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Tehran is dark, cold tonight, I can hear screams. scary #iranelection

– A tweet from mohamadreza one hour ago

I’ve been reading the news about the Iranian elections with growing angst. I find a few things particularly disturbing.

Unrest in Iran

1. Where is the mainstream media’s coverage of what’s going on in Iran? CNN has one minor article with 3 pictures on the topic. The article makes the entire situation seem like a small incident which will blow over by tomorrow. 
2. Cell phone networks seem to have been down following the election, and social networking sites like Facebook were blocked. The entire thing reeks of foul play.

Thanks to Behdad for posting the first real news I saw about the elections. Your post grabbed my eye when it hit Planet GNOME.

During the last two weeks I took my English, computers, and math matriculation exams. I have the physics exam this Thursday and then I’ll just be left with history and Hebrew lang for another two weeks.

Sorry for disappearing up until now, but I’ll be back online as soon as exams are finished. In the meantime, be sure to read RainCT’s summary of the Zeitgeist presentation at UDS

UbuntuOne just went live.

You can get a beta invite at http://ubuntuone.com/

Today I participated in the CodeGuru Extreme contest at the Weizmann Institute and took 2nd place.

Congratulations to all of the other winners!

Seif has done some very neat work on Zeitgeist lately. I’ve been away from coding in order to take care of personal work, but here are a few of the items on my TODO list:

1. Implicit tagging of files/documents- There are endless mountains of information on the user’s computer and on the web that can give us hints about a user’s files. I’d like to use some of this information in order to automatically sort and tag files. (E.g. Popular Delicious tags can be used to automatically label a user’s bookmarks.)

2. Automatic grouping of documents based on tags and the time they were accessed.

3. A new database design.

4. Better Open File dialogs- I’d like to display file suggestions to users based on their past file history and the list of currently open files.

Two months ago, I began working on GNOME Zeitgeist with Seif Lotfy. We were frustrated about usability problems with the current GNOME desktop, and we had several ideas about how we wanted to fix them. Under guidance from Thorsten Prante and Federico Mena-Quintero, we began programming a Python prototype.

Over time, we experimented with different interface designs as well as the underlying architecture. We played around with the journal-like interface that Federico suggested, added support for tagging,  and switched to a sqlite database.

Right now, we have a basic architecture in place. From here, we’re going to move on to more interesting elements. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to do some work with Seif on implicit tagging and user contexts. Both the backend and frontend have major rewrites planned.

If you have any ideas for Zeitgeist, feel free to drop either Seif or myself an email.

Just to provide a quick visual roundup on what’s been going in with Universal Applets the past week, here are a few snapshots of recent changes.

Read the rest »

I just saw this email on GNOME’s Desktop Development mailing list:

> Then we can build on top of that to provide locations so you can
> switch the usage profile, the proxy configuration, VPN settings and
> other stuff basing on where you sit (and get bonus points for
> detecting locations basing on stuff like current wireless network).
> Anyway that's a whole different story and does not belong in this
> thread.

This sounds a lot like Marco Polo for MacOS, which I started cloning as
Shackleton (http://burtonini.com/bzr/shackleton/).

Ross Burton

For those of you who don’t know, Marco Polo tracks your computer usage and will automatically update locations and configurations based on your environment.

Ross, I’m looking forward to it!

Introduction

Rodney Dawes wrote an interesting post that I saw on Planet GNOME a few weeks back. Here’s one excerpt that I found noteworthy:

The Future is not your desktop. It is mobile devices. It is tablets. It is holographic displays and interfaces. It is flexible transparent screens. It is your television, your appliances, your home, your car. It is all the things we haven’t even scratched the surface of, for sensible user interface design. It is networked storage, with your content being accessible wherever you are, be it in your living room, kitchen, hotel 5000 miles away, or a boat in the middle of the ocean. If we want to move into the future, and not get left behind, we need to start thinking about this, not what new shiny method of accessing a 50 year old 2D desktop is best. None of them are best.

The bolded bit is particularly interesting. Cloud computing is not simply a phenomena that we’re likely to see at some point in the future. It’s already here. Today. Every time that someone uploads a photo to Flickr, they’re going out onto the cloud. Every blog post, Google Document, and even email is a little whisp in the clouds. This is where people are working, playing, living, and- most of all- sharing.

Read the rest »

If you’re interested in helping make Universal Applets 0.1 happen, there’s now a list of all the bugs and blueprints that need to be fixed or implemented before the release. Check it out here.

I’m a bit bogged down with school work at the moment, but I’d love to review some patches!