Fitness

I'm with Eric on this one. I know plenty of scientists and engineers that run, bike, climb and participate in other sports. Although for athletic people I don't put much stock in BMI. For instance, mine is 24.8 and 25 is considered over weight. For athletes, percent body fat is a much more accurate albeit more difficult to measure indicator of fitness level.

Seahorse libgnome/ui Free

With the help of patches from Saleem Abdulrasool (compnerd) I have spent the afternoon eliminating libgnome/ui from seahorse and seahorse-plugins (bug #524018).

The port of seahorse to gio is already complete and the port of seahorse-plugins should happen fairly soon (A big thanks to Saleem for volunteering to look at this too).

There's also a icon refresh underway that will hopefully bear fruit so stay tuned to unstable!

Omelet in a Mug

I got home from morning practice and wanted a fully cooked breakfast without the fully cooked hassle. I decided, drawing inspiration from Lunch in a Box, to try cooking eggs in a coffee mug.

I started with two eggs and scrambled them in situ. Then I added a handful of frozen cubed potatoes, some minced sharp cheddar cheese, a spoonful of salsa and stirred. I nuked it all for 2 minutes on high and voila, Omelet in a Mug.

*WARNING* Watch your mug carefully during the last 30s so that the cheese doesn't boil over the top of your mug.

Vrooooom

I spent my off weekend from crew related activities to learn how to ride a motorcycle. It's been on my todo list for a almost a year, but the timing was always off. I decided to take the Beginning Motorcycle class offered by SC Rider Ed at Greenville Tech, one of the local community colleges.

The course consisted of 3 sessions on Fri, Sat and Sun and was taught by Eric Diehl. There was some classroom work on Friday night followed by riding practice on Sat and Sunday. The class provided motorcycles in the form of Honda Rebels.

I would recommend taking a safety class from the American Motorcyclist Association to anyone looking to start riding. There's so much info to cover, a friend or relative might leave something out. Before this weekend, I had never ridden a motorcycle or operated a manual vehicle and I was able to have fun and succeed at the exercises practiced. Eric did a great job of emphasizing the fundamentals and I now feel confident I want to get a bike.

Slogan for the Democratic Party

In a response to Nat

"Freedom, Peace and Choice make America Great. Democratic Party."

Of course, this only works because the "conservatives" have leaned toward becoming fascist, war hawks. It's interesting that a true conservative would espose two out of three of the above on the basis of personal liberties and responsibility.

GNOME SoC 2008

GNOME is joining Google for the fourth annual Summer of Code program. We need your ideas and expertise as mentors to make this our best year yet and bring more awesome Free Software into existence. This year, we would like to see projects about the integration between various
GNOME modules. Other types of projects are of course also welcome, like new programs, bling, etc.

As long as there are mentors available, we are also taking SoC proposals for GNOME related technologies and projects such as GStreamer, Avahi, Beagle, Bluez and Telepathy so don't feel left out if your favorite project isn't part of GNOME or just isn't yet. We will also be collaborating with KDE to mentor freedesktop.org related projects.

Please submit your ideas and volunteer to mentor on our wiki at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas. Ideas that are posted will be triaged by the GNOME SoC Admins based on mentor support and feasibility.

Note that the student submission deadline is March 31st so get your great ideas up so students will have plenty of time to help our favorite desktop keep rocking!

-- GNOME Summer of Code Admins

Lessig '08

What do we want?

Change!

When do we want it?

Now!

I've been following Larry Lessig's path from free culture pioneer to corruption crime fighter and I agree with him that he cannot make the changes in our culture he wants to see until the culture of corruption has been addressed. To this end I have decided to support his possible run for congress in the CA-12 and have done so financially. It's time to put our money where our mouths are and make the change happen!

If you want change,

If you want hope,

Support Lessig for Congress.

N810

This post is written from my new N810. Thanks Nokia and Maemo for making the discount program happen. I'll be installing Ubuntu over my venerable Slack+DLG install to get the development environment working properly. DLG, I love the work you've done but need to be able to use the documentation without having to blaze a new path. Keep up the good work!

Come on ......

Evolution, the size of your preferences window is shameful. I'm using the C locale with a resolution of 1280x800 and the preferences dialog cannot fit completely on my screen. This is a known bug at lower resolutions as well. It appears that the "Mail Preferences" selection in the left frame is the culprit. The "General tab in particular since none of the others occupy the whole window. Please fix this!

Success!

I successfully defended my Masters thesis Monday afternoon and my submitted manuscript was approved yesterday. This means that aside from my math final next Friday I'm a free man. I've been using my newly found free time to triage and fix some bugs in seahorse and upload state borders into OpenStreetMap. So far I've uploaded borders for SC, NC, FL, GA, TN, KY, AL and MS. I'm hoping to work my way across the country in the next couple of days.

I have some seahorse features I've decided to work on the next couple of weeks. They are in no particular order: adding passwords to gnome-keyring in the key manager, ACL lists for saved secrets in the properties of saved secrets, and possibly some evolution integration.

Tinder

Luis: While it would be nice for it to be "open hardware" already, I wonder how long until someone hacks the Kindle to run Gutenburg project texts. Because it runs Wikipedia, I can't imagine it would be hard to do. However, it's very understandable that it would be the antithesis of Amazon's business model to provide quality free content and furthermore would be rude to use the wireless link(supported by buying items) to load Free content on the device. On the other hand, the USB link is fair game. ;)

Gmail encryption/signing

I spoke too soon as this signed email does not verify correctly. Google why can't we get this right?

GMail part deux

I haven't noticed a lot of changes with the new GMail interface that has been recently delivered, which for the most part is a decidedly good thing. However, I decided to test out Seahorse's Epiphany plugin with the new plain text entry box and was delighted when my test email was delivered and the signature was good and the decryption didn't have a problem with the word wrapping. This was a major thorn in my side; preventing me from using signatures with my sent mail. Thank you to whichever brave Googler purposefully or inadvertently fixed this featurebug.

Also, I would like to join the band wagon in thanking the crowd over at Nokia and Maemo for accepting my application for a discounted N810. It will probably lead to an increase in my Verizon tax, but will be worth it.

Success

Since the end of August, my friend Kat and I have been coaching Clemson Crew's novice women squad, . This weekend we traveled to Chattanooga, TN to participate in our first competition of the season, the Chattanooga Head Race. While Kat and I are volunteers, we were paid in full for our efforts of the last month and a half by 2 out of 3 of our ladies' boats bringing home medals. Even though the third boat didn't place, they made a valiant effort and were only 6s off of the 3rd place time. We left Chattanooga extremely proud of our ladies and look forward to the next 3 weeks of practice before we again travel to Chattanooga for the Head of the Chattahoochie.

Cory Doctorow

Cory made an appearance at Clemson University yesterday and I was lucky enough to break away from work to hear him speak. His talk was titled "From International Standards to Web Practices, IP Mania Has Undermined the Idea of Real Property, of Freedom, of Creativity." It was held at the lovely and historic Strom Thurmond Institute (see picture below).

Cory was an entertaining and informative speaker and I encourage any of you that get the chance to make time for hearing him. While the part of his talk concerning licenses was familiar to me, as I suspect would be to many of my p.g.o readers as well, I enjoyed his history lesson concerning WIPO's formation and how our (U.S.) free trade treaties are forcing developing countries to adopt our draconian IP laws as well as other measures that we would not tolerate in our country. His example of one is our treaty with Russia forcing them to license their optical media presses and be subject to command inspections. Good thing we aren't as worried about their printing presses eh? I thought his call to arms at the end was especially well received and when an audience member pointed out that the talk was being recorded and asked if it would be available, Cory released it in its entirety to the public domain. As such, when I can get a copy, I'll post it on YouTube and add a link from this blog to it.

Thanks Cory for taking time out of your busy schedule to visit us in Clemson!

Cory Doctorow

Also, because someone on Flickr asked what's studied at the institute, I'll explain it here. The institute houses all of the documents from Strom Thurmond's time in the U.S. Senate. It is much akin to a president's library but less expensive and without the touristy stuff. It also houses the special collections from Clemson's library. The research arm of the institute is concerned with public policy at all levels of government.

Showing the GPG Key

Richard:

This might be an instance where Seahorse's DBus interface could help you. If a user is part of the web of trust already, the dialog could possibly be skipped completely. Also, the key in question could be automatically acquired using the DiscoverKeys method.

In any case, I agree with the other comments regarding your "signature identifier" field in that the full finger print should be shown. Also, signature identifier is not a commonly used term that I'm familiar with and in any case it's a key identifier and not a signature identifier.

Let us (the seahorse devs) know if there's anything in the DBus interface that's missing that would make your life easier.

Haiku on the Fly

Breeze wafts through the trees
Undulating boughs above
Birds chirp merrily

OpenStreetMap Presentation

This past Thursday, I gave a presentation on OpenStreetMap at the first meeting of CLUG for the fall semester. While a little long (about an hour and twenty minutes with demonstration) I think it was well received.

The slide deck (in PDF and LaTeX formats) and presentation resources are available from here.
The area used for the demo can be viewed as part of a slippy map here.

Welcome

Glynn, Welcome to the brotherhood of brewers. In the immortal words of Ben Franklin, "There cannot be good living where there is not good drinking."

My Linux Success Story

This is my Linux success story. Well, actually not mine because that was long long ago in a galaxy far far away but more of my adviser's. He bought a new desktop computer for his home use and when faced with learning Vista or sticking with XP came to my office and asked about installing Linux on it. At this point, I'm ecstatic with thoughts of seamless transferal of OO.o documents and a return to LaTeX for typesetting his documents.
Being a good member of CLUG it took me all of 2s to decided that our official installfest distro of choice, Ubuntu, was right for him.

After his white box computer arrived I burned an ISO of 7.04 and walked down the hall to get the install going. The live cd aspect of it flawlessly detected all of the hardware on the machine and after answering a few short questions the install was just like imaging a machine.

Post-install, I demonstrated Synaptic to get the Nvidia drivers, LaTeX and added Clemson's repositories for MATLAB and VPN software. I also installed the LaTeX plugin for Gedit which really ought to be packaged in Universe (hint hint).

Due to the short interval before the conference, I couldn't convince him to use Impress or LaTeX for his presentation, but he did generate his figures with OO.o Draw. He really likes what he sees and can't understand why anyone would need Windows. Maybe when we get back from Ottawa I'll get to install it on his main machine.

Cheers to the Ubuntu guys for making the install so painless and all of my favorite Gnomies for keeping the desktop rocking!