Lee Braiden's Blog » Uncategorized

“389″?

Lee — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 08:09:50 +0000

I just discovered that Fedora Directory Server is now called “389″. First, the awesomely named “firewire” becomes IEEE1394, and now this? Sheesh. I don’t even like using 389 for a tag, much less the name of a major FOSS project.

Gallium3D on AROS

Lee — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:10:38 +0000

Seems that Gallium 3D acceleration is being ported to AROS. Haiku, another non-mainstream OS, has some support already, and of course, Linux and Windows have always been target platforms for Gallium.

At this rate, Gallium might just be the thing we’ve been missing, that can bring 3D features to all platforms, in the same way that all platforms have been able to do decent 2D for a long time. If so, this will be a very welcome change to the IT landscape.

GUI Kernel OOPs Dialogs

Lee — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:49:12 +0000

Hmm. I’m running debian/KDE in virtualbox. A lot of syslog entries just popped up from the systray, quickly followed by some analysis/explanation: the kernel just panicked, and I can submit a bug report.

This is highly cool. Last I knew, kernels just locked up on panic. But to keep going, present nice GUI prompts, and let me submit bug reports over the net? Very nice.

The 1968 Desktop Wiki

Lee — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:09:02 +0000

I just discovered this Mother of All Demos. It’s a very early (1968) IT presentation from Stanford, with the goal of augmenting human office work by giving them a desktop computer.

What’s amazing is that Doug Englebart presents mice, hierarchical information organisation, hyperlinks, diagrams and charts, and email. Conceptually, it’s really not that far from what we’re using today. It has a lot in common with “modern” desktop wikis like Zim (which I’d highly recommend), TomBoy, BasKet, and OneNote.

According to old-computers.com, this is what inspired Xerox PARC, who directly and indirectly inspired X11, MacOS, Microsoft, etc. Of course, something akin to (but too complex/restrictive in comparison to) the web itself was dreamt up WAY before this, back in 1960, with Project Xanadu. I seem to recall something about a microfiche-based hypertext system way before as well — back in the 1920s or so. Anyone know the details on that?

Anyway. Very cool to see that so much was already in place back then, and that desktop wikis are in fact an old concept, revived.

Now, if we could just build that “email” thing he was talking about, we’d be all set for a bright future

Launchpad now Open Source

Lee — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:16:21 +0000

Canonical have now released Launchpad as open source. This is really good news, considering Shuttleworth’s previous stance, which I found quite wrong-headed. Just having Launchpad alone as an Open Source project is great, as it’s a very powerful tool. It’ll be interesting to see if they follow suit with the rest of Ubuntu’s proprietary offerings.

Oh, and it’s written in python

Django used for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Lee — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:06:42 +0000

I don’t know if this has been publicized yet, but a quick google doesn’t show much up about it. I was checking out Amazon’s Mechanical Turk the other day, and it give a Django error page due to an unhandled URL. Interesting.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk showing a Django Error Page

Update: I stand corrected. Seems Amazon MT just embeds other sites’ pages in its page, so this is an error from a third-party host.