monotonous.org

Biannual Update

It’s been almost six months since my last post. So why not just recount all the major things that happened last year. I have been extremely busy, I have been working full time for Collabora, and at the same time managed to always have some project or other deadline I was racing towards. This is probably the first time I paused to think about the wild goose chase that was 2010. Here goes:

Collabora

I have been drafting Telepathy specs, improving Gabble, drafting more specs, and generally learning a lot. Some (potential) user-visible features include bomb-proof XMPP invisibility, interactive authentication, power saving, communication policy (contact blocking), improved codec-conflict user messages in VoIP and video sessions. And more that I can’t remember right now. Of course this is on top of the client work that is not public yet. It’s been a great experience, working with energized smart people like Simon, Will and Sjoerd is fantastic. I would love to head to FOSDEM this year and see everyone, but I will be turning 30, so probably not.

GNOME Accessibility Team

Early last year Willie Walker’s Orca team in Oracle was finally liquidated and we were not sure where things were headed. I was working on putting a hackfest together, giving a talk, organizing a booth, and generally having a presence in CSUN. This was the first a11y meetup, and I spent time preparing a presentation, dealing with sponsorship and travel, getting resources for the hackfest and booth. Besides saying goodbye to Will at CSUN, it was also a disengagement for me, as my job and other projects were keeping me elsewhere.
Since that hackfest there has been another one in Seville, Alejandro and Joanie have been leading the GNOME a11y team like nobody’s business. There is even a weekly meeting that I never attend on a regular basis. Things are looking good, it is really humbling. Joanie started doing this work pretty much at the same time I got involved in a11y, and she is still plugging away. Somebody please hire her so she could do this full time.
I also gave a talk at GUADEC about Universal Design. I learned a lot preparing it, and I hope to continue polishing it.

Getting Closer

At some point this year, I found the time to develop an iPhone application, a GIS Django backend and a web-based map authoring tool! The idea of the app is basically aural augmented reality. For example you could walk around in a city neighborhood and listen to past events and stories of different places. The main difference from an audio tour is that you are being led by sound as it gets louder when you approach as opposed to visible landmarks. Of course the technology is the trivial part, the real magic is in the well-produced audio. Jenny Asarnow has been doing that, and created fantastic soundscapes with stories and music. Full discloser, she is also my sweetheart. Getting Closer was showcased in two events: Megapolis in Baltimore and Third Coast in Chicago. We hope to collaborate with more audio producers and find new and exciting uses for this. As for my end, it was fun to step out of my niche Desktop programming and do some mainstream stuff, like iOS, Django and HTML/JS, just to know I could.

Causing A Nuisance

I joined other young Jewish activists in New Orleans this fall where we successfully agitated the Jewish American community into conversation by interrupting the Jewish General Assembly, the largest annual event surrounding Jewish philanthropy. Disrupting the Israeli prime minister’s keynote was really just an added bonus. This is one of the most important things I have been part of this year, and I am completely flattened by the amount of positive responses we have gotten for this. I wrote an essay about the experience that I hope it will be published soon. I am looking forward to continuing to be part of this conversation.

Caribou

After things settled down, and I caught back up on work, I started giving Caribou some desperately needed attention. I asked that it be pulled from the GNOME 2.32 module set in the last cycle because I just never had time to really get it ready for release. No excuses! I spent the holiday slowness porting Caribou to GTK3 and GObject introspection. Let me tell you, it was not trivial! I ended up rewriting whole chunks of Caribou, which was not all that bad. Since taking over maintainership I have done little in doing major changes, and accepted some large patches that I never should have, so it was cleanup time. This whole ordeal did not introduce any user-visible changes besides a new prefs window and stability. Um, I guess that is something. Anyway, I will be merging it to master today. That bad news (and this is what sucks about GNOME 3.0), is that other contributors and testers will need to do a jhbuild dance before being able to run any of this. I have a moduleset I will share with the world that does the minimum required stuff for a development a11y stack, with the new AT-SPI2, Orca, Accerciser and Caribou. There are some amazing artists in the GNOME community, anyone fancy on designing an icon for Caribou?

That’s Not It!

I am sure I forgot stuff.

Google, I Hate You Because You Are Awesome

When Google isn’t alienating us by pushing social experiments down our throats, and doing evil, they are often awesome. Nevertheless, I started thinking this month how I will take my Google Apps domain and start hosting it myself: mail, chat, calendar, contacts, etc.
Today they integrated Google Voice with Google Talk in GMail. I still don’t know how they are doing it, are they connecting to PSTN through XMPP? In any case, I feel all excited and giggly about it. Maybe I will keep my Google Apps account after all..
It’s always been another one of my personal technological gaps. How do I travel and remain reachable on my US number? I could spend months on end in Israel, and it’s always nice to have seamless access to my US number and voice mail. SIM cards are so cheap abroad, the phone numbers assigned to them are arbitrary, I should be able to punch them in to Google Voice and just have people reach me with my usual number (this feature is yet to come). In short, unify and clean up the mess that is telephony and voice mail. Hopefully, if all this magic is through XMPP, we will have sexy integration in Empathy as well.
So at this point, not only has this delayed my disengagement from Google, it has brought me a step closer to getting an Android phone (Apple, stay classy and ignore Google Voice).
This isn’t conclusive, I don’t welcome our new overlords with open hands. My trust is being eroded with age, I just need to hear another horror story about political repression or Google evil doing to decide on personally hosting encrypted everything. Even if it means I will have to spend a few years of my life setting up Asterisk.

My Perfect Data Backup Solution

This might already exist, and I might just be uninformed. When I look for a backup tool that will do what I need, usually I get a scoff in the form of “rsync, dummy”. My computing equipment typically consists of a laptop that I use everywhere, and sometimes even at home, a headless computer at home that I use mostly for music and movies (with a projector), and several external hard drives with varying capacities.
These are my requirements for an awesome backup solution:

Media
Accumulative backup. See what new music, photos or videos I have on my laptop, and copy them to the backup storage. This mode never deletes media that existed in previous syncs. I should be able to download or create new media, and have it stored on the high capacity storage at home, and only carry with me the media that I am currently consuming (I really don’t want to clutter my laptop disk with The Godfather trilogy, but I might want to take it with me on a flight).
Virtual machines
I usually have a small collection of virtual machines on my laptop. They are by far the largest single type of data I have on my machine. Since they support virtual disk snapshots natively, I don’t really care for revisioning like the home folder, virtual machine disks could clobber older versions of themselves on the backup storage.

There are countless backup solutions (read: rsync wrappers) out there. Do any of them answer those needs in a user-friendly way?

Nation Of Misguided Teenagers


“I still don’t understand what I did wrong. Seriously, I don’t understand!” Eden said during a morning radio interview after pictures of her posing next to blindfolded Palestinian detainees were found on her Facebook page.
Of course she doesn’t understand, she spent “the best years” of her life serving in an army of occupation, immersed in a culture that is blind to the humanity of it’s subject population. It’s not a sentiment reserved for the lower ranks, or the middle ranks, it goes all the way up. It’s a mentality where the only people with mothers are people who speak Hebrew. The Israeli army is where youthful experimentation occurs, you get to humiliate, you get to intimidate, and if you are lucky: you get to kill.
“I’ll rephrase my question, Eden, so that perhaps we can learn together how it was wrong…”, the radio host will walk her through it, slowly.
She crossed an invisible line, specifically she embarrassed the IDF, “I hoped there wouldn’t be any media interest” an IDF spokesperson said. But the media showed interest, and that is what turned Eden’s souvenir into “shameful behavior”.
And now Israel’s military, media and political elite must fulfill their solemn role: behave like disappointed adults, and wrinkle their noses in distaste. Another delinquent youth has infiltrated “the most moral army in the world”.
This isn’t of course the first morally corrupt soldier that the IDF has disowned. There are many more, and they have done worse deeds. Mostly these individuals don’t exceed the rank of second lieutenant.
And this is how the IDF keeps it’s legitimacy in it’s own eyes. While the Israeli government and it’s army are accused repeatedly of war crimes and violating human rights, the IDF, through internal inquiry, discovers that all of those heinous acts were committed by the rank and file alone. Where were the brigade and battalion commanders? Where was the regional command? The general staff? They were giving compassionate orders of the utmost morality, but a few teenagers spoiled it for everyone.
“We are a nation surrounded by enemies” Eden tells the the radio host. She doesn’t understand she is outside the fold, she is now a joke. She will repeat all the mantras and clichés she was told that enabled her to see Arabs as less than human. That allowed her to enjoy those army years so much without a hint of remorse or regret. Everyone else will shake their heads: “she doesn’t “get it”, she doesn’t understand how bad this makes us look.