Google SoC

I'd like to join the crowd and welcome my mentee, Pinar Yanardağ, to the GNOME community and Google's SoC. I'm sure her blog will be syndicated in a prominent place soon enough(hint, hint p.g.o admins) so you all will be able to learn about her progress all summer and into the future (hopefully). She's so on the ball she's already created her own hackergotchi:



She'll be working on integrating Seahorse key selection dialogs(libcryptui) into Evolution as well using Seahorse's DBus interface for encryption and such. I'm also hoping to see some rocking integration with the e-d-s address book.

Please join me in welcoming Pinar and all of the other Summer of Coders to our fine community.

Slackware is Hard?!?

Andrew,

I realize your chart is pointed at the newbie, but quite possibly the only part of a new Slackware install that isn't entirely straight forward is partitioning your disk. I admit that the installer isn't graphical in nature, but neither is the Windows installer. For anyone not wanting to manually pick packages to install, the install all option is front and center. Upgrading Slackware is now as easy as Debian with the slapt-get tool. Granted that you can't install and update GNOME with slapt-get, as Patrick no longer builds GNOME and no one provides the appropriate repositories, but the folks over at Dropline GNOME do a fantastic job of keeping GNOME up to date with their installer and update applet.

I admit Slackware's not for everyone, but it's not the great evil it's made out to be.

OCRopus

Philip:

Tablet PC implementation? Allow beagle/tracker/whichever to search handwritten notes? Print out handwritten notes as text? Let the madness ensue.

Google MyMaps

I've really been digging the new MyMaps feature of Google Maps. I even started working on a MyMap version of my university. However, I have a few suggestions/requests that would make this product even more useful for such a large and complicated area.

• Allow showing and hiding "overlays" based on the same color. Also, allow a key for what each colored area means. (Residence Halls, Academic Buildings, Parking Lots, etc.)
  
• Allow showing all areas and points of interest at once and not just those in the order they were created. Possibly allow sorting of the items allowing non-linear creation. (For instance, all buildings should be shown with their labels all of the time when the buildings overlay is shown)
  
• In their blog post, Google indicates making your map public includes it in the search results, but that doesn't appear to be happening at present. (For instance search for "googleplex building 43" which is clearly marked on their example map of the googleplex. Also searching for "Clemson Crew Boathouse" doesn't return my campus map or this one.

I think this product has a lot of potential and makes it easy to get directions for places that don't necessarily have physical addresses, like the boathouse, but I'd like to see a little more functionality for "power cartographers".

Message Area Redux

In response to my earlier post about the message area, there were several more people that voiced the need for such a widget.

In fact pbor in #gnome-hackers voiced a vision I would support:

<pbor> sadam: actually I'd prefer to have a sexyer widget upstream :)
<pbor> sadam: it's something I wanted to try for a while but really can't find the time
<pbor> sadam: I want a GtkCurtain widget that drops down from the top (or the side) and covers the text *without* pushing it down
* lucasr|afk creates the page
<pbor> sadam: obviously it should drop down with a smooth animation and maybe be even slightly traslucent for the crack-addicts :)
<pbor> sadam: maybe it could be part of the "Make some core GNOME modules sexier" SoC proposed by vuntz

Of course I would be happier with a curtain widget that gave the coder the choice of whether to push the text down or not.

Gedit Message Area

Lucas and Gedit developers,

Is there any interest in pushing the message area widget upstream to gtk or libegg? I've looked at it and would like to make use of it for Seahorse plugins. Three of us probably shouldn't be maintaining our own separate copies of the widget.

Weekend Update

This weekend managed to be fairly productive. Saturday my roommate, Matt, and I tilled our garden and I finished my hops trellis. Sunday we planted the garden and returned our borrowed rototiller. It should only be a matter of time before we are flush with excellent produce. The climate in SC allows for a very long growing season so we'll probably do a replanting this summer to take advantage of the warm fall weather. When my hops rhizomes arrive at the end of the month our garden will be "produce complete".

Sunday night the four of us in the house went to see our friend Holly perform in the Vagina Monologues. We almost didn't get in because of the small theater it was being shown in. The Clemson ladies that performed it did an excellent job and I'd recommend seeing it if you get the chance.

It's good that so much got done this weekend as regatta season for Clemson Crew kicks off next Saturday in Aiken, SC with the Southeastern Regional Collegiate Sprints. In addition to being my first regatta as an assistant coach, I'll be racing the unusually popular Open Men's 1x.

GNOME Build Bot

I noticed that builds of at least seahorse, gnome-applets, and gnome-power-manager are failing with the following error:

/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_get_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_layout_get_lines_readonly'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libgthread-2.0.so: undefined reference to `g_thread_gettime'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_set_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_gravity_get_type'

If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know.

Respect

Full Rate, Full Pressure
Straight Down the Course, All Out
Victory For All

Frustration

Spheroid Radius
Changing the Convergence Rate
Complex Code Ensues

Numerical Accuracy

Note: When computing values that need to be numerically accurate and calculated quickly carry any integration inside a summation when only one term in the summation contains the variable of integration. This results in a massive reduction of things that need to be computed. That is all. Carry on.

Daily Haiku

Azalea Blooms
Songbird Twitters Cheerfully
Sunlight Filters Down

Haiku-a-palooza

Cherry Blossoms Blow
Near a Tumbling Waterfall
Wind in the Willows

Tall Aspen Reach High
Hawk Soars Over the Meadow
Brother Bear Sleeps

New Seahorse Release

We've just pushed a new version of seahorse out the door. Please give us a hand with shaking out any remaining bugs before the 2.18 release by grabbing it and using it. You don't have to even be a 1337 2.17 using hacker to help, all of the new features work properly using libraries available in 2.16 and the appropriate non-gnome libraries, of course.

Qualifed

This morning PhD qualifier results for Clemson University's ECE Department came in. The electromagnetics group had a great showing with all 6 members that took the qualifier passing. Congrats to all of my fellow group members! Now get back to work !

Google RFE

If anyone at Google is bored and needs ideas for their 20% time, look no further!

• Add the ability to poll confirmed guests to events in Google Calendar. This would be useful when ordering sandwiches or other food items for meetings or deciding where to go out to lunch.
• In the interest of indexing and making all information available, Google could run an OpenPGP key server that synchronizes with the key server network. When searching for a name with the main search app, a key could be returned as a search result. In GMail, signatures of messages could be verified and a UI element could be presented to the user.
• Add Google Checkout to Google Apps for Domains. This would allow groups to sell merchandise, collect money for events and trips and accept donations. Perhaps in the interest of not being evil have reduced or no fees for confirmed non-profit organizations as long as they use Google Words on their Google Pages site.
  

Those are a few of the ideas I have at the moment, but rest assured if I see any of them implemented I'll post more. :)

The greatest depression ever!

Given Dave's post on investing with leverage, I'd like to point out that the Great Depression wasn't so much caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as the fact that people had posted their homes as collateral for loans to invest in the stock market. When the market crashed and the lenders saw that they weren't going to be repaid, they started foreclosing on houses and farms set as collateral. With people losing their jobs and homes the Great Depression set in.

Cautionary tale aside, people invest with leverage all the time. In a short sell, one sells stock borrowed from others with the promise to return it by a certain date hoping the price will go down and they will pocket the difference. In a long sell, stock is purchased at the current price with money the investor has borrowed, often from the brokerage itself,
with the hope the price goes up and they will pocket the difference. In both of these cases, the non-leveraged portion of the investor's portfolio is used as collateral. Performing long and short sells requires a margin account with a brokerage of some kind.

Additionally, investors at the Prosper Loan Market Place are using their high credit ratings to secure sub-prime interest loans to invest in other loans on Prosper. Because the loans on Prosper are unsecured, the speculator could be burned if enough of their purchased loans default. They would still be on the line for making the monthly payments on the money they borrowed. I think investing in these characters is attractive for a lot of people because they view it as safer because their money has been lent to a person with a good credit rating to protect. However, one never knows the confluence of events that could occur. The speculator's loans could default and they lose their job leaving them to default on their own loan.

I think the real lesson here is that "investing" with leverage is entirely speculative and as a general rule no more than 5% of your portfolio should be held in speculative investments.

Disclaimer: The above does not construe actual financial advice. If you lose all of your money it's your own fault.

Righteous Anger

Phillip, I'm sick and tired of how you are going on and on about Americans as if we're some homogeneous group. Not every American likes Bush or voted for him (I've voted against him twice now). We don't all like the war in Iraq, and not just because we're having trouble there now. We also are not universally for the death penalty.

You blame the government we "re-elected", but the government we just elected that is sweepingly different from the current one hasn't taken office yet (It will in January). I don't expect Bush will ever see the inside of a court room in the Hague, but he should be investigated, impeached and tried criminally here.

I can't speak for all of GNOME Planet's denizens, but probably a fair share of the Americans that belong here agree with your sentiment. I just hate how you're expressing it.

Financial Independence

After reading jamin's blog post with links to desperate measures to get out of debt, I had a discussion with one of my office mates about how one gets into that kind of trouble in the first place. It turns out it is really easy to make the mistakes that get you there. If you aren't there already, there are some things you can do to avoid it.

• Pay off your credit cards in full every month. Making only the minimum payment will result in you paying for that geek gadget or shiny object long into the future.
• Save for your big purchases. If you have been lusting over some new toy that you simply can't live without, set aside money every month until you can afford it. You've been living without it this far and will avoid interest charges when you do buy it. In fact if you put your savings in a high yield money market account such as ING Direct's (disclosure: I have been very happy with my account there.) you could actually make money on the deal.
• Establish a safety cushion. Sock away at least 3 months worth of living expenses if you're single and more if you're not. If you have the cushion and hell breaks loose, you will be able to rely on savings instead of credit cards while you weather the storm.

There are plenty of more things you can do, but those are some of the biggies. Just remember that as the compound interest of the credit cards can work against you, if you have the money invested it can work for you.

Code of Conduct

I've been following the discussion concerning the Code of Conduct on the foundation-list and agreed with one poster that is concerned about "signing" something on a wiki. I have now signed the Code of Conduct and made sure there is no question about what exactly I was signing.

I invite my fellow Gnomies to do likewise using Seahorse's Epiphany plugin, panel applet or Gedit plugin or gnupg on the command line (If that's the way you roll).