I’ve read every tweet and nearly every comment on Reddit, Lifehacker, and other blogs, and the message is clear: the world is ready for better Linux software, and a better instant messenger. People are encouraged by Synapse and looking forward to it’s future. No pressure, right?

Huge HUGE thanks to everyone who has reported bugs, helped with troubleshooting/triaging, and shared their feedback in the conference room and on the forums. Synapse is still an alpha product so there have been plenty of problems, and quite frankly I’ve been a bit overwhelmed :). All the help has been great.

Lots of bugs have already been fixed including better icon support when running under KDE, support for proxy servers, and eliminating many many crashes.

The first user-contributed plugin was just merged in, adding preview for wikipedia urls (Thanks goto!):

You can also now add multiple accounts, just note support for this is still a bit rough around the edges.

So what’s next? First I’d like to make absolute sure that nobody will find Synapse less useful than other open-source products. In addition to fixing all the open bugs in the tracker, the plan for this week is to focus on implementing two major features:

1. Logging and a conversation history browser.
2. Linked Accounts aka transports/gateways. This will make it possible to communicate with friends on other networks, so if you’ve been holding off on switching to Synapse because most of your friends haven’t switched to XMPP yet, hang tight!

I’d also like to add official packages for other distributions very soon, starting with openSUSE and Foresight. If you can help with either of these, please let me know! Big thanks to trontonic for working on ArchLinux support.

There’s been great international interest in Synapse as well. So far members of the community have offered to translate Synapse into Russian, French, Italian, Ukrainian, and German… so making Synapse translatable will be a major short-term goal as well.

Once all this low hanging fruit is taken care of, we’ll be switching gears back to new innovative features. We’ve got a few things in mind, and would love to hear your ideas on the forums.

Challenging the status-quo is never easy. If you’re looking for a fun and exciting project with tremendous potential to get involved with, I hope you’ll consider joining us and help make the vision reality.

(That would be me in the green)

It managed to line up the two shoes and box you see here trapping itself, then went around in circles until it’s battery died.

Sadly, this Roomba has hated life from the very beginning. The day after I got it, it forced it’s way under my couch scratching it’s self up and eventually getting stuck.

Yesterday was opening day for the new South Lake Union Streetcar line in Seattle, WA. This is not to be confused with the first stretch of light rail, scheduled to arrive late 2009.

I met a group of friends downtown at the Westlake station to join in on the festivities. After collecting a bags worth of streetcar swag, we piled into the inaugural run of the purple train along with probably 200 other people. It was crowded. Sadly amidst all the chaos, only one out of the five people in our group got a golden ticket.

I think I see the back corner of my head somewhere in this picture.

For some reason – probably to be absolutely sure that there would be no accidents on the first day – they were running the streetcars at a maximum of 12mph (they are governed for 30mph, but will unlikely be run over 25mpg according to a City representative). Because of this, it was a slow ride, and left many people unimpressed. The city probably should have told everyone about the speed cap in advance.

One of the things that was being handed out was a “passport” containing a list of retailers, restaurants, and other businesses along the streetcar line. These participating businesses would stamp their name in your passport if you stopped by, and if you got 10 stamps, you could drop the passport off to enter into a drawing for prizes. Many businesses were also giving discounts to streetcar riders.

We got off the streetcar the North end of the line, popped open our passports, and found a nearby participating restaurant for lunch. Afterwards we set off, by train and foot, to explore. The passport served as a guide – getting enough stamps to enter the contest was really just a secondary goal. We all had a great time walking and riding around a neighborhood that none of us have spent much time in, and discovered new coffee shops, parks, expensive-yet-amazing condos, and a very cheap and tasty happy hour menu. The city did a great job with this program.

Throughout our travels, we bumped into a reporter for the Seattle PI. Both Andrew and Jessika were quoted in an article about the streetcar.

Three blocks from the streetcar line, near Fairview Avenue North, the streetcar’s debut brought busy sales of the SLUT T-shirts at the Kapow Coffee shop, where entrepreneur Jeremiah St. Georges has been selling them.

Outside the shop, Andrew Filer called the line a “small start” toward developing density that will support it — “a good idea in the long run. I like it.”

But Jesika McEvoy, sporting one of St. Georges’ T-shirts, was unconvinced. “Why spend a lot of money on something that doesn’t go very fast and stops at every stoplight? It seems like Paul Allen should have funded this exclusively … the only ones benefiting are him and a couple of retailers.”

The day ended with 11 stamps, a streetcar ride back downtown, and a bus ride home.

The next meeting is this Saturday (September 1st, 2007) at 12:00pm, here’s the announcement that Ian sent out on the list:

  The September 2007, inaugural meeting of the Greater Seattle
  Linux Users Group (GSLUG) will be held on Saturday, September 1st,
  starting promptly at 12:00 PM on the North Seattle Community College
  campus.

  We are confirmed to use room IB 3319. (Yes, the same room we've
  had in the past)

  Parking is free on weekends.

  For directions and complete details, please visit the meeting's Wiki
  entry:

      http://wiki.gslug.org/index.php/Meeting_2007-09-01
      (Links to: http://www.northseattle.edu/maps/ for directions)

  Please feel free to forward this announcement as appropriate.

  This will be the first meeting GSLUG has had in quite a while, and
  things have changed. The presentation format will be that of Lightning
  talks (Several talks from 5-10 minutes in length, with open Q&A
  afterwards) instead of the traditional hour or so long presentations.

Microsoft might be right on the other side of the water, but Linux and Free Software is alive in Seattle! If you’re reading this and in the Seattle area, I hope to see you there! (Also, I’m giving a talk!)

Hacking BoF

I’ve organized a “hacking session” BoF at Ubuntu Live, anyone interested in improving Ubuntu and GNOME is invited to attend.

Here’s the official description:

Do hackers of a feather flock together? Let's find out at Ubuntu Live!

Anyone interested in hands on experience improving Ubuntu is invited to come by
to share ideas, bugs, code, or whatever else is on your mind.

Agenda may include (and is certainly not limited to):

    * Overview of technologies that make up the modern GNOME/Ubuntu desktop
    * Problem solving/debugging tips
    * Brief introduction to launchpad.net (reporting bugs, suggesting features,
      etc.)
    * Going through the Ubuntu Desktop team TODO list and working on small
      tasks.

I'd also like to throw everyone in the room at a specific project, such as
fixing out-of-the-box touchpad support for laptop users, and see what we can
accomplish in a night. This will be a great opportunity for both experienced
and brand-new developers to make something cool that will (hopefully) see it's
way into a future release.

See you there!

P.S. If you're from the area and have a projector and/or whiteboard to bring,
that would be great!

The event will be taking place on Sunday from 8:00pm to 9:00pm. If things are going well, we will find somewhere else to keep hacking after they kick us out at 9.

More information at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuLive2007

See you there!

It was a lot of fun!

Talks were on Saturday at the Last Supper Club.

A list including slides are up on the website.

Saturday night’s party was at the Public N3rd Area, which was temporarily converted from workshop to dance club.

Sunday started off with a trip to the Museum of Communication, which was really cool.

Next it was back to the Public N3rd Area, which was back to shop mode, where people were building robots with lego mindstorms… and whatever else happened to be laying around.

The weekend ended with an almost 40 person DDOS attack on a local restaurant. Some poor family got caught in the maddness and had to be relocated to the backside of the restaurant.

See everyone at Toorcon San Diego, and hopefully at the next Toorcon Seattle!

(Photos all credit whoever took them, not me!)

Seattle has been in great need of a good public transportation system for a long time, and it’s really great to see it finally happening.

The facility is located in south downtown (also known as “sodo”), across the street from the former Raineer Brewery, which is now the Tullys coffee headquartes.

The mayor of Seattle started things off.

As part of Sound Transit’s art program, they had the huge “R” that used to stand high on top of the former raineer brewery restored, and used it to write “Rail” on the side of the building, I thought this was pretty cool.

The poles that hold up the electrical wires for the rail cars in the outside lot are also part of an art project, apparently.

These are supposed to be horsetail. As the mayor said, “I always thought that the stripes were a safety thing, but it turns out that they are art!” (paraphrased). Honestly, I thought they were ugly safety stripes too, so who knew. A sound transit representitive referred to the yard as the Sound Transit Missle Defense Silo, which I thought was aptly chosen.

Painful speeches from various politicians went on for a while, I had a whole rant prepared here but decided against including it. Maybe in a future post.

Anyway, obviously no building dedication is complete without a pair of oversided scissors and a photo opt:

With the facility’s only security now lying on the ground in ruins, everyone swarmed into the building where were were greeted by cake, coffee, and lots of free swag.

Too much cake, coffee, and swag later, our tour group set off, lead by Roger Pence, a community outreach coordinator for sound transit.

The building is four stories tall. The upper floors have very nice offices, with very nice views of the city. Note that they still had not installed furnature, computers, or anything in most of the building.

This will be the command center:

The lower and ground floors are warehouse space and repair/maintanence shops.

Since the electrical system is on the top of the rail cars, each service bay has an overhead mezzanine, as well as an underground pit for working on the wheels and stuff.

To keep the cars looking nice, they have a paint room and a 2-car carwash:

And finally, we got to walk through one of the cars, they are very nice!

More photos here and here. Official press release about the opening here, website and factsheet here. The Seattle Channel also put together a video, although I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.

Light rail – finally coming to seattle for the first time in 2009!

 Jonathan Coulton – Code Monkey

The song is under a Creative Commons license which allows for redistribution with very few conditions, but if you like it, I ask that you seriously consider paypaling $1 to the artist. DRM-free music that makes you smile is certainly worth at least that.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
– Benjamin Franklin

UPDATE: It seems a few people everyone missed the point here. I was most certainly not suggesting that anyone should vote republican, I was trying to point out the foolishness of this advertisement. I do not agree with the patriot act or any forms of government surveillance or arrest that are undertaken without a warrant. I strongly encourage readers to visit EFF’s website to learn more about these bills, and what can be done to stop them.