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• I won 5th place in the Robonir Firefighting Robotics contest a few weeks ago. On April 11th, I’ll be competing in the international finals with the rest of the Israeli team at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
• This week I participated in the Safe Cracking Physics Contest at the Weizmann Institute and my team took 2nd place internationally and 1st place out of the Israeli teams. I had fun meeting members of the Canadian and Slovenian team and going out in Rehovot.
• Figured out today that pressurized Butane/Propane can be used to read unopened letters by spraying the envelopes until they’re wet and transparent. It dries almost immediately leaving absolutely no trace.
• Just saw the Zeitgeist talk proposal for GUADEC. Are we already at that time of year? Reading over the proposal gave me nostalgia. Maybe I’ll have time to be more involved after the Trinity robotics contest.
• Been thinking about plans for the future lately and I’m leaning away from computer science and towards engineering. Not sure if/how that changes my plans for the near future.

We’re looking for web developers to help out with Zeitgeist’s website. If you have some experience with web development (of any kind) and don’t mind volunteering some time then let me know.

Thanks.

I left Bolzano back for Munich this morning. Here are a few quick thoughts on the Linux Desktop.

• Every year I read four or five magazine articles claiming that this year will be “The Year of the  Linux Desktop.” Every article so far has been wrong, but I’m starting to think that this year and coming years will be “The Year that Millions of Users Switched to Linux and Didn’t Even Realize.” After Dave Richard’s talk last year in Boston, I realized that there are some governments and large offices using Linux, but I just didn’t grasp how many. This past week I spoke to a few people about the topic, including Sebastian Faubel, a few employees of the South Tyrol Free Software Center, and others. All of them spoke about the push to switch to FOSS for financial reasons and how Linux is now being used in places that one would never expect.
• If we want this year to be the year of the Linux then we need to start developing differently. Linux needs to stop being the domain of geeks. We need to start targeting older users who are intimidated by computers. This means that we need to stop making assumptions about what users do and don’t understand. We need to focus on simplicity and usability.
• It’s a critical moment right now. As crazy as it sounds, lets stop focusing on 99% of all computer users. Sure, they’re important- and we definitely shouldn’t do anything to stop them from switching- but they’ve already had their “Year of the Linux Desktop.” Lets focus on the remaining 1% of all computers- some of the computers found, lets say, in government offices. We can get Linux installed on them if we develop with those computers in mind.

Here’s a quick mockup from the Zeitgeist Hackfest.  The code for this should be online later today.

In 12 hours I’m going to board a plane at Ben Gurion Intl Airport for Munich. 8 hours later I’ll take a train to Italy and only 3 hours after that I’ll arrive in Bolzano, Italy for the Zeitgeist Hackfest.

Many thanks go to the GNOME Foundation and Canonical for sponsoring the hackfest and to the South Tyrol Free Software Center for organizing and hosting it.

I’ll see you in Bolzano!

From Google Israel:

I’m not sure where to report a bug for Ubuntu’s download page. My blog is aggregated on planet.gnome.org so I’m sure that the appropriate people will read this:

Ubuntu’s DVD downloads need to be updated. Right now anyone who clicks on them will start downloading Hardy Heron.

Today I met with Clemens Buss (creator of Project Gothenburg) who’s doing research for his masters at the Weizmann Institute. We talked for half an hour about Zeitgeist, Feedgeist, and Gothenburg, along with an entrée of side topics including developer documentation and Mono.

A few highlights:

1. It’s very easy to extract (or log) lots of useful information on the desktop. However, to date, no one has actually succeeded in doing anything useful with that metadata.

2. People have developed successful user interfaces for very specific types of metadata. (E.g. F-Spot, Rythmbox, etc.) Perhaps the approach that Zeitgeist should take is to develop totally separate user interfaces for browsing web bookmarks, local files, and other types of documents. After perfecting each user interface separately, we can slowly merge them into one application.

As much as we’d like there to be one user interface that works for everything, there are differences between different types of documents that we can’t ignore. (For example, users usually have many websites in their history which can make the small number of important local files in their history seem to be less significant.)

3. Stick to well-defined use cases and make sure to justify code that you write.

On a different note, I just heard an amazing lecture by Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) this evening. Overall, the past week at Weizmann has been truly wonderful- I love the lab I’m working in and the entire place is growing on me fast.

Yesterday I arrived at the Weizmann Institute for the Amos De Shalit summer program. For the next two weeks, I’ll be working in a chemistry lab which studies nanoparticles.

Unfortunately, sleeping (somewhat) does take priority over open source projects I’m working on, but that doesn’t mean that everything will have to wait until Amos De Shalit is over. I do plan on continuing work- especially on Feedgeist- but it’ll have to be done at a slightly slower pace.

For some educational fun, I’ve decided to build a RepRap with my younger brother.

RepRap 1.0 Darwin

Here’s the description from the website:

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown above – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend…

Has anyone built a RepRap before?