I have been to FOSDEM 2005 this weekend. fukami has already blogged about it. It’s a meeting for open source developers and quite a lot showed up (although I doubt the official number of 3500, it was closer to 1500 to 2000 for me – but that’s just my impression). So the event is about development and so is this

The event is free (as in beer) for the participants although you are kindly asked to leave a donation. They are selling expensive t-shirts to give you options. The venue is one of the ugly buildings of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Quite a lot of rooms for people to talk, not much space for exhibition which is a pity. Also the exhibition area could have been a bit warmer, but I doubt there was a chance to do anything about that as it was fucking cold this weekend.

One of the bigger annoyances was Richard Stallman who talked about possible changes to copyright law. While his talk was not totally disappointing it didn’t deliver any glorious insights worth mentioning. However, I could have lived with his statements if he would have been open to comments and discussion. But when people started asking questions he exposed an unbelievable arrogance. When people haven’t been clear enough (mainly general english problems – not unlikely to happen for non-native speakers) he refused to answer because he „can’t understand the person“ talking to them third person. Such an asshole…

Jimbo Wales‚ introductory talk about Wikipedia was fine. He adapted well to the audience and pushed the projects main problems they face at the time: developers. They do not have enough developers to deal with problems like the overall growth in terms of users and data, the overwhelming traffic and the need for more sophisticated features in the software, especially to deal with meta-data.

Alan Cox‘ talk on his personal approach to Linux kernel development was a revelation. For a while now, he produces his own version of the Linux kernel dubbed -ac. this kernel is an alternative to the „official“ kernels of Linus Torvalds that usually introduce a ton of changes that tend to break a lot of things. In order to compensate, the -ac kernel tries to be more conservative. He doesn’t use the same revision system, he applies patches depending on taste and his tools are diff, patch and evolution („the search engine works for me“). Impressive, but the Linux kernel development model is a mess.

I hope, the public will wake up one time and shift the hype to the threeBSDsystems, where it belongs. Their development model is by far more professional as is the code that results from this model.

This is my comeback. With a new blog. Please note that the RSS feeds have changed as I have moved from MovableType to WordPress. You’ll see this message if you have subscribed to the old feed but you won’t see anything else until you changed your subscription to the new feed.

Parents: don’t get pwn3d by kids‘ 1337sp33k

The new PowerBooks have this fancy feature allowing you to scroll by touching the Touchpad with two fingers instead of just one. Cool approach. If you want to have this for your old PowerBook or iBook (you nee to have the „enhanced touchpad“ for this feature to work), you should have a look at iScroll2 which brings this capability to some of the older models as well.

Well, here I am again. After a significant break of more than two months I am back on track.

I have switched to the most recent version of the excellent WordPress blog software and I hope that this will serve my needs. Please note the new RSS feed URLs.

Congratulations. Just in time for the next round of Apple‘s Design Award at the World Wide Developer‘s Conference, the Coding Monkeys have released version 2 of the super cool SubEthaEdit collaborative editor.

SubEthaEdit 2 brings a host of new features. Among the more interesting are read-only access, a by far more bandwidth-efficient network protocol, invitations, IPv6 support, iChat and Mail integration, regular expressions and much more.

Der Zahlentisch (the number table) is a brand new interactive installation by ART+COM for the new 10+5 = Gott exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It‘s a really nice user interface and works really well. Check out this movie to get a clue.

The system is running on Windows, is programmed in Java, using OpenGL via JOGL and QuickTime for movie integration. The user interface uses capacitor foil to detect the peoples hand movements.

Yes, today is RSS day. Brent points us to RSS Feeds of recent earthquakes. Nice. Start feeling it rumble below me….

I was a bit picky when taking a look at Konfabulator, a subsystem for Mac OS X allowing you to run menu-less widgets on your desktop. Widgets are written in JavaScript and usually do just a small thing much in the tradition of the UNIX toolbox („do one thing well“) but with the beauty of Mac OS X icons. Back then I was looking for my „killer widget“ in Konfabulator and I didn‘t find it.

Checking it out once more recently finally revealed even three of the that are now running on my desktop.

1. The first killer widget is „Weather“ which comes bundled with the standard download. Just enter the name of your city into the preferences and the tool displays current weather conditions in more than well-designed graphic style on your desktop. You even get a two-day lookahead, ideal for couch potatoes that consider even a short peek at the outside a unworthy loss of computing time.
2. Number two is „Calendar“, simply showing the current month with the current day highlighted and no other useless extra features.
3. Number three, actually forcing me being a convert, is the well-hidden „iChat Bezel„, just recently improved by and called „iChat Bezel Enhanced“ with a bunch of welcome extra options. This widget couples with iChat and displays a OS X style „bezel“ window (lie the ones for brightness, volume etc.) for every status change of one your buddies. So you can immediately see when one of your buddies goes online or offline, becomes idle etc.

The creativity of widget designers seems to be endless. I just discovered a widget called „Berlin Clock“ that mimics the fancy „Ku-Damm Uhr“ that once stood in the center of Berlin (West) at Kurfürstendamm.

By the way: Konfabulator was just updated for Mac OS X 10.3 with version 1.5.2. The iChat Enhanced Bezel needs to be updated to work with this version. But you can do it for yourself: version 1.5.2 uses a new XML parser that seems to be a bit more strict (which is a good thing). The iChat Bezel widget uses a (non-standard) „macintosh“ encoding in one of its files so it does not parse. Heres how you fix it:

1. Locate the „iChat Enhanced Bezel“ widget file in the Finder
2. Select the „Show Package Contents“ action from the context menu
3. Locate the „iChat Alert.kon“ file in the „Contents“ folder
4. Drag the file to the TextEdit application
5. Replace „macintosh“ with „utf-8“ in the first line. The file does not contain any non-ASCII characters so this is not a problem
6. Save the file
7. Restart Konfabulator and double-click the widget in the Finder to open it