Reinouts’ Nerdy Notes

Dear Lazyweb,
I need to represent some bibliographic information records like this one in a machine-readable format. But I wouldn’t like to invent my own format when there are dozens to choose from. Could anybody point me to a (preferably semantic web-compatible) format suitable for this purpose that’s also easy to generate using Java?

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GUADEC (pronounced GWAH-DECK) is an acronym for the GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC is the largest gettogether of GNOME users, developers, foundation leaders, individuals, governments and businesses in the world. Gnome is the Free and open source software stack that drives the user interface of many Linux-based devices, from smartphones to your home pc.

GUADEC 2010, the eleventh edition, will be in The Hague, The Netherlands and takes place on July 24 – July 30.

The organisation team calls you to arms! A community conference like GUADEC only happens when the community puts its weight behind it.

This is your chance to be part of this event. Whether you are a conference rookie or a seasoned GUADEC veteran, your help is much appreciated.

As a volunteer at the conference, you may enjoy special benefits such as a free and limited edition volunteer shirt and free food and drinks during your volunteering hours.

Read more…

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Today was the last day of the hackfest. We’re all tired.
Behdad and Evan did more work on Harfbuzz integration and can now show kerned text created by the new text layout engine.

Dan made a patch so that WebKit no longer eats about: URLs.
Diego worked on reinstating the safe/unsafe mime types code.
Gustavo enabled the Page Cache that we thought was enabled all along (!).

Mario worked on fixing a regression with regard to toggling image zoom. I’ll leave the last word to him this time!.

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Welcome to the third report right from the WebKitGTK+ hackfest!
A nice walk along the windy coastline of A Coruña blew some fresh air into the heads of the hackers gathered here. Behdad made a photo of the group next to the Torre de Hercules:

WebKitGTK+ hackers standing next to Torre de Hercules

• Diego fixed opening the user manual from Epiphany, even though he isn’t physically present at the hackfest
• Benjamin has been busy fixing crashes
• Christian worked on the context menu in text areas, and spell checking
• Alejandro worked on middle button paste within the same page
• Philippe merged the HTML5 video controls
• Xan added support for customizing the User Agent string
• Yours truly compiled a list of regressions from Epiphany/Gecko and triaged loads of bugs

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The hackfest is in full force now. Behdad arrived yesterday evening (without luggage) and he and Evan are now working on making WebKitGTK+ use the Harfbuzz layout engine.

Xan finished made a first version of the DOM bindings. This means there’s an API to access the DOM without having to go through JavaScriptCore. Also Form authentication saving has been implemented!

Some more photos of the hackfest

Gustavo made overriding context menu grab by Ctrl key possible. We now have the best of two worlds: rich web applications with context menus can be used while we can also override “malicious” sites that try to block the browser context menu! He’s also working on reinstating Shift-click downloading.

Dan checked in Content-Encoding support for libsoup. Sites like Lenovo.com can now be rendered instead of just showing garbage!

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This morning I took a flight to La Coruña, Spain (also known as A Coruña in local Galician language) to join in the WebKitGtk hackfest. Why would I join such a hackfest when I don’t have any C/C++ skills worth mentioning? Well— it’s my task to clean out bugzilla a bit (both Webkit and Gnome) and I’m also planning to get up to speed with Seed/Javascript Epiphany extensions in order to make some improvements there!

The food here is excellent, as a vegetarian I feel very well treated! Looking forward to getting to know the town.

/ CC BY-SA 2.0

P.S. It’s saddening that booking a flight from Amsterdam to La Coruña is so easy and booking the same trip by train is all but impossible. There is no international train planner that will calculate this trip for you. It’s possible to travel to Madrid and then book a trip from Madrid to La Coruña, but even then you’re unable to get any price information on the Web. Not even considering the traveling timeof at least 24 hours, most likely the trip would be even more expensive than the modest €290 I had to pay for a return flight with Iberia. I couldn’t explain that to the Gnome Foundation who paid a big part of my trip.
Note to our EU negotiators: if we want some tangible results from Copenhagen instead of volatile emission targets, why not start with making train travel more attractive?

Edit: Hi Planet Gnome! Would somebody with the right superpowers be so kind to update my hackergotchi please?

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Het artikel op Webwereld over de OV-Chipkaart deed me er weer aan denken. Een paar weken geleden wilde ik met de RandstadRail van Den Haag Centraal naar Leyenburg. De HTM maakt al overal trots reclame dat je nu ook de OV-chipkaart bij hen kan gebruiken. Ja, behalve als je met de RandstadRail reist. (Terwijl op de RandstadRail Erasmuslijn de OV-chipkaart vanaf het begin gepushd is! Je verzint het niet.)
Om een lang verhaal kort te maken, als Rotterdammer die wel eens met de metro en de trein gaat dacht ik met twee chipkaarten op zak dat ritje wel te kunnen betalen. Niet dus. Ook geen strippenkaart meer bij me. Alternatief: kaartje kopen bij de verkoopautomaat in de tram (de bestuurder zit in een afgesloten cabine dus dat is geen optie). Ik toets in dat ik een 2-zonekaartje wil en wil betalen met Chipknip. Helaas, de chipknip meldt “NO CONFIG” en weigert dienst. Muntgeld dan? Gelukkig heb ik nog wat contant geld in mijn portemonnee. Ik gooi 50 cent in de automaat en… wat schetst mijn verbazing: het apparaat geeft een 2-Euromunt terug en toont vervolgens een foutmeldingsscherm!

Gerät außer Funktion!

Omdat ik verder geen enkele mogelijkheid meer had om een kaartje te kopen heb ik de rit gemaakt met €1,50 winst! Ergens jammer dat er geen controle was, dat had nog interessant kunnen worden. Helaas zullen de meeste mensen die vanaf 11 februari verplicht moeten gaan ov-chippen wel niet zoveel mazzel hebben. GroenLinks Rotterdam vindt dat de strippenkaart pas mag worden afgeschaft als alle kinderziektes opgelost zijn en daar sluit ik me van harte bij aan.

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Today, Martijn Cielen accused me of not respecting his personal opinion and of being a Mono evangelist. This was all prompted by the announcement of a Mono devroom at FOSDEM. Normally I steer clear of the Mono vs Novell vs Miguel vs Microsoft debates but I do stand up for the right of people to develop Free software for whatever platform in whatever language they choose to! Here’s what I replied:

Dear Martijn,

Your personal opinion is crystal clear to me. Why are you suggesting that I don’t respect it? If anything I said leads you to believe that, please point it out. It certainly wasn’t meant that way.

If the quote you mention from the MS tech evangelist, made in the context of competition with IBM OS/2 and Netscape Navigator, was meant to convey a point, then indeed I am afraid I missed it. Could you please state it more clearly?

As for your list of reasons to avoid Mono, I will simply let them speak for themselves.

For the record, I haven’t used any MS products on my PC since Windows 3.11 and I am a professional Java developer. Calling me a Mono evangelist is unfounded and pointless.

Have a nice day!

I hope someday people will quit putting energy in stopping other people from writing great software, and start putting it in writing great software themselves instead!

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I’m very happy to announce that our bid for the Gnome conference (GUADEC) 2010 in The Hague has been accepted!

Read the press release here.

I really hope we can use this opportunity to strengthen the case for open source and open standards in the (Dutch) public sector. Not just for software developed under the Gnome umbrella, but for every Free Software project developing great desktop applications, cool web applications and everything in between. Consider yourself invited!

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Via mijn werk kreeg ik een uitnodiging voor dit seminar. Dat wilde ik even doorgeven voor de geïnteresseerden!

Het Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), de Prof. mr. B.M. Teldersstichting en het Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis nodigen u graag uit voor een seminar over de Nederlandse politieke vrijzinnigheid in de eerste helft van de 20e eeuw. Dit seminar vindt plaats op woensdag 9 december in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

Aanmelden kan tot 4 december.

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