Renata

I was going to bed, because it’s getting late and tomorrow is Monday, Monday, so good to me. But did you guys see that? Linus Torvalds himself just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1. I THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS COMING TO A COLOURFUL EXPLOSION before we would be seeing that. But it’s true, you all non believers. I went to kernel.org, and I saw with my own eyes.

For your pleasure, I will reproduce the full announcement

Yay! Let the bikeshed painting discussions about version numbering begin (or at least re-start).

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.

The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let’s face it – what’s the point of being in charge if you can’t pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I’m just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You’ll like it.

Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We’ll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final release should be just “3.0″. The -stable team can use the third number for their versioning.

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

So no ABI changes, no API changes, no magical new features – just steady plodding progress. In addition to the driver changes (and the bulk really is driver updates), we’ve had some nice VFS cleanups, various VM fixes, some nice initial ARM consolidation (yay!) and in general this is supposed to be a fairly normal release cycle. The merge window was a few days shorter than usual, but if that ends up meaning a smaller release and a nice stable 3.0 release, that is all
good. There’s absolutely no reason to aim for the traditional “.0″ problems that so many projects have.

In fact, I think that in addition to the shorter merge window, I’m also considering make this one of my “Linus is being a difficult ^&^hole” releases, where I really want to be pretty strict about what I pull during the stabilization window. Part of that is that I’m going to be travelling next week with a slow atom laptop, so you had better convince me I *really* want to pull from you, because that thing really is not the most impressive piece of hardware ever built. It does the “git” workflow quite well, but let’s just say that compiling the kernel is not quite the user experience I’ve gotten used to.

So be nice to me, and send me only really important fixes. And let’s make sure we really make the next release not just an all new shiny number, but a good kernel too.

Ok?

Go forth and test,

Linus

Need a new challenge for the new week? Now you know what to do.

How do you name your software? Do you want people to be able to pronounce the name of your trendy app in meetings easily, or do you want to make it so unique and distinguishable that every person will have his or her own way to pronounce your beloved application name?

I don’t really know what’s going on on a developer’s mind, as I’m not one, but I deal everyday with the weirdest software names. Will anyone agree on how to pronounce Nagios? Nachos? And Debian – named after the love of Deb and Ian?

Still on the opensource world, we have the Gentoo – couldn’t Drobbins have named his distro after Emperor penguins, much easier? Oh wait, my favourite this week is a paid software, the freaking Axure – nobody here seems to agree on how to pronounce it. Reminds me of the Icelandic volcano. If I’m to write a software with a very recognizable name, I’ll have no doubts and I’ll name it Eyafjallajöware – it’ll blow people’s mind!

After my test week with the N900, I was pretty sure that I just needed a basic smartphone able to do Google Sync. I’m a dirty cheap bastard, and I don’t like long-term commitments with carriers, so I decided to buy the HTC Snap. It’s Windows Mobile 6.5 based with qwerty keyboard and it works on the 100% unlimited plan from Mobilicity.

This phone surprised me in a very good way. I was expecting the worse from a Windows-based phone, and the interface is very good, the connection with Google works wonders, everything is very intuitive and easy to do. Doesn’t look like a Windows OS at all :)

The downside is the AWFUL Windows Marketplace: the apps are expensive and, yeah, totally uninteresting. I just gave up on trying to find apps after a while, don’t even bother.

Guilty pleasure: playing Solitaire on the subway. Gotta love this!

I was happy with the phone, just having problems with Mobilicity coverage. THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED: exactly one month after I bought the toy, I fell asleep on the Trinity-Bellwoods Park and had my purse stolen – yep, with the phone. Is it strange to say that I miss my Windows Phone? Microsoft has done something that I like and I’m not afraid to admit it.

I spent more than a week deciding wether I should buy an Android, like Fabio’s, or use some old phone on a prepaid carrier. After being stolen, the cheapest solution seemed wiser and I’m just a crappy prepaid phone owner now.

About one month ago, WOMWorld sent me a Nokia n900 for a week, so I could test it. For those who are unaware, the N900 is not exactly a smartphone: it’s more like a portable, pocket-sized computer, which also happens to have a cell phone.

The Good

If you’re a geek, in any level, you’ll fall in love at first sight: it’s OMG a cellphone running Linux? I want that thing NOW! The operating system, Maemo, is debian-based, so it makes installing apps a very simple task, and Nokia got it right and the interface is not that confusing thing I got on my old N78 Symbian – yeah I hate Symbian.

You’re usually one or two clicks away from doing what you need and it has a sliding, full-qwerty keyboard. Typing won’t be an issue. It’s REALLY a small computer just the size of your pockets, and worked like a charm on my GSM carrier.

The Bad

Now that you’re in love and you’ve started your relationship, some things will start to annoy you. You’ll need to add extra (“non trusted” in Nokia lingo) repositories, if you want to install really interesting apps – everything in the “default secure trusted” is booooring and old (this is so Debian I should have expected). The adding new repos thing is not that user-friendly if you’re not used to linux.

You’ll also find out that if you want full root access on your command line, there are also some tricks involved. The N900 is now looking like a geek toy but trying to protect you from playing with it.

After solving these issues, I installed ssh, the apps I wanted and tried to set it up for synchronizing with my Google Life. Now comes…

The Incredibly Awful

The N900 doesn’t carry any kind of app that synchronizes with your google calendar, mail or contacts and their Exchange connector doesn’t work with Google. There are some vague solutions on their forum – even suggesting upgrading the firmware! – but, as I only had the N900 for one week, I couldn’t test ALL of them, and the best I could do was to sync my facebook account and contacts and manage my contacts using the awesome app Hermes.

The thing is: even with my old Symbian phone, it was pretty easy to do Google Sync. HOW COME I have a INCREDIBLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICE and it does not do Google Sync? Come on, we’re in 2010, these things HAVE TO WORK. So, this is a major turn off on the N900 for me.

The Veredict

It’s a good gadget, it works and it has great battery life (Nokia is the best for battery life, always). I don’t care about camera or embedded music player – I just need them to work, and if they work, it’s ok for me. But if you’re expecting to transfer your Google Life to your pocket, go buy yourself an Android. I’ll have more amazing cell phone stories to share with you. Stay connected.

About one year ago I bought an Asus eeePC 900, and was totally impressed with the size, weight, everything. But, you know, experience changes everything.

From the beginning: eeePC 900, the old model, features two SSD disks – 16GB and 4 GB. It uses a Celeron M ULV 353 900MHz Processor and I upgraded the RAM to 2GB.

The linux distribution that comes with the eeePC is useless. I’d say awful. Xandros is not even usable by newbies. I don’t even know what is worst, an eeePC running windows or Xandros.
WHY I GAVE UP: Awful interface, user experience, and slowness.

Ubuntu-eee is SLOW. But at least I could manage to configure it according to my needs. But the slowness was a serious issue.
WHY I GAVE UP: It was slow, and they released another version under another name.

Then they turned into EasyPeasy. It was “kind of ok”, but still too slow to do daily tasks like watching videos and listening to music. I gave up.
WHY I GAVE UP: OMG SLOW

My next shot was Crunchbang. I had Crunchbang installed for a long time because I feel it’s very customizable. The guys understood that not every netbook owner is a newbie. And netbooks tend to be slow, so running a minimal environment is always a good choice. But they are Ubuntu-based and they are stuck in Ubuntu 9.04. I tried installing some newer software, like latest pidgin and firefox, but I couldn’t compile the libraries needed without, basically, rebuilding the entire system.
WHY I GAVE UP: It was too out of date for me. Too bad

Jolicloud, with awful netbook interface

I’m looking out for new distros and I know there’ll be a new release of Crunchbang soon. I’m also planning to buy a new, REAL notebook and – uh – BETRAY TEH COMMUNITEH! – as I’m pretty sure I’m getting a good MacBook.

But I still like my eeePC, for being so lightweight and small. And I love to test new stuff, so I’ll keep everyone informed when I choose my new distro. I’m really impressed on how I came to hate my user experience with Jolicloud after only one week. These guys know what they’re doing – NOT!

Everybody loves Facebook, some people can’t live without checking in at foursquare or gowalla, brazilians are crazy about Orkut and tech-savvy professionals have always their profile at Linkedin up-to-date. But, the truth is: only a few people know how to use properly Social Networks.

The Basics: Adding People Just Because

Can someone please explain me WHY people add whoever they find on their way? I’m going to say a sad truth: you WON’T become more famous or popular or whatever because you have one million friends YOU DON’T KNOW. Oh, yeah, you shouldn’t import your whole Gmail address book into your new Social Network account – that’s horrible.

Most networks will offer you the option to scan you contact list to see if, among their registered users, they found a match of your friends. And at this moment you should be wise and think if you know these people well enough to add them on that kind of network. For instance, on Linkedin, you should add only people who have worked or done some kind of business with you – not your friendly neighbour who always invites you for a barbecue. This guy must be on your Facebook.

There’s an important observation regarding networks like Foursquare and Gowalla: it’s useless to add people who live in different cities, as their information won’t be available to you (unless you go visit each other city). These networks are based in geoinformation and writing tips about places in your specific city. Don’t even bother about adding that interesting guy in Tokyo.

I’m a Fan of Everything

People love ice cream, chocolate, movies, all sort of stuff. Then they’ll become fans of ice cream, chocolate, movies about ice cream and chocolate and everything they find. Again, what’s the purpose of joining every group you see? If a group doesn’t seem to have any relevant information about something that might interest you, why join?

Do I need to be in another social network?

Everyday a new social network is born and thousands of people subscribe to their services. And I’m pretty sure as fast as they’re born, they’ll be forgotten. Do you remember friendster? I had an account there and now i can’t even remember what e-mail I used to register. There are social networks for pets (yeah, don’t you know catster and dogster?) but, mostly, they’ll do the same thing. So, why do you need the incredible new one? Another username and password to remember. More time spent at the interwebs. Yeah, right.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that social networks are bad. They have their place on the internet – like that rainboot manufacturer, “Connecting People” – but there are many people on them who aren’t able to connect to each other very well.