JulioBiason.Net

Remember when I tried to use Canola? Well, I’m a happy user of UKMP (which is getting features and bug fixes in a weekly basis), but I can’t help to stop and read stuff when INdT says it is working in a new version of Canola, which should be the “best thing since sliced bread”.

Since I’m a coder, I can say that:

1. Jumping from toolkit to toolkit means you don’t understand what “community” means;
2. Choosing a toolkit just because it is the “new shinny thing” is not a good methodology (see “Duke Nukem Forever” and its three rendering engine history);
3. hidding comments because they ask the dreadful question is not nice.

Honestly, I really can’t care about such thing anymore. Canola will not succeed by itself in its current pace (maybe because it is a Nokia thing they will push it in their devices) unless those guys realize what a community is.

What a social engineer, the leader of a warez group, a computer scientist who wrote one of the most well-known programming languages and a kid who accidentally writes a script that infects several computers have in common?

They are all called “hackers”.

I’m not kidding here. Twice this week I read some article about “most famous hackers” and the list have all those listed. It seems that they put the “bad guys” in front of the list, to give it a “those guys are bad” feeling about it.

One of the articles had Dennis Ritchie, the guy who designed the C programming language with Ken Thompson; the other had Richard Stallman, the father of the GNU organization and the free software movement. The rest of the guys? One guy who cracked a telephone company, the kid who wrote a computer virus and brought several *cough*windows*cough* machines down. Oh, and Kevin Mitnick.

Here at work we decided to use Skype as the default communication IM for the whole company. Two days ago I decided to try the new beta ’cause, honestly, the interface looks horrible on a GNOME desktop (maybe not so much on KDE, because Skype uses Qt). So I downloaded the newest beta.

The result? Groups are gone, the main menu is going and you can’t hide offline contacts anymore and there are some options that simply don’t make sense for normal user (Transports? What’s that?). I thought it was something wrong with my installation, so I went to their forums, just to find that this is gone because they rewrote the thing from scratch. Honestly, I don’t think that switching between Qt 3 to Qt4 means “you need to completely rewrite all your code”.

But, then again, today I read an article were you can read that the complete rewrite was done because they wanted to add video support. Now, were the hell you need to drop an interface when you need to add something in the engine behind it? Ok, maybe the interface don’t have the space to put a video, but that doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and start from scratch.

Honestly, the problem is not that “we had to add video support”. The problem is that now their team is bigger and a lot of guys there are like 90% of the developers around: they can’t read code from someone else. Joel Spolsky pointed this before: it is easier to write code than read it.

And, on top of that, I can say: there is nothing proving that rewrite code makes it better. Honestly, I think it makes it worst (and that’s the same opinion Joel has): you are dropping several years of bug fixing and you are just adding new ones.

PS: If one of the Skype guys want to prove me I’m wrong, do this: GPL the previous version. So everyone would see that the code was bad for a start.

“PC”.

How many times did you see “PC” when someone actually meant “Windows”? Several times I’ve seen this and can’t stop getting upset by it. Is my x86 running Linux not a PC, then? OF COURSE IT IS! Isn’t a Macintosh a PC? SURPRISE, IT IS!

PC stands for “personal computer”. My Laptop is a personal computer, no matter which operating system it runs or what architecture it runs. PC is a concept, not an architecture. PC is in the same level of MID (Mobile Internet Devices, a.k.a. what the N800 is).

And it really pisses me off when “news for nerds” uses it on a headline.

Why CSS designers decided to offer 21 different styles of bullets for list but completely ignored the fact that someone may want to define a single string as a bullet like, say, “*”?

I just realised how the creation of frameworks is near astroturfing.

You see, a framework doesn’t do anything by itself. You have to put code around it to make it useful. That won’t stop developers claiming how great their framework is, how awesome they API is and such. In the end, they have nothing to prove that. They leave it to others to complete the work.

I mean, what’s the point to say that you wrote the greatest and most clean framework to web development or to get emails from any protocol using the small amount of memory ever if there isn’t a single webpage or email client available using it? It is just saying “see how great I’m; unfortunately, I can’t prove it, but you have to take my word”. Yeah, I have faith on you. NOT!

And yes, I just found the meaning of “astroturf” today, thank you very much for asking.

Oh, and yes, I know a certain email library that the developer is just astroturfing. Web development framework is just one of the most common types of framework around.

When I moved to Australia, Julio told me about “brazucas”: other Brazilian people that, instead of trying to “absorb” the Australian culture and way of life, try to keep being Brazilians (and, in a way, try to change a whole country to fits their small minds). Honestly, at first, I was a bit skeptical about people like this: they would have to absorb the culture, sooner or later.

It seems I was completely wrong.

Last night I went to see “Spider-man 3″ (hurry up and go see it, I’ll post a review on the weekend and spoil your fun) and, unfortunately, I got a bunch of those guys sitting right next to me. The whole time, the guy was speaking in Portuguese (with some annoying accent, by the way), making loud comments about the movie and, worst of all, the guy was smelling like if he just came out of the gym and went right into the cinema. And, in an unsurprising comment, the loud guy decided to rant the Japanese girls sitting behind us for talking during the movie.

Really dudes. Go back to Brazil and keep, at least, this country clean of stupidity.

Besides my own thougths, I decided to install Canola on my N800, because I wanted to listenn to a DAAP source with it. And I must say: it is crap. The player finds the DAAP source, but fails with “Error” (and just that); the configuration tool spawns the browser, which means I’m now running a webserver on my UMPC; also the config server likes to load a page and after that redirect to another before your eyes.

Next time, I will listen to myself.

My iPod is starting to behave quite weirdly: it is locking up, the volume sometimes starts to jump from very high to very low when you are moving really slowly in the circle thing and the “letter jump” is really annoying now (I guess this is somewhat related to the circle problem).

Should I buy another iPod? Probably. But I have right here, in my gadget pack, a brand new N800, which can have two 8Gb SD cards. Ok, it is nowhere near the 60Gb I have on my iPod, but I guess I could get rid of some songs or buy some more SD cards and have some music collections instead of putting all them in the same place.

When you think about multimedia on the N800, the first thing that may come to your mind is Canola. It is a media player developed by INdT, the “Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia” (Nokia Technological Institute), which seems to be a Brazilian arm of the Nokia guys. I was kinda worried about installing it on my N800, as there were several reports of other applications crashing or simply not working once you install it, due some changes in the DBUS configuration, which manages almost everything in the device (or, at least, that’s what the INdT reported in the list as the reason things were failing after the installation). Digging in the site, looking for some more technical information, I found this:

Q: Is Canola Free? Is it also Open Source?
A: Yes and No. Canola is free, and will continue to be free but it’s not YET open source. We have plans to release the source or at least a big part of it, which will allow users to create custom plugins.

Ok, hold a second there. What do you mean “it is not free”? It runs on a free kernel (Linux), using a free graphical interface (KDrive, based on the X.Org code), using (probably, as you can’t open it to check) free sound library (GStreamer) (and the interface seems to be build using SDL, which is also free, but I’ll not push that far on my assumptions) and your code, which may crash several other applications is not free?!?!?

Wake up, INdT. You are not in Microsoft bandwagon, where you can write crappy applications and say “ok, it is fine; the problem is somewhere else”. You want Canola to rule? Open it up! Let people hack it! Let people fix those little stupid things you left behind for you.

Really. I want to write a Last.fm plugin for it. But I completely refuse to do such a job or install it if I can’t see the code.

PS: And when I was thinking about writing one media player myself, I just found UK Media Player and life is good again.

It seems I’m really unlucky when dealing with the Python-List.

As pointed before, when I signed it, I got in the middle of a battle between Lispers and Pythonistas. Although it was pretty ugly, a lot of good stuff appeared there; after all in the middle of it, some people pointed good points in both languages. And, as the list goes, it is a programming language list.

Then, when things settle down, someone decided that it would be good to post things about 9/11. Yeah, things from 2001 (some people seem to be trapped in the past and really like it). Several people complained and, for weeks, the posts keep appearing over and over again (each time, a different story, but always about 9/11). After three weeks, it seemed that the moderators decided to do nothing, so I did what I would did: I reported it back to SpamCop.

What I hoped was that the original poster would get listed, his/her ISP notified and, if everything fails, at least wake up the Python-List moderators.

The thing is, after some reports, my subscription turned into digest and I received one message from one of the moderators. It seems that, instead of getting the ISP from the spammer notified, I manage to get the hoster of Python-List notified and blacklisted. I explained my point of view, that I was reporting spam on the list and not the list itself and so on.

Then, the guy came with this:

Those messages were coming in through the USENET gateway.

The moderators have no control over the gateway.

We do have very aggressive anti-spam processes on the python.org mail servers — I’ve written a six-part article to be published on the LOPSA.org website on the current state of the art on fighting spam for mail server administrators, and I use what we’re doing on python.org as one of the key sets of examples that I keep coming back to.

That’s when I unsubscribe the list. Not only because it pretty hard to follow conversations in digest mode, but because such stupid nonsensical message. In one point, say that they are very agressive towards spam and, on another point, show that there is a way to bypass every “state of the art” measures they have against spam. It is like, “I have build this super-strong wall; nothing can breach it, you can drop a nuclear bomb on it and it won’t even scratch! But people say it is too dark inside, so I put this glass window”.

Really. How can someone say “we are very rigid against spam” and let an uncontrolled, unprotected way to send things directly to the list? That’s utterly stupid and braindead. The guy probably never heard that “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It doesn’t matter if they are using an advanced neural network, a bayesian filter or even a positronic brain to filter the messages if there is way to bypass everything.

Stupid. Some people should look around before praising their own work.