The world spun when I heard Steve Jobs died. Steve Jobs was you and me. He was an inventor, an investor and a visionary, but above all else he was human.

Steve was an orphan and a dropout. He was a cancer victim and survivor. He was the entrepreneur who failed and succeeded. He was the bitter young business man who fell from grace and out of sight. But then he came back and rose higher than ever. Who doesn’t use his products today? Who doesn’t know his name?

There was a little bit of all of us in Steve Jobs and we saw Steve Jobs in ourselves too. He was always there, he always fought on, and he seemed invincible. But today the illusion has been shattered. There is all too much in common between Steve Jobs and ourselves. Steve the survivor is dead. There is no hiding from death today.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

- Steve P. Jobs, Stanford, 2005

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, alongside side topics including developer documentation and Mono.

A few highlights:

•  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.
• 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 applicatio
• 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.)
• 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.