Well, given that I have not figured out how to traverse the great firewall of Bahçeşehir for SMTP+TLS, or, that is, no mail sending... may I claim "first post" for language bindings for Clutter 0.8!

Guile-Clutter 0.8 is out! Download it here: ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/guile-gnome/blah/dee/blah/dee/blah

Or check the fledgling, love-needing docs.

Hack hack hack hack hack

All the time we are presented with options. Should I get my vegetables from the greengrocer's, the supermarket, or the farmer's market? Should I buy a PC or a Mac? Should I start my new project in Ruby or C#? All of these options are equivalent: they're just vegetables, they're just computers, they're just languages. So how to choose?

Some people make choices on technical grounds: for example, "I'm going to buy a Mac because it has a video editor." This is rational, but its rationality degrades over time. The next time you go to buy a computer, you just buy a Mac because it's what you got last time.

To take another example that Robert Collins mentioned on Monday, if you choose bzr over subversion because bzr does merges, what happens in a few months when subversion finally gets merge support? So you make your decision for a reason that turns out not to mean anything. If people go massively for git because of git's workflow and in-place branching, you can be sure that bzr will get the same workflow in the future, and in fact has some of it now.

What I would suggest is that we should make choices not on strictly technical bounds. Instead we should make a choice based on culture. When you choose something to be a part of your future, it affects your culture, the world around you. You invite a tool, a set of people, a set of social relations into your life and into your future.

Technical considerations form a part of culture. Anyone who knows something about Silverlight and Mozilla knows that the technical differences in the projects reflect different values. These values translate into different futures: a world where technology flows from Microsoft, out to the world, or a world in which hackers collaborate in the open to shape their own destiny, our own destiny.

It is especially important not to make decisions about perceived market share, perceived uptake, or the like. For one, these perceptions are easily manipulated. This is the task of the propaganda industry, euphemistically referred to as "public relations". For another, when we choose to invite e.g. GNU into our lives, we affect the future, and especially that part of the future that is in our immediate surroundings.

So in conclusion, and for the GNOME audience, we as hackers build the structures that we are going to live in for a long time. When we make decisions about technology, we begin relationships with people, and to some degree take their values on as our own. We should make sure that we recognize this, and that the values of the technologies we choose mesh with our own, as individuals and as a community.

(For another take on "what makes us the same are not technical similarities, but cultural similarities", and especially in relation to a possible GUADEC / aKademy joint event, see Lambda, the ultimate political party.)

My camera broke; I have only words.

the golden horn

Istanbul is a town full of wonder. And wander: around the cobbled streets of the old town, in the morning, in the evening, alive at all hours.

Last night I shared a water-pipe under the bridge, looking back on the night silhouette of the old town, smoke rings dissipating over the water. As we were walking back to the hostel some hours later, Dimitris noted the waft of baking bread, the start of a new day.

I stepped out on Sunday morning to the GStreamer mini-summit, but was waylaid by the Blue Mosque. Outside it is grey, hard stone and spired; inside it is lush and tactile, the carpet creeping up between your toes. I believe that space can have rhythm. In that place there was a rich visual soundscape, tiled motifs repeating on the macro level, fractally recursing into micro-vegetation, a symphony of space and lines. I stumbled out into the blue sky.

gstreamer, breakage

The GStreamer summit was pretty good. We decided to switch to git (from CVS), once some issues are ironed out regarding history and our "common" submodule. We also decided that at some point we should do a new development cycle, but that we needed reasons for doing so; the idea would be to develop a number of features that cannot be done with 0.10 in experimental branches, and once there are enough branches, we pull them together in a quick 0.11 and from there to 0.12 or 1.0. This would be a process that could take a year or two.

In that regard, some interesting points were brought up regarding GLib and GTK+'s plan to break ABI for version 3. The problem is that any library that depends on GLib will break ABI as well, and that includes GStreamer. So given that we will need to break ABI to depend on GLib 3, that gives us a good timetable for a next development series, corresponding to GLib 3's release in about 16 months. I suspect that many projects will want to do the same.

Hackers, slackers, countrymen and countrywomen:

Guile-Gnome-Platform, that beast of the dual hyphen, has finally reached stability. You might say that the API and the ABI are as stable as the hills, but we like to put it like this: "Write once, run anywhen"

(Amused tittering)

From the release notes:

There are several things that are the awesome about this code:

• It's fully integrated!
  Instances of GObject are objects in Scheme; you can query their properties, class hierarchies, etc at runtime. You can derive new types yourself, with signals, properties, and the like. Good stuff!

• It's fully documented!
  Start with the tutorial/reference docs for the core GObject wrapper, then branch out into individual modules.

• Fully extensible!
  Guile-Gnome-Platform also provides a good base off of which to bind other libraries based on GLib. For example, Guile-Clutter binds almost all of the new Clutter library, with documentation, and most of that work was done in a day.

• Stable!
  Write once, run anywhen! Guile-Gnome's API and ABI will never be changed incompatibly.

• Scheme!
  You will be assimilated, or alternately, gnawed to death by fingernail clippings.

More info at the homepage. DANGER CAPTAIN: ASSIMILATION IMMINENT

Good evening!

Here the evening is good indeed -- tepid air, the kind where you don't know it's there until it moves, or you move: skin temperature. We don't get too many colored cloud sunsets, but today there was sky-drama over the wasteland of la Sagrera.

q

I have a question, to those in the know. It's nargery. I have a machine with intel graphics, a GM965. It claims to support the texture_from_pixmap extension, but I have not been able to make it work, neither in my own code nor in that of others. I whine about it more in the fedora bugzilla. What's the dilly?

conversations

I'm in a fortunate position to have readers that might just be able to answer that question. This is mostly a result of being syndicated on Planet GNOME, although Advogato and individual subscribers do play a role. But it is good to write for an audience.

In that regard, I think that Advogato is a much more appropriate system for publishing and reading, for conversation, than are the various planets out there. Advo has no barrier to entry; anyone can start writing. You can syndicate your writings from elsewhere, like you can with a planet, or write them there if you feel like it. If your writings are good, or interesting, then folks will read them. If some people don't like them, they don't have to see them. If no one likes them, no one will see them.

Granted, present-day advogato does have its problems. It seems that its model of trust has drifted too far from the root nodes; my ratings never affect someone's rank, even to go from observer to apprentice. "Apprentice", while it does correspond to reality in some sense, is seen as demeaning; everyone wants to be a journeyer, if not a master. The front-page articles have been of low quality for a long time. But the diary "interesting-ness" ratings do seem to have stood the test of time.

Project-specific aggregators like Planet GNOME are great. They're wonderful for community, and good for communication too: "this is who we are". But I do miss the easy anarchy of Advogato. Maybe it's time to make an antiplanet, running on mod_virgule. Thoughts?