A colleague pointed out this article, reporting on Linus Torvalds giving a talk at some search engine shop about Git, “his” source code management system.

Always interested in something better than CVS/SVN, and a spoiled brat with the various distributed systems available under Smalltalk (like Monticello), I looked at Git back when the kernel folk moved away from Bitkeeper and Linus started on Git. However, Git had a learning curve back then only surmountable with alpine climbing gear, so I dropped it especially because I was a happy Smalltalk camper and my code was fine in either Monticello or Cincom’s StORE.

I totally and completely agree with a) his assessment about CVS and SVN (they suck and they concentrate on solving the wrong problems - and SVN adds insult to injury by not even fixing CVS’ most obvious shortcomings; at least the CVS people can defend themselves by saying that the project is based on a hack around RCS almost 20 years ago) and b) that you really, really, really want distributed repositories. So, I found his presentation highly entertaining, his tongue-in-cheek arrogance very funny, and I would recommend viewing his presentation as long as you are able to take neither CVS/SVN nor his manner of speaking seriously

In the meantime, I played with Git because one of the points Linus makes is that Git is now actually reasonably user-friendly, and it is. It works, it is simple, it has bridges to all the other repository systems, and its design, especially the whole aspect of a single SHA-1 hash securely identifying a full version, is sleek. So I’ll be experimenting with it on my development laptop a bit, starting by pulling our SVN repo into Git for local hacking. Keep an eye on this place for updates.

I never heard about StumbleUpon before, but with its addition to the eBay family, I had to try it out. I strongly advice you not to do so for reasons that will become clear very soon .

StumbleUpon is a sort of social bookmarking site - we’ve seen that with del.icio.us, digg, etcetera. However, StumbleUpon adds a twist in that it lets you select topics you’re interested in, and then provides you with a browser toolbar that has a big “Stumble!” button which drops you at a random site belonging to one of the topics you selected. This has kept me busy for the better part of the day, and is the basis for my (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) advice not to succumb to this time-killer (time killer? I don’t even have time!).

Among others, StumbleUpon has toured me along gems like some christian fundamentalist jerk being pissed off by Cheney, Hans Bethe reminiscing on good old times and teaching a bit of quantum mechanics at age 93, a perspective on the size of our li’l planet, and other fun stuff.

Brushing all the questions aside about what’s cool about StumbleUpon and why the heck eBay bought it, it did provide me (and still does, I fear - there goes my spare time, sigh) with a tour of some lesser-known nooks and crannies of the internet, away from the gray Google/Wikipedia monoculture where one seems to land all the time these days when using mainstream search engines.

I can be long and short about this, but Google trampling privacy laws by publishing recognizable pictures of people with its new Street View feature means that my doubts about their “do no evil” PR slogan have vanished - it’s indeed just a PR slogan, not something they actually believe in and adhere to.

I’m a photographer, and this is a clear-cut case: if you want to publish pictures of people, you need a model release. Period. Google’s lawyers know that, but in their “we’re the king of the hill” arrogance, they simply don’t care.

I might drop my Gmail adress over this. Any alternatives for Adsense?

My bookshelves are filling up, so I had the choice to either add another Ikea Billy or off-load some books. When talking with a colleague about a shared hobby, geocaching, he mentioned the concept of bookcrossing.

What a great way to get rid off the books that you liked but are likely never to read again (and books that you don’t like of course - maybe someone else will…). I’ve printed and applied the first batch of labels, registered a handful of books, and will be releasing them “in the wild” in the coming days. If you’re interested to see what happens with them, follow my bookshelf.

And the number is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - apparently a (admittedly revokable) key used on lots of HD-DVD’s. The blog post also points to information on a more permanent hack which seems to indicate that the film industry again hasn’t been able to come up with a watertight encryption scheme. Surprise, surprise.

Hopefully this’ll prove to be another nail in the coffin of DRM…

A quickie - we are busy putting Squeak out under an OSI compliant license, solving at last the whole mess around the original Squeak license.

The baseline version has been re-licensed by Apple, so now the task is to find all contributors since the very first version of Squeak, and ask them to sign a statement that they approve of relicensing their contributions under the new license.

If you have ever contributed to Squeak, even a single line of code, please go to the missing signatories list and check whether your initials/name is on it. If so, please contact me or any SqF board member and we’ll be happy in assist you getting the paperwork done.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying the SMC Skype WiFi phone but never had a real reason for it apart from the obvious gadgetness (gadgetosity? ) of the thing. However, eBay internally uses Skype quite a bit so I went for it. It’s a nice little phone, I now have Skype in my pocket around the house and wherever I can find free WiFi…

..and there’s the snatch, of course. Free WiFi isn’t exactly ubiquitous. So, Skype sponsors you a FON access point when you buy this SMC phone. FON is a great idea and might actually work, being solidly grounded in the advantages of network effects - the more Foneros (and Foneras, I assume) the world counts, the better the system works. Here’s the deal: you give away free access through your FON access point, you get free access to all other FON routers. If you don’t want to do that, you can sell access to your access point - non-sharers, public and FON sellers alike, can buy day passes for $3 which is quite a bit less than the 10 pound sterling/day I paid T-Mobile the last time I was on the road.

Google maps show you the location and activity of FON routers, so you can always check out where you will have coverage (in reality, certainly at this point in major cities like Amsterdam, the answer is “almost nowhere”, but that will hopefully change). It’s a disruptive way of spreading low-cost WiFi, and here’s to hoping that FON will be able to seriously cut into the market, forcing the Telcos to adjust their ridiculous WiFi pricing schemes.

Well… April 1st, no kidding, I’m starting a new job. Some of you might have heard of my new employer who’s logo you can admire here on the left

At the moment I am at a new employee training in London. What I’ve seen so far is a company with clear goals and values, and a very human face. So, I’m quite looking forward to lead a software development team in the Netherlands, working on one of the world’s premier classified sites, Marktplaats.nl.

London, by the way, is gorgeous at the moment. We had lunch at the bank of the Thames, sunny weather, I was quite comfortable in short sleeves. Sometimes, I wonder whether this whole global warming thing isn’t a good idea after all (but then I remember James Lovelock’s latest book…).

The election results are in, which means that we have a new board. With some luck this’ll be the board that will take SqF to some “official” form, now that we have the budget and the decision to start incorporating in California.

In any case - I’m happy to serve another term. The Squeak Community is like the proverbial herde of cats , but alltogether it’s an ultra-cool bunch!

The yearly board elections are coming up. I’ll be running for another term, mostly because the actual incorporation of SqF is tantalizingly close and I want to see it through .

I’m in a bit of a hurry now, will add some ideas about how I see SqF later on. In the meantime, feel free to ask me questions through the comments section of this post.

Information on the elections can be found here.