UK Linux User Groups

#sweetemotion because the world needs more spider charts.
Love the animated rainbow flower though.

#ontheedge #adobesummit here comes responsive design with edge reflow. About a dozen clicks to mobilise a website. Magic from @keepthebyte

#adobesummit are showing sneaks – previews of possible new features and functionality. Also running a tweet contest real time. Very cool.

I’m in @paolomoz‘ lab on Experience Driven Commerce at #adobesummit. Impressive to see 50 people build a CQ5.6 eCommerce site from scratch!

Great session by @rogerjwoods & @Danalytix at #adobesummit on analytics & targeting on mobile. Easy as baking a cake! developer.omniture.com

Wife and baby in bed, listening to the Beatles on vinyl, idling in IRC waiting for sleepiness. I very much doubt it'll be long.

Turns out that being a parent is quite hard work. Well, not hard exactly - just tiring. It also comes with a pretty total rearrangement of priorities, intended or otherwise. During the later stages of pregnancy (and even some of the first week or two afterwards) while there was quite a bit of waiting around, I had loads of ideas for things I want to write - some I even started writing. I'm talking code and music here. Now, I can only remember one of them and I doubt I'm going to have time to work on it any time soon :S

I don't know if I'm just overly selfish or summat but I feel almost ready to explode through lack of a creative outlet. Geekery might seem like something on the other end of the scale to "creative" but it really, really isn't. Writing code and writing music feel very similar to me. My code usually runs a bit better than my music sounds though ;)

On the upside, I'm working from home tomorrow so that should at least give me a chance to properly focus on getting some work done.

git-aux isn't written with node as I'd previously stated, because I rewrote it in bash :D

#adobesummit kicking off here in Salt Lake City

Why thank you, poorly-implemented VPN, for causing the loss of the last 30 minutes of work. Let’s just pipe to /dev/null, it’s more secure.

Dear Mail.app: I’m a big fan of your maths. “0 messages, 1 unread”. How does that work, exactly? img.ly/sYlN

I threw together a simpler sampler plugin for kicks. Like the other plugins it sounds fairly underwhelming. Next challenge will probably be to try plugging in some real LV2 plugins.

Novice #CQ tip: sidebar on left is the Content Finder. Disable it by taking cf# from URL, e.g. /cf#/content/foo.html to /content/foo.html

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Prevent MacDroppings.
support.apple.com/kb/HT1629
github.com/binaryage/asep…

My day: expletive java expletive mvn expletive docs expletive deprecated expletive missing expletive examples expletive
Don’t code with flu.

The Baremetal MIDI file player was cool, but not quite as cool as a real instrument.

I wired up a MIDI In port along the lines of This one here, messed with the code a bit and voila (and potentially viola), I can play LV2 instrument plugins using a MIDI keyboard:

When I say "LV2 synth plugins", I should clarify that I'm only using the LV2 plugin C API, not the whole .ttl text file shebangle. I hope to get around to that at some point but it will be a while before you can directly plug LV2s into this and expect them to just work.

The constitution of the debian operating system project says things like “consistent with the consensus of the opinions of the Developers” at various points but doesn’t say how strong a consensus or how the project will test for consensus. I think those were mistakes, breaking a couple of the conditions for consensus.

Wikipedia’s understanding of consensus is even worse. Wikipedia seems to treat consensus as a synonym for unanimity. Its testing methods allow an infinite loop to form where the casual observer can’t differentiate between a controversial proposal and consensus. I think those were mistakes.

These famous-but-imperfect implementations frequently lead to misdirected rants which seem to misunderstand consensus as requiring perpetual bikeshedding. Apache’s implementation is rather better – and it may surprise you to learn that our co-op is mostly run by consensus.

There are two key differences which I feel makes consensus work for us: we’ve set limits beforehand on some decisions where we need to act fast – where not making a decision would usually be the same as making a bad decision – and our methods of testing for consensus are better. We test for consensus with secret-at-vote-time-but-published-after straw polls, or using Crowd Wise by email.

I summarise Crowd Wise as follows: gather all ideas plus option 0 (do nothing) if possible, carry out a de Borda (preference) voting round 1, merge/amend/consolidate ideas, voting round 2 if needed. It does still work better if participants put their ego aside a little and co-operate, but it does put limits on non-co-operators.

Anyway, as described in Xana/ xana2/ bamamba/ Why Russ is wrong, debian isn’t exactly using consensus much at the moment, anyway. Should we try to fix its bugs? Do you know other projects where consensus is working?

The @ApacheCon talk I wish I could see is “Open Development in the Enterprise” by @bdelacretaz na.apachecon.com/schedule/prese… shame I can’t make it!

Finder “Open with” is a persistent annoyance with OS X. It’s a shame @gruber wasn’t critical of Apple when blogging it. j.mp/Y2r94F

For others searching on twitter: low or no water pressure in Lewisham SE13? A leak on Lee High Road is the cause says @thameswater helpline.

Charged phone all day. Upgraded to #iOS 6.1.2 last night. Phone totally dead this morning. Seems like the battery issues just got worse

“draped in another set of threadbare attributions” – guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/19…
Fantastic turn of phrase from @hilarymantel. Loved Wolf Hall.