Beagle

Mankiw on the corporate income tax:The ultimate payers of the corporate tax are those individuals who have some stake in the company on which the tax is levied. If you own corporate equities, if you work for a corporation or if you buy goods and ... [More] services from a corporation, you pay part of the corporate income tax. The corporate tax leads to lower returns on capital, lower wages or higher prices—and, most likely, a combination of all three.Krugman on embedded versus non-embedded inflation:Imagine that there are two entrepreneurs, Harry and Louise, both of whom change prices only at fairly long intervals—say, once a year. Other things equal, Harry want his average price over the next year to be about the same as Louise's; Louise wants her average price to be about the same as Harry's. But their price setting takes place on different dates. (This is a metaphor for the real economy, in which people setting prices have to think about the prices of many competitors and suppliers that will prevail until they revise the price again.) In this situation, inflation can feed on itself: Harry raises his price above Louise's, because he expects her to raise her price in the future, and she does the same thing when it's her turn.Love on the 2008 US Presidential election:Clinton, citing Puerto Rican victory, soldiers on ... PR cannot vote in general ... Obama 48 delegates shy of lockBiz Stone on why the above is so damn slow:We currently use one database for writes with multiple [sources say two] slaves for read queries. As many know, replication of MySQL is no easy task, so we've brought in MySQL experts to help us with that immediately. We've also ordered new machines and failover infrastructure to handle emergencies. [Less]

Crane Beach, Ipswich, MA

Road rules: 1 in 6 drivers would flunk (CNN money) About one in six U.S. drivers wouldn’t be able to pass a written driving test if they took it today, according to a new study. Drivers in the Northeast continued to have the lowest scores and the ... [More] highest failure rates, with New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia maintaining their three-year streak in the bottom five rankings. SUVs plunge toward ‘endangered’ list (CNN) Jorge Fernandez makes his way through the car lot littered with unwanted SUVs. “I’ve never seen it this bad,” the auto dealer says. With gas prices at an all-time high, one expert says SUVs and trucks as personal cars may soon be an “endangered species.” [Less]

So, I recently saw some more updates on the Gnome Live wiki regarding the evolution of a ‘Semantic Desktop’. I have some bad news people: Its not going to happen. Now before everyone spends 20 minutes explaining all the ways it could, let me clarify ... [More] my point. It’s a largely unattainable goal, which if it ever were to complete, would be a horrible user experience. I think somewhere between RDF, FoaF, and ObjectRank we lost sight of the original goal of a Semantic Desktop. We wanted to organize, present and store data in a fashion more congruent with the human mind. The general effort behind the Semantic Web and Desktop movements was to reduce the ‘multiplier effect’ of communication. (Take for example one e-mail sent to a mailing list, the file and data is now duplicated a hundred times over, and each receiver must filer or classify the e-mail with relationship to themselves). On the scale that communication takes place over the web, this effort is still crucial, but in the desktop world, where we operate on a billionth of the scale, that problem is not nearly as pervasive. No doubt the advances made in understanding and structuring the mass hysteria of the web will benefit desktop users, but I think forcing that structure onto the desktop is not only impossible, but counter-productive. In my opinion the options are clearly laid out before us: 1) Move the desktop into the structured realm of a million and one tags/categories/color filters/labels/folders - Or - 2) Get rid of it all. And just know what the user wants. (Ok, not really all of it, but instead of adding more hierarchies, we add more in-place understanding) I know, its a bold statement, but somewhere between my tags, stars, labels, folders and emblems I realized that all these efforts we were making towards ease of use and understanding are just obfuscating things even further.  These elaborate systems that require users to squeeze into sub-par standards like iCal exacerbate the problem even more, and ignore the efficiency of simple systems, like a pad of paper. (Yes, props to Tomboy). The problem is, many times a blunt-simple interface requires significantly more work on the programmers side (to actually understand the data entered) than a more traditional tabs-and-forms approach. I think we are demanding too much from users, how many people actually keep their address book completely updated? Or tag all their photos, or keep every document in the right folder? Even those who are vigilant eventually fall behind, and that’s because users already know what the material they are filling is, but still have to spend time explaining to the computer which items are related and where they belong. Especially for users with large sets of desktop data (Few thousand docs,e-mails,photos, and songs) the time can add up. Instead of asking users to commit even more time for data integrity and organization with more tagging systems. The way I see it, we can count on 2 skills from a Desktop user. 1) Searching ( ThankYou Google!! Most people are quite comfortable with search phrasing!) or more accurately, knowing what they are looking for 2) To use their computer even when they aren’t looking for something (ie content generation, surfing the web, chat etc.) These are the common denominators that we should be reaching for. We shouldn’t be trying to make the user classify their relationship with each person in their address book, we should just always be there, identifying the relationship based upon their level of interaction. And on a higher level than traditional approaches have taken us. After working on the Beagle Project for some time, the incredible weight of maintaining the backends to communicate with each mail client, each rss reader and each chat client almost seems to drown out the gain from having the data in a central and unified place. I mean, each time it was just someone talking to someone else right? Why have we taken simple actions and tried to codify them, when the complexities of human behavior are so great any Psychologist would tell you its a guessing game anyways. I think we should start with the disorganized mess that is someones workday at a computer and ask for nothing else. Reverse the system, take all of our analytical energies and structure, and use it for ourselves, in the backend, and just have the users use computers. The best example of this is the phenomenon of tagging. Basically associating like objects via keyword-phrases. The problem is tags restrict themselves, lets say I have created a blog post about web browsers, while the tags ‘html, web, mozilla, ie’ may indeed be the most accurate 4 words from my point of view, they in no way approach the whole set of meanings and connotations carried by all their synonyms, let alone the entire post. In the realm of multimedia, tags are more useful, as images and videos are harder to extract contextual value from, but there is a better way…. Lets be smart! Instead of trying to stem the tide of data to make it more manageable, we ride the wave! Data is very rarely stagnate on a machine, people send photos to friends, edit each others papers, and share music all the time, there is a wealth of information in the chat I have with a friend while he listens to the new song I sent him, we just need to grab it! I have specifics and even a little bit of code for my next post, but until then, I want feedback, do people agree? I mean, yeah, a million and one more ways for me to catalog and store my data, but when I’m actually looking for something the tags never seem to help much. While tags and folders do help with the clutter problem, I want to propose the idea that we move completely beyond presenting the hierarchy to the user, and start determining how (from the most basic of usage data) we could better present/organize information. Is the ubiquitous search box the only UI system that fits? What about something like Dasher meets lowfat, powered by an incredible datastore, but for files? [Less]

One of my most fun responsibilities at Novell is running the SUSE Incubation Team: a  small team of developers focused on innovation, prototyping, and exploratory hacking.  Our charter is to come up with disruptive ideas that take Novell's Linux ... [More] business in exciting new directions. The team is a diverse group, ranging from web developers who love working in Ruby on Rails to kernel hackers and virtualization experts, and it's a great privilege to work with them.  We have an upbeat culture that's tolerant of experimentation, we're obsessive about delivering innovative and amazing experiences to our users, and we hold each other to high standards.  Besides our exploratory development work, the team is also responsible for running the twice-a-year SUSE Hack Week. As it happens, one of our projects — an innovative web application — is starting to look promising and so we're working on getting it ready for a limited public beta.  And we're looking for a few talented, energetic developers to help us get there. The job descriptions are below.  Keep in mind that we're not looking for specialists: we're a small team, and we need people who are willing and happy to shift gears whenever necessary. If any of these sound interesting to you, mail us your CV/resume. We're open to hiring people in any location, but we have a slight preference for people who can work in Nürnberg, Germany, and a preference for people close to the UTC 1 timezone.  We offer competitive salaries and benefits in a fun, tight-knit team. Quality Engineer If you believe that quality is priority one and that great QA also means writing code, then this could be the job for you.  We are looking for a skilled programmer to help create and run a robust testing environment for an innovative new web service. Your responsibilities will include building and maintaining a test harness and test environments; automating UI testing of our web application; monitoring and analyzing test results; helping to fill in unit and functional tests; creating test environments; and playing the role of bugmaster in our bugzilla. The ideal person will be a strong programmer who can tell a good bug report from a bad one, will consider themself a whiz at scripting (shell, perl - whatever works for you), and will enjoy understanding the ins and outs of a sophisticated system. Deployment and Release Engineer Interested in designing and operating a streamlined deployment architecture for a cluster of several hundred cores? We are looking for an engineer to architect and manage the build, release and deployment infrastructure for our new web service. Your responsibilities will include creating and maintaining deployment scripts; creating deployable packages and images; system administration of production machines; building RPM packages and virtual images to simplify deployment; and setting up and maintaining a cluster monitoring infrastructure. Linux packaging and system administration skills, and experience deploying web applications are a must; experience with Ruby on Rails is a plus; solid programming skills and a strong focus on delivering a great user experience are required.  Infrequent travel to our data center in Boston will also be required. Developer This position will be working today on the core of our web application, which is mostly written in Ruby on Rails, Perl and in C.  Ideal candidates will be creative self-starters with a strong focus on user experience and performance, and will have good communication skills and experience working in teams. Because of the nature of our team, we can't allow ourselves to be defined by the tools we happen to be using at any given time.  Today you might be writing Ruby on Rails, but tomorrow you could find yourself knee-deep in C: whatever it takes to get the job done.  Above all, we're looking for smart programmers who don't mind learning a new codebase or a new language overnight, and who are willing to hit a few dead ends before arriving at the perfect solution.  We're also looking for people who are good writers, and with good design skills. If you're applying for this position, please send us some code that you've written that you're particularly proud of. [Less]

So, I think most of the open source world has agreed that the DRCS model fits our working style better than the traditional model pushed by SVN and CVS etc. And in this DRCS world we have rallied around 3 main tools: Bzr, hg, and git. And in an even ... [More] greater display of complacency we have given those 3 tools quick and general classifications that became obsolete almost a year ago. Bzr is user friendly but slow and technologically inferior, hg is the champion of the middle but with slow development and a lackluster community, git is wicked fast and ‘The Right Way’TM but a pain to use. Really? Come on guys, those molds were cast almost a year and a half ago, isn’t it time we looked at things again? Git has an entirely new interface, hg has a slew of plugins/extensions, and bzr has a completely new repo format, and network protocol, resulting in a massive speedup. Now I’m not claiming to be some unbiased source, and comparing 3 incredibly robust tools is not my job, but given the amount of support that Git receives from its very vocal supporters makes me feel a need to give props to my favorite DRCS system: Bazaar. That’s right, Bazaar (or bzr) is awesome. Sure, git is awesome too, and so is mercurial, but I have found myself loving bzr. I’m not going to attack other DRCS tools, I just want to extol the awesomeness that is bzr. 1) Bzr is Python-Tastic! - As a python hacker, being able to utilize a robust API and plugin system is a cool plus, this also generates lots of powerful and complete plugins, which leads me to the next point. 2) Bzr has a ton of plugins! - Plugins like bzr-avahi (allows the discovery of branches on a local network, great for sprints/hackfests), bzr-svn (makes working with upstream repositories easy as pie!), quilt and gtk tools. 3) Bzr works on Windows - Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of accommodating Windows users, but it makes collaboration easier, I don’t have to make my roommate boot into Ubuntu to lend a hand with some CSS bugs. 4) Bzr is easy to share - The ability to push branches to some central repo is a big component of distributed development. While patches work in some cases, most of the time, having access to a branch makes the whole system work better. Both Git and Hg require a bit of work to set up a new repo and push a branch, bzr supports a ton of protocols and can create the target directory/repo with one command. Sharing is easy! 5) Bzr is fast - Maybe others are faster, maybe it could be a million times faster, I dunno. What I do know is the only thing I seem to wait on is my net connection… I realize that many people need more than that. So here you go. http://bazaar-vcs.org/Benchmarks 6) Bzr is small - In my development model (a shared repo with branches inside of it) bzr is compact and aware of disk space, without repositories it might be huge, I dunno. 7) Bzr is clear about whats happening - I can follow what Bzr is trying to do with my code. A branch is a new directory, and I can always see my code. Not only is this comforting/reassuring, but I often utilize IDE’s like Wing, Eclipse, or Monodevelop when working on code, and while they can handle other systems, directories for branches translates to every editor and works well. Bzr is reliable - A massive suite of unit-tests and a commitment to their excellence offers some comfort that I won’t be left holding half of my code in one hand and an ugly binary blob in the other. 9) Most of all, its a feeling. Its hard to explain, but I don’t notice bzr. Its just there, and I just have my code. I rarely take notice of it, and don’t focus on it. I spend 99% of my time coding and every 30 min I enter a terminal for a few seconds to do all my DRCS stuff. Maybe its why people who use Bzr aren’t very vocal about it. Its not a revolution in revision control, and I don’t do a million cool things in it. I just write code, and bzr is there, doing whatever it does. [Less]

We're looking for a neat, meticulous person to help us rack and wire some servers next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday. The tasks are unboxing, carrying, mounting, screwing, wiring, and testing the servers.  Pay is $20/hour, duration is until we're ... [More] done, location is in Waltham (we'll pay for your transport). If you're interested, send mail to [email protected] and mention any relevant experience or skills. [Less]

If your in the greater Salt Lake area and love python swing by the meeting this evening! We’re doing a python editor head-to-head, should be fun!

Become famous and then blog about it. Its easy (the blogging part). And it works [1a, 1b].Now if only someone famous blogged about some other literal showstoppers in beagle and KNetworkManager, some more Kubuntu users would be happy [2]. Beagle is ... [More] second class citizen in Ubuntopia, but I thought KNetworkManager is important.One thing I noted though, since Beagle was moved to Universe from Main, it is getting better treatment. Periodic sync from debian is actually happening unlike when it was in main; the core Ubuntu developers rarely found time to update the Beagle package. Kudos to Masters of the Universe![1a]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/galago-sharp/ bug/186049/comments/9[1b] http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/hardy-heron-review.ars/3[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/beagle/ bug/207157 [Less]

So we (some of us students) met and decided to do something about the sudden implementation of the Internet shutdown from 0000-0600. Some updates:The intimation about doing this was sent at 2357 hours today (yesterday, to be precise) to all. The ... [More] notification basically stated that because of “undesirable activities”, Internet will, with immediate effect, be disabled from 0000 to 0600 every day. And that’s it -- poof. The hostel network is disconnected from the rest of the Institute, thus making sure that nobody can access the Internet (or even the Institute’s own computing facilities). To compensate, the Computer Center (with a capacity of <200 computers) is to be kept open 24x7.Of course, this was unacceptable, so a bunch of us decided that something needs to be done. There are 2 issues -- the decision, and how it was implemented. While the decision itself needs discussion (more about this later), the implementation is of immediate concern. People were not prepared, and work on several people's theses were affected. Plus, this has been done just a little after the end-semester exams, when most students are not on campus. This sort of fascism usually rears its head under precisely these circumstances. We decided that what needed to be addressed right now is the implementation -- the Internet has to be made available this night.A couple of our student representatives spoke to the Dean of Student Affairs (the DoSA -- the official channel between the students and the administration). The DoSA basically said that they, the various Deans and the Director (and Deputy Director?) have made the decision at nothing would be done about it. More precisely, the Director, as the highest power in the Institute has taken the decision and that's that. Further discussion may be taken up with him.About 60-70 of us went to the Director's house at about 2:30 (the entire process was peaceful -- there was not shouting or slogans). We met with the security, who called the Head of the Computer Center (CC) and the DoSA to the place after some attempted dodging.The CC Head turned up first and started asking what our problem was. He offered such resources as a vehicle to transfer us from hostel to CC as well as as many pen-drives as we require to transfer data from our machines to the CC machines. The DoSA just said that we’ve given you 2 years to think about whether this should be implementing it, and now we will be implementing it, so there.Our student representatives (who did a pretty good job), after some dialogue, got the connection reinstated for tonight. They will be further taking up the issue later today.The decision itself is extremely foolish, of course. Moreover, the dictatorial way in which this is being done is just as shocking. Let’s see how things pan out in time. Perhaps sense and sanity will prevail. [Less]