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?

After over nine months of hacking, Zeitgeist 0.2 has been released into the wild. Head on over to Launchpad or Siegfried’s blog for the nitty gritty.

It’s worth pointing out that this release is aimed at developers only and includes the Zeitgeist Engine and DataHub. For the rest of you, the Zeitgeist team has been working long nights on a slick new GUI. We’re not quite there yet, but very, very soon we’ll have something good for end users as well!

A big congratulations goes out to the entire team which made this happen. Rock on!

I’m jumping onto the meme a little bit late. I go offline for 24 hours and when I come back at least half of Planet GNOME has blue banners.

However, what disturbed me most about Stallman’s speech wasn’t the rabid rant against Mono and it wasn’t even the fact that he showed his incapability to understand the other side. What troubled me a lot more was his sexist attitude and his total lack of political correctness.

It’s easy to deal with Stallman’s opinion on Mono- you simply let the BoycottNovell group scream as loudly as they can and go about your own way without listening. However, the other issues are a lot harder to deal with: For many people, Stallman represents the open source community. Outsiders judge us based on what he says.

I was happy to see that at least one member of the GNOME Advisory Board stood up against it, and does seem like Stallman wont be invited to speak again in the future. However, why is it that no one else thought it worth their time to address the issue? Focusing on Mono might be more practical in the short term, but if we want to increase the number of women in open source software, it’s not enough to simply avoid echoing Stallman’s comments. We need to stand up and make it clear that this is something that wont be tolerated.

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

I’m not young or naive enough to think that this is ever going to reach meme status, but I wont simply shut up and ignore it. Shame on you, Stallman.

I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer.

(From Nick via Luis via David)

Here’s a quick screencast of what Markus has been working on: He’s mounted a date-based FUSE filesystem using Zeitgeist and recently added html index pages for each day in the calendar.

For example, all documents that were opened on July 10th, 2009 would be in the virtual directory zeitgeist/2009/07/10.

Update: If you’re on Planet GNOME then you can watch the video here.