete crap, either being copy-pastes of our own project proposals, or one-line applications. This year we seem to have very few of these.
  • We have more than zero female candidates, though still not an acceptable amount. But it’s hard to guess at the gender of some of the names.

I think these changes are down to our poster drive this year, and the summer of code process being more familiar to people now. It means that we have a lot more text to read, and many more difficult decisions to make.

Hopefully it will allow us to choose some more genuinely useful projects than we have sometimes in the past. I’d like our students to learn to consider user goals and usability, and I’d like them to become involved with the community by writing code that others actually care about.

GNOME visions: More needed

General

As a follow up to my people post:

I was pleased to be reminded how many people are already working in this direction, such as Gimmie’s People menu, gossip-telepathy, and Project Soylent. I’m not claiming to be original. I’m convinced that we can get this done technically, and that we can get it done faster by encouraging people to work towards a coherent vision.

But this people thing is just one vision. Where are the others?

And I wonder, once someone has written these up sanely, how should we go about giving a plan an air of respectability? Can we brand a plan as official? I doubt that, but I think that’s OK. I’m sure we don’t need unanimous consent, but it would be nice to have some consensus, and it’s important to try to avoid clashing with alternatives if there are any. At the moment, I guess it would be enough for someone to just say “Here’s an XYZ plan for GNOME. Who’s thinks that would be good?” but maybe I’m being overly optimistic.

As always, I’m not under the illusion that anyone can make something happen by just saying it should happen. But a shared vision can make things more likely to happen.

Munich’s New Jewish Museum: No stories

Uncategorized,

We visited Munich’s new Jewish Museum at the weekend, on St Jakobs Platz, near the Stadtmuseum. The new synagogue, which looks a bit like a British car park from the outside, and the new culture center are also on the square. I hadn’t know before that Munich’s main synagogue used to be on St Jakob’s Platz before it was destroyed in 1938.

The museum was a disappointment. They seem to have made an effort to focus less on the holocaust, which is fair enough I suppose but only if they had actually focused on Jewish life instead. Even any hint at the number of jews living in Munich before the Nazis was strangely omitted in their timeline. All that was left was a collection of religious objects, with only brief descriptions of their meaning and use, as if Jews were a forgotten civilization about which we knew little. Modern lighting and design don’t make up for the lack of content.

With this much history and movement, including the new immigration from the ex-Soviet-Union, there should be some fascinating human-interest stories to tell and lives to celebrate. The audio recordings at the entrance are a start, though they force you to stand in the way of other visitors to hear them, but narrative was otherwise ignored. There is, however, a good specialist library on the upper floor, with books that you won’t find easily elsewhere, covering some of this.

Jewish Museum at St Jakobs Platz in Munich. Picture by “Toco” on Flickr. CC licensed.
Picture by “Toco” from Flickr.

Munich’s New Synagogue. Picture by “NiceBastard” from Flickr. CC licensed.
Picture by “NiceBastard” from Flickr

Nautilus 2.18 bug whine: Name column still annoying

General,

The fix to the incredibly-small-name-column bug in nautilus has introduced a new bug. The name columns are often still too small, and they have to be resized even when reopening the same folder. At the moment it looks like this is going to be in Ubuntu Feisty to annoy me for the next six months.

I feel sure that the column sizes were remembered before. If not, I guess they just had better defaults before, and I guess that the name column resized with the window before so it was enough to just increase the window size, which was remembered.