Planet Open Clip Art Library
July 02, 2009
[ End of the day photo by Shasha Liu ]
I wrote a quick summary of yesterday’s party and chronicled many press hits the event got on the Internet. I’m still not finding many photos which I know were being taken. If you took photos or wrote about yesterday, please do comment on this post or email me.
I also wrote about the Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 July 1st Green Day IDEA2009 on my wiki previously if you’d like to chip in some links or comments. I really want to use the speakers, granted they aren’t the big Laoban 2.0 stack, for more events in Beijing! Also, I really must learn more about this brilliant Ableton live software. I’ve avoided it because its not free software, but now I think I’ve got it running in Wine. And, regardless, I must learn about this software if myself or anyone else wants to make something similar for live audio/video performances in the same caliber, but as Free Software (and better!).
If you want a great analysis and take on the Chinese Green Dam Saga, please read Andrew Lih’s post and the other great ones by Rebecca MacKinnon.
July 02, 2009 07:37 AM
Chris Cheney posed an interesting problem - how to get a listing of currently opened Firefox windows.
You can get this info from sessionstore.js in your firefox profile, but it's a jumble of javascript. I wrote a script ff-pages to display them in a more useful way.
Example usage:
$ ff-pages .mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js
Window 0:
http://shoutcast.net/directory/index.phtml
http://www.radioparadise.com
http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Plots/
file:///var/www/X/Graphs
Window 1:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/379797
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21315
Window 2:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/360319
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/376092
Window 3:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21756
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16702
...
July 02, 2009 02:22 AM
July 01, 2009
Yesterday I wrote about me-too storms, including how they develop and some of the problems they can cause (most notably - delaying the bug's solution).
Since this is a bad problem there's been quite a few ideas proposed.
FIXING the bugs faster would be the best thing of course. That's a whole other topic... but does deserves first mention.
Launchpad already has a solution in the form of the "This bug doesn't affect me (change)" text and link on every bug.
Presumably this is serving as a lightning rod saving us from heaps of me-too comments. And presumably the data is being stored somewhere to help developers identify highly popular bugs, but I don't know how to access that info. I would imagine if developers could filter/sort/view this data it'd give added incentive for people to use that and it would be a more effective tool.
Another issue is that the link just isn't that noticeable. I'll leave it to usability experts to work out how best to improve it, but it definitely needs a re-think so it's a bit more obvious, especially for casual launchpad visitors.
Educating bug reporters is another oft-suggested solution. I think there's some truism about documentation being the worst way to explain how software works, because no one will read it. Actually there's been reams and reams of discussion and documentation about how to write and behave on bug reports, and indeed I think this is really helpful as it can turn bad bug reporters into really good bug reporters. That said, many people are just too busy, or too lazy, or don't even know they don't know how to report bugs.
Hiding comments or otherwise emphasizing/de-emphasizing comments by various criteria has been suggested and I believe is being considered by the launchpad crew. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't end up actually consuming more time to manage than it saves. I think a lot of useful experimentation could be done on this idea using greasemonkey, as Brian Murray has done.
Splitting bug reports would be pretty cool feature, at least in theory. If we realize that John and Bob have different issues, it'd be slick to be able to push a button and have all of Bob's comments moved to its own bug report. But in practice I suspect this could result in creating more confusion by losing context. In any case, I don't think it'd help with me-too storms since most of the low value comments really aren't worth setting up a separate bug for; better to just have the people file new bugs from scratch.
Locking bug reports, is sometimes suggested by those familiar with similar functionality provided by forums software.
Minimum karma requirements to post onto other people's bugs is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've noticed (thanks to Kees Cook's lp_karma_suffix greasemonkey script) a very strong correlation that the worst me-too'ers also tend to have the lowest karma. People with the most helpful comments usually have higher karma.
So why not make use of that by requiring posters to have a certain karma level before being able to comment on someone else's bug report? From what I can tell, it needn't be high; 50 points would be enough to weed out the vast majority of the noise, but still be low enough that anyone with a legitimate interest in helping on bug reports could earn with a fairly minimal amount of work, such as helping on answers.ubuntu.com or going through the full bug process following up on their own bug reports.
Perhaps it could be set up to kick in only after there are already a few commenters, so we don't get in the way of random helpers on bugs that would otherwise be neglected. In a way, this would be akin to the "locking" idea above, but a bit more targeted.
Other thoughts?
July 01, 2009 06:39 PM
So the BBC is making a new drama series about the battle between the ZX spectrum and the BBC Micro. Currently codenamed ‘Syntax Era’. As it turns out Clive Sinclair, the creator of the ZX Spectrum, had his offices very close to the current Collabora office here in Cambridge. And due to our own Edward Hervey knowing some of the people involved, the production team behind this new series came by our offices to do some location scouting some weeks ago. It is a little bit up in the air if they are going to use our offices or not in the end, but there is a chance they will, and if that happens there is also chance you might catch some familiar faces as extras in this new series 
July 01, 2009 03:54 PM
It possible to attend two FUDCons at once? It seems I managed to do this in an indirect way and without even knowing: while I was in Berlin for the European FUDCon, the guys at LATAM FUDCon were near a place called "Nicu's Bar & Restaurante".
photo stolen from tatica's photostream
July 01, 2009 12:14 PM
There is a rule for photographers: take a lot of photos but then make a strict selection and show the world only a very few, the best from a photo session, those that are truly great. This way people will think you are a great photographer, they won't ever know you had "poor" or "mediocre" photos. Hell, they should not know even about your "good" ones, only about the "great".
I often break this and post a bit too much of my photos, but today I'll mark the triumph of the quantity over quality, posting a gallery with all the photos I made in Berlin at FUDCon (over 1300), I had people asking for them so I provide. Even if this cost me a bit of reputation as a photographer :D
July 01, 2009 10:52 AM
Just in time, Matt got some pretty new aluminum fronts cut in time for the big event today.
Now that the Green Dam Youth Escort has been delayed, we have a full on celebraton on our hands in CaoChangDi from now until midnight, on Wed, July 1, 2009.
July 01, 2009 01:01 AM
June 30, 2009
Spread the word! The Party Day is on tomorrow like no other in CaoChangDi! Get your boycott on.
[Link to the SVG file]
We will bring our Laoban 1.0 Soundsystem with its new shiny grillz tomorrow. To all DJs and musicians out there (especially good ones!), this is an open call to come on out and plug-in to the speakers. We need you to come out and make some sound, art, and have a big ole green day brainstorm. The whole day is free and open! The entire day is to boycott the Chinese Internet.
To all our Internets Massive! To all Twitteronians, Identicators, Free and Open Source, Creative Commons’d out people in Beijing, or those who just want to have fun, please come out tomorrow for the full day or even just part of it. Matt Hope, Jon Phillips (rejon), Robin, Phil Dunn and so many more will most definitely be on hand to mix, make some projects in realtime and collectively boycott the Internet.
Party Day — See You in Caochangdi
WEDNESDAY 2009 1 July 9:00 AM to 11:30 PM, all day beer and chatting.
Blog friends, food friends, all are welcome. There will be gifts.
Phone: 010-8456-4194
Email: xuesheng512@gmail.com
Address: Beijing, Chaoyang District, Airport Service Road, Caochangdi No. 258 FAKE Studios
Breakfast menu: soy milk, gruel, youtiao, dumplings, four types of pickled vegetables, fried eggs, ham, tea eggs, fruit platter
Lunch menu: cinnamon lotus root, village style fungus mushrooms, seafood hot and sour soup, marinated duck, oyster sauce beef, fried fresh vegetables, Yangzhou fried rice, fried noodles, seasonal fruit
Dinner menu: cucumber, fish and egg soup, barbecue chicken, fish steaks, gulao pork, hot and spicy tofu, black peppercorn beefsteak, fried dishes, assorted mushrooms, udon, lotus fried rice, seasonal fruit
Midnight snack menu: cabbage hearts, spicy dried tofu, peanuts, fried broad noodles, gruel, fried bread with dipping sauce, garlicky vegetables, season fruit, four types of pickled vegetables
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack. Coke, Sprite, Fanta, orange juice, plum juice, lemon tea, Tsingtao, all kinds of beverages.
Guests can hang out in the lobby our outside eating and doing whatever they feel like.
Thanks to our great friend Robin Peckham for the realtime translation of the original post by the Wizzler.
UPDATE: Chinese government has delayed the Green Dam! The party goes on though in more of a celebration-mode!
June 30, 2009 10:41 AM
Much to my amusement, for the return from FUDCon I got the plane seat numbered 13:
And somewhat I can say I was unlucky about that,
Ionuț got the window seat, so I couldn't stare at the cloud formations all the way. But this was not that bad, I got to stay next to a pretty girl with hazel hair and big, green eyes (sorry, no photos for you :D)
Then I got back to the shitty city of Bucharest: dog-days, traffic jams, construction works in the middle of the roads and so on (still there
is a small positive impact over the way the streets are looking due to the excessive heat, but again, no photos for you :D)
On a positive note, my dog was very happy to see me again, she was alone in the backyard with a pile of food and a reserve of water for about 5 days:
And then the
13 kicked-in: a phone call and I learned about the first job I have after returning to the office: setup a Vista computer, buy MS Office for it and shit like that. Way to go... At least I can give a try to the Fedora Live CD on the machine (an HP TouchSmart). After 5 minutes (don't have much time to play with it), the touch screen and wireless do not work OOTB, the webcam does.
Probably to celebrate my return, my co-workers decided to have for lunch a traditional Romanian meal:
mici with mustard, French fries, salad and, of course, (hopefully my boss does not read this :D) beer.
June 30, 2009 08:52 AM
So, my mom is one of the most avid early adopters of my new site Tweeted Blessings, which is where I post two reasons to be happy every weekday, as well as distributing them via Twitter, RSS, and e-mail.
Part of the concept of the site is that I invite people to submit reasons to be happy. My mom did it and she provided an interesting insight on it that I wasn't expecting: it made her think about what makes her happy and just added to her happiness because it brought all those good thoughts to mind. Bonus!
If you haven't visited Tweeted Blessings yet, do it. If you haven't told your friends about it yet... do you hate your friends and not want them to be happy? Go, enjoy some reasons to be happy and then share them. Help start a happiness pandemic.
June 30, 2009 07:22 AM
June 29, 2009
Yesterday I wrote about me-too storms, including how they develop and some of the problems they can cause (most notably - delaying the bug's solution).
Since this is a bad problem there's been quite a few ideas proposed.
FIXING the bugs faster would be the best thing of course. That's a whole other topic... but does deserves first mention.
Launchpad already has a solution in the form of the "This bug doesn't affect me (change)" text and link on every bug.
Presumably this is serving as a lightning rod saving us from heaps of me-too comments. And presumably the data is being stored somewhere to help developers identify highly popular bugs, but I don't know how to access that info. I would imagine if developers could filter/sort/view this data it'd give added incentive for people to use that and it would be a more effective tool.
Another issue is that the link just isn't that noticeable. I'll leave it to usability experts to work out how best to improve it, but it definitely needs a re-think so it's a bit more obvious, especially for casual launchpad visitors.
Educating bug reporters is another oft-suggested solution. I think there's some truism about documentation being the worst way to explain how software works, because no one will read it. Actually there's been reams and reams of discussion and documentation about how to write and behave on bug reports, and indeed I think this is really helpful as it can turn bad bug reporters into really good bug reporters. That said, many people are just too busy, or too lazy, or don't even know they don't know how to report bugs.
Hiding comments or otherwise emphasizing/de-emphasizing comments by various criteria has been suggested and I believe is being considered by the launchpad crew. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't end up actually consuming more time to manage than it saves. I think a lot of useful experimentation could be done on this idea using greasemonkey, as Brian Murray has done.
Splitting bug reports would be pretty cool feature, at least in theory. If we realize that John and Bob have different issues, it'd be slick to be able to push a button and have all of Bob's comments moved to its own bug report. But in practice I suspect this could result in creating more confusion by losing context. In any case, I don't think it'd help with me-too storms since most of the low value comments really aren't worth setting up a separate bug for; better to just have the people file new bugs from scratch.
Locking bug reports, is sometimes suggested by those familiar with similar functionality provided by forums software.
Minimum karma requirements to post onto other people's bugs is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've noticed (thanks to Kees Cook's lp_karma_suffix greasemonkey script) a very strong correlation that the worst me-too'ers also tend to have the lowest karma. People with the most helpful comments usually have higher karma.
So why not make use of that by requiring posters to have a certain karma level before being able to comment on someone else's bug report? From what I can tell, it needn't be high; 50 points would be enough to weed out the vast majority of the noise, but still be low enough that anyone with a legitimate interest in helping on bug reports could earn with a fairly minimal amount of work, such as helping on answers.ubuntu.com or going through the full bug process following up on their own bug reports.
Perhaps it could be set up to kick in only after there are already a few commenters, so we don't get in the way of random helpers on bugs that would otherwise be neglected. In a way, this would be akin to the "locking" idea above, but a bit more targeted.
Other thoughts?
June 29, 2009 10:25 PM
I deal with a lot of X.org bugs in launchpad, and I often run into an intriguing phenomenon, the so-called "me-too storm".
Essentially, a me-too storm is a bug report which accumulates a large number of confirmation statements from different people, to the point that it actually hinders progress.
Knowing that a bug affects additional people does have some value to it. I particularly appreciate it when someone of a technical bent is able to reproduce a problem, because I can have confidence that they can test out patches or at least provide insightful technical analysis.
However, past maybe half a dozen comments, the value of an additional confirmation drops off to zero. So, comments in a healthy bug report would shift from confirmatory statements towards comparing data, discussing workarounds, identifying test cases, proposing patches, and so on.
Unfortunately, with a me-too storm, the confirmation statements come in at a faster clip, and their quality often drops further. Commonly, the confirmer will not provide log files or other proof that they do indeed have the bug. This is a particular problem with X because often there are different unrelated bugs that have identical symptoms (examples include X freezes, black screens, performance degradation), and so they might have a different bug; by "me-too'ing" their bug instead of creating their own bug report, it means their issue probably won't be investigated, or it can cause massive confusion or even sidetrack the discussion away from the original bug.
The bug suffers from a bad feedback loop at this point. The more comments a bug has, the more "important" it looks to launchpad's search engine, so it gets suggested to anyone with vaguely similar symptoms. New commenters notice that some old commenters provided data already so they don't bother putting it in.
Indeed, after a while the bug report can start accumulating negative comments, that have a value below zero - they actually detract from the discussion. These range from demanding "is it fixed yet?" questions to rude, inflammatory or borderline threatening comments "fix it now or I go back to windows, you insensitive clod!!!1!" These predictably stir up a variety of 0-value follow on comments, "No, it's not fixed yet, please be patient," "yeah +1 for fixing this soon," "did you try rebooting? it helped me," "plz unsub me from this list, to many emailz," "'doze sucks, get a mac," and so on.
Now, no one would argue that "me-too storm" bugs are not important. Obviously with so many people commenting, there must be some real problem that needs dealt with. It could be a real bug, or a class of bugs with similar symptoms, or a usability issue, or even just poorly set expectations...
However, the stormy nature of these high comment bugs tends to work against themselves, for a few reasons. First, as a developer it's just plain time consuming to read through a gazillion comments. Second, these bugs can be hard to summarize and send upstream, particularly if analysis data is coming from different people (with perhaps differing hardware). Third, if you post a proposed solution, you often get feedback from people having unrelated bugs that leads you to make erroneous conclusions about the fix.
The "me-too storm" is a fascinating phenomenon, but since it hinders bug solution it is interesting to consider ways that this could be prevented or mitigated in launchpad. I'll share my own thoughts in a future post. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear other's ideas.
June 29, 2009 08:53 PM
The third (and last) day of the Berlin FUDCon was dedicated to a hackfest, with everyone working on whatever they liked:
There was also a presentation of the Electronic Lab spin by
Chitlesh:
The atmosphere was pretty relaxed:
And the people attending where not that many, with some already leaving before the day started and some other leaving at various moments of the day:
Some were creating "patches" for the
group photo:
I managed to take a photo of the third girl present at the event, so the ratio was about 1 woman in 50 men, yeah, this sounds pretty much like Fedora (and don't blame me
again for this):
For a little while we had a nice sun and warm weather outside, so a few guys moved in the park next to our building:
Of course I couldn't miss the opportunity to take a few flower macros (come on guys, with such beauty near us, why are we staying in the inside?):
And also play with the lights and reflections:
A bit of disappointment was people not using their freedom to write names, thoughts, locations on the big board prepared for that (I did my part, how about you?):
Oh, the time is passing, not much remaining until I have to board the plane so I'll end this for now (a bit more to come later about how we spent the evening) with a photo of the deserted hall. FUDCon ended.
June 29, 2009 06:26 AM
June 28, 2009
I teased before about some fun adventures after the second FUDCon day, so it's the time to deliver my promise: in the front of the hotel there it was a large crowd from which were standing out a lot of nice looking girls dressed like for a fancy event. No way that would be related to FUDCon or LinuxTag, they were attending some kind of reception and we had to mix with them on the route to our rooms:
Learning it was a high school party, so part of them were potentially underage was not the real stopper, but the bad light and my shyness (being shy is my main flaw as a photographer, where the rule for taking photos of people is like: go as close to them as so feel comfortable and then take two more steps closer). So I didn't feel like lighting my flash and shooting left and right, but with the help of my long lens and most importantly with some support from
Franceso, with whom I stroke a deal to ask the girls to pose with him, I managed to grab a few:
Then I went with a group of people to the eastern part of the city for a dinner, and learnet a lesson: don't go to eat to a place called
Habana, the advice is even stronger if you are hungry:
No matter how nice the waitress is, or how fruitier the fancy drinks are
It does not matter if the food is good or bad, no matter the free shots at the end as an excuse, no matter they don't charge for the appetizers they forgot to bring to the table for over an hour, if it takes
that long to get the food (I think it was about two hours), then it does not matter anymore.
Oh, and forgot about the waitresses, hookers, high school girls and stuff, we decided what was the sexiest thing at this conference: our mighty leader. The sunglasses are definitely the final touch:
June 28, 2009 11:49 AM
This is already public knowledge: the code name for Fedora 12 is going to be Constantine. If you voted for it thinking about the Keanu's movie, I have some bad news for you: the F12 theme will not be based on that, it will not gonna happen.
My first reaction is to go straight to the source: Constantine the Great, the famous Roman emperor, which was "first" for some things, had some "features" and also provided some "freedom". And for me that Constantine equals Byzantine culture, best represented by Byzantine mosaics, something like:
see more; photos by Gauis Caecilius
published under a CC-BY-ND licenseThe real trick is to take out the religious implications (which are bad) and leave in the cultural references (which are good). And I think there is potential in a visual conflict in a contrast of old mosaic style and modern imagery (4 F's?), everything with a shade of blue.
June 28, 2009 10:25 AM
June 27, 2009
So in preparation for heading of to Gran Canaria and GUADEC on Thursday I pushed a new Transmageddon release today. 0.11 is actually the first release I posted to sites such as Gnomefiles and Freshmeat so in some sense I guess I feel more confident about this version that earlier ones. A lot of new features included, like multipass encoding, videoflipping (so if your video is 90 degrees tilted you can correct that during transcoding) and better profiles. Still kinda rough at the edges though, and the very latest GStreamer releases are needed for everything to work. Still expecting quite a few bugs to be reported still.
In some sense development have stood still for a while as I have focused on testing various devices and GStreamer features. Remuxing is still on my todo list, but discovered that for instance an ac3parser is still needed in GStreamer to
do nice DVD conversions.
Was kinda nice to successfully use Transmageddon for a business related need at work, we had gotten a request at Collabora Multimedia which meant I needed to transcode a video into quicktime+h264+aac from a .vob file. Worked like a charm I mean while I have of course done hundred of transcodes as part of development, it was nice to do one for something ‘real’
June 27, 2009 01:10 PM
First it should be mentioned no human is responsible for all those thing, it was the panda who got drunk early in the morning ans started impersonating Mo, so it wasn't her and I was not involved in any way.
panda getting drunkSo the first move of the drunk panda, Mo impersonator, was to inkscape a FUDCon
poster (he also invented the verb "to inkscape"):
the posterTo have the madness complete, Hello Kitty joined the party:
Hello Kitty popping inAnd the next move was a
making-of video of the poster creation (complete with title and credit screen and catchy soundtrack):
the videoYou know a panda has fingers? Of course he has, so he can get carried away and show them in reply to wise-ass comments (so be warned):
panda fingersOf course all this was possible with the valuable contribution of a lot of nice chevaliers, ready to jump at any moment and help a panda in distress:
panda helpersDisclaimer: this post was fuelled only by cranberry juice provided by the hotel's breakfast service.
June 27, 2009 11:21 AM
I am moody at times, like yesterday, when I was tired a bit, frustrated a bit, so got pretty demotivated and took a smaller than usual amount of photos (and maybe not that great). But they are still quite a few.
This morning I am somewhat more optimistic: not enough for a big blog post with a story wrapped around the photos, but enough for a large photo dump. So here was the first FUDCon day seen trough my lenses (again, there are more on my photostream:
The FUDCon day ended with a big
group photo but it continued late into the night with FUDPub, the social event consisting of beers, fancy drinks and free pizzas (BTW, does anyone liked the seafood pizza? it was like everybody was running away from it):
June 27, 2009 08:28 AM
June 26, 2009
Next on FUDCon's agenda is the BarCamp day, those are the people who enlisted yesterday to keep talks:
June 26, 2009 10:36 PM
The photo didn't came the best (is rotated a bit), as I didn't have a real tripod with me, but it captures the spirit of our community ant this is all that matter - happy Fedora contributors at the Berlin FUDCon in 2009.
If you want to play a bit with it in GIMP, print a poster or whatever (I tried to put it online ASAP, at least a FUDCon logo could be added) a
large version is available (CC-BY-SA).
June 26, 2009 05:10 PM
FUDCon started already, but while listening to speeches and taking some more photos, I still have to talk a bit about yesterday.
After a morning at LinuxTag I joined Mo, Spot, Jesse and Ionut for a sushi lunch
If you know Mo at all, you don't me to tell we stopped and bought a big basket of (very yummy) strawberries
Jesse went for some business and the rest of us got to visit the Berlin Zoo (with seeing pandas as a primary objective and frogs as a secondary one, you must know already who is a panda appreciator and who is a frogs fan). Conclusion: the zoo is amazing.
Then we got for a while back to "serious" Linux stuff, attending the
LinuxNacht, which ended sooner than expected, remaining without drinks and food. So I got out with a few Ambassadors to take care of the problems. We had some beers and interesting talks about various stuff, from hiring idiots to Michael Jackson (fun fact: at about 2:00 AM, we had a TV crew asking
Cristoph about the "king of pop").
Much to my disappointment, even if we were in the right place, it was too dark to use my camera properly and take revenge for yesterday's
hooker incident.
June 26, 2009 09:30 AM
So, I just posted a "viral" video for the site I've been working on. Here it is...
Some of you may remember my post on counting your blessings last month. That incident sparked something in me. Besides helping reverse a descent into a dark place, it made me want to share that insight... that there are all these reasons to be happy all around us.
So I built Tweeted Blessings to find and share those reasons... in small, bite-sized pieces. Right now, I'm generating all the reasons because it just went public today, but hopefully people will tweet in or mail in their reasons, and it will become a little juggernaut of happiness.
I'm having a hard enough time finding work right now, so I decided to make some... this site. What better way to spend some of my time than working on something intended to spread happiness.
So, please, copy the video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVh1T3I4TiQ
Send it to your friends, tell them to send it to their friends. Help me snowball this into an avalanche of joy. As an added benefit, you help keep me indoors working on positive projects.
Thanks!
June 26, 2009 07:00 AM
It may needed to remind that the photos posted on my blog are only a thin surface, I do a lot more, from which a selection is available online, but since my photostream is quite volatile the flickr pool is a safer place for archiving (it looks like I am the only putting there photos from this FUDCon, guys and girl, do not forget about it!)
Speaking about the LinuxTag, the first thing to mention should be our ambassadors, who are doing a great work but also seem to have a good time while doing it
Then I have to acknowledge I am
not impressed by LinuxTag, in the little time spent here didn't saw something striking, it seems a bit boring. But there are a loot of FOSS projects represented there
Yesterday was also the day for LinuxNacht, a social event around LinuxTag, for which I was lucky to receive a discount voucher (thanks!). It was really dark in there, so the photos are not that great
The next post will probably be about the fun time from yesterday: sushi, zoo and late night beers, stay tuned.
June 26, 2009 05:13 AM
June 25, 2009
It collects particles in the air in #caochangdi
The Underground Space in Beijing
Is this a possible #laoban event space?
June 25, 2009 08:32 AM
We (me and Ionuț) arrived in Berlin for FUDCon yesterday evening, at about 18:00 (the plane has a small delay)
We decided to walk to the hotel, since it is not far away from the airport, about 30 minutes
And the decision proved to be a good one, near a huge park we had the awesome opportunity to admire the local fauna/wild life, there were a lot of bunnies
At the hotel we meet
Mo,
Spot and
Jesse and got together for a nice Indian dinner
I also tried some local beer and liked it:
As a funny anecdote, on the route to the restaurant we meet a different kind of local fauna, a few working girls and almost got into a fight with then, they were angry about Mo taking photos in the area but somehow didn't have any problems with me doing the same thing - this must be yet another side effect of me having a much
bigger camera
June 25, 2009 08:14 AM
June 24, 2009
Been working on a new project that will go into previews for selected friends and family later this week and go into general release a few days later, once I've had a chance to fix any issues my preview users find.
One part of the project was to add "Tweet This" links to certain items on the site, where clicking on the link would send the user to Twitter and fill in the suggested text of the tweet for them.
It's actually a lot simpler than you think. The format is: http://twitter.com/?status=[URL encoded tweet text].
Now many of you are asking how you "URL encode" the tweet text. Well, if you're using PHP, you use urlencode('text'); where "text" is the text of your tweet. If you want to do it in JavaScript, the PHP.js library has a javascript equivalent for PHP's urlencode.
But here's a little trick I didn't know about until I made this mistake. Make sure your link goes to twitter.com, not www.twitter.com. If it goes to www.twitter.com, the text doesn't get properly decoded. So, trying to tweet Creating a "Tweet This" Link - http://www.brainhandles.com would look like Creating a %22Tweet This%22 link - http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brainhandles.com, and nobody wants that.
June 24, 2009 09:51 AM
We are really getting into photo-realistic clip art. Maybe its the world being flooded with iPhones or loads of movies like Terminator 4 and Transformers that show off some new concepts in glassy interfaces. Regardless, Minduka has his eyes set on making some quality clip art.
Also, Minduka made a nice image of a Present. With Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), since I’m an admin, I’m able to help cleanup Minduka’s file. When he uploaded it, he did not set the document boundary correctly. We hope that all types of people will upload content, so please keep uploading. However, every once and a while special people come to the Open Clip Art Library who want help fix these issues. We call these awesome people, Librarians. If you want to be one, please do join our mailing list and we can show you how.
I fixed the following image, uploaded the file again and then created a thumbnail of his work for this blog post and the OCAL website. Fixed!
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June 24, 2009 09:32 AM
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