25Sep
I was on a website this evening after work and I saw a poll: “How often do you Google yourself?” It made me stop and think a moment and realize that I haven’t in some time. So I did. And Google found the skeleton in my FOSS closet: I have a Software Patent. System and method for transcribing audio files of various languages (United States Patent 20050091274) was filed by me and my employer at the time (who owns the rights) in 2003 and was published in 2005. Having gone through the process, I have to say it was amazing. It was hard but exciting. It took a long, long time to get through the process and then equally as long to get the actual patent. My employer at the time was very helpful and supportive throughout the process.
It was not long after the patent was finally published that I began to see why software patents were not really a good idea. They stifle innovation, create monopolies, and sadly do nothing to make the world a better place. So I’d like to take this opportunity, as a software patent holder, to encourage you to read up on why I believe we should end software patents.
Perhaps the company that now owns the rights to this patent, having a stated interest in FOSS software, will make a gesture to the community and release it to the public (not really for the content but for the good will it will generate).
18Aug
I think Gregory Haynes and his GSOC project “Kobby” is going to be a killer app for KDE. If anyone is looking for something to do, I could definitely use an obby plugin for Gedit to allow all the fun features of Gedit while still retaining the collaboration activities that gobby provides. Alban has a prototype up using dbus which allows collaborative activities using editors of choice (in his example, VIM and Gedit).
Why do I want such a thing? One of the biggest advatages of the Internet is to allow people around the world to collaborate on FOSS development. We do quite a bit of this collobratation via email but it’s not really a high bandwidth environment (meaning, you can’t accomplish things with the same speed and clarity as you could, for example, in person). IRC is much better since it’s higher bandwidth but you can’t do any Agile Pair programming with it. (Incidentally there was at one point a proposal to use IRC as the backend for collaborative editing. You would use a client application which integrated IRC. You’d hop on a private channel and you could communicate like you do currently plus there would be a control feed as well. The problem with this approach is flood-protection/rate-limiting.) Ideally we as a community would want something similar to what N-Brain did: high bandwidth collaborative editing utilizing a fair amount of Agile practices. So, if anyone feels inspired to help Philip and Armin extend Gobby with additional interface features or develop a Gedit plugin, I think we’d all cheer quite loudly.
Collaborative editing is the killer feature of our decade, regardless of platform.
Edit on 2008-08-19:
John from N-Brain saw this post and told me some interesting things I didn’t know! He writes:
UNA is free for open source projects. It’s a failure of ours that you didn’t know that looking at the website, but we are strong supporters of open source (UNA is built on many open source components itself), and we are keenly aware of the value of real-time collaboration in the dispersed teams that make up 99.99% of open source development.
29Jul
Gregg Pollack just finished his OSCON ‘08 overview video so if you missed OSCON this year, have a look at it. I even make an appearance along with my esteemed colleague, Nick Barcet.
27Jul
As OSCON this year I ran across Steve Savitzky and his album Coffee, Computers and Song which consists of “Songs of hackers, hardware, Silicon Valley, silicon life-forms, artificial intelligence and a bit of natural stupidity”. Sounding like Simon and Garfunkel at times, it’s an interesting and very “folksy” album. Plus, he looks the part. Good Job Steve. I’m looking forward to more tunes from you.
27Jul
Darrin has posted up some Colorado LoCo Team wallpaper if anyone would like it.
24Jul
Today someone let me in on an Easter Egg in OpenOffice which displays all the developer’s names. After a 5 minute wait, lo and behold, my name appears. 
What a nice surprise.
14Jul
Don’t miss the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter next week as they celebrate thier 100th issue with the Ubuntu community. There will be interviews with community members, a retrospect, and insights from past and present UWN staffers. You definitely won’t want to miss this issue, so make sure your RSS feed is up to date, your email subscription is current, or the wiki bookmarked for a very special anniversary issue of the UWN.
08Jul
Ian Clatworthy has announced a new project that aims to extend Agile software development with successful practices used in the Open Source community. The goal is to create and support a process framework that teams and communities, both open source and commercial, can download and customize to meet their needs.
This is a direct offshoot of work that has been happening inside Canonical, especially in the bzr and Launchpad teams.
03Jul
A news article released on July the 1st carries an interesting title: Intuition can be explained.
It was an interesting read to me especially because of the people I work with. Time and again I see people’s intuition about things (potential problems, potential solutions, etc) come to pass. So much so that I have developed a good sense of faith in my colleague’s intuition and when expressed, consider it intensly during decision making.
29Jun
Cool tool alert: My friends are up to something fun, so I thought I’d share it with you.
I use Tomboy religiously. Except for when I travel it’s all but replaced my moleskine notebook. One feature I’ve been waiting for in Tomboy has been task tracking. In lieu, I’ve been updating a Tomboy note called TODO with my TODO list items. I need something better though. Enter Tasque. Tasque is a simple task management app (i.e. TODO list) for the Linux Desktop. It integrates with RTM and exchange too. You can find the Ubuntu packages here. Give it a try!
