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.

Today I’m extremely happy to officially announce the project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s called Synapse, and while it may look like just yet another instant messaging client, it’s actually much more than that.

The web has changed a lot over the past few years. Web applications now offer rich user experiences and beautiful interfaces, video has has become ubiquitous, the ability to mix and match content from different sources is now not only easy, but widely accepted by companies that would have once sued you for doing so. Most importantly, more and more of our daily lives continues to move into the “cloud”.

With all the focus on the web, a lot of people have been dismissing desktop operating systems as nothing more than something required to run a web browser. Unfortunately, Linux, which has suffered from unpolished UI applications for a while, has been hit especially hard by this trend.

Even though there have been lots of exciting advances to the platform (Mono, DBus, Cairo, Gstreamer, KDE4, etc.), few developers focus on supporting Linux, and Linux applications rarely receive the same polish and attention to detail as web applications.

Although it makes me unpopular, I’m not ready to give up on Linux software development. I feel strongly that there’s a place for both web and desktop applications, and exciting opportunities for integration between them.

The state of instant communication and collaboration, especially on Linux, has been stagnant for many years. In fact, there have been few advances since IRC, which was invented in 1988 – nearly 20 years ago.

For the most part, we’re still limited to expressing ourselves using only plain text. Image sharing and file transfer rarely work, we can’t make voice/video calls, there’s been little to no integration with the Web, and a lack of innovation all around.

Sci-Fi movies have been envisioning amazing communication tools for years – tools that appear infinately flexible and act like magic.

The goal of Synapse was to see if it was possible to bring this magic to reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

History has a tendency to repeat its self, so my first step was to determine why other similar projects have failed to foster innovation. One of the failures, in my opinion, is the desire to be multi-protocol. If any new feature needs to work everywhere, the result is often that it works poorly everywhere, or not at all. What we’ve seen with many projects is that they implement only the lowest common denominator across everything, and then stop there.

Just as Apple understood when they decided to throw away OS9 and switch to something new that was designed from the ground up to do exactly what they needed, having a solid base is extremely important. Fortunately, there’s already a mature, open, and all-around wonderful chat protocol out there: XMPP.

Although I suspect this will be one of the most controversial features, Synapse is designed to only support XMPP. If this upsets you, relax and hear me out.

Unlike any of the legacy proprietary networks, XMPP is an open and distributed system. Anyone can run their own server and communicate with people on any other server. In addition, the “X” in “XMPP” stands for “Extensible”. Any piece of the protocol can be extended without breaking compatibility with software that doesn’t understand the extension. This is a perfect fit for Synapse because it means there’s never anything stopping you from implementing your great idea.

Many people will say that this all sounds great, but that it doesn’t matter if nobody else is using it. Standard chicken-and-egg problem? I think there’s already proof that it is possible to overcome this. Skype appeared out of nowhere and now has millions of users. XMPP can do the same, it just needs an awesome client that offers features nobody else has, just as Skype offered working voice chat when nobody else did. And of course, XMPP already has a huge head-start thanks to Google. Remember, Synapse can talk to any other XMPP server/client, including Google Talk.

All that said, legacy networks will likely be supported through server-side transports that translate other protocols into XMPP, but if Synapse is truly successful, I’m confident it just wont matter.

Synapse is a very new project. I’m confident that it already offers a few compelling features, but overall isn’t groundbreaking in its current state (and is certainly not bug-free). My hope is that Ive succeeded in expressing my long-term vision, and can interest other people to join the project.

Pre-built packages are available for Ubuntu, with support for additional distros on the way. If you want to get involved, or just want to share your ideas, you can join the conference room or post on the forums.

I look forward to your feedback!

Download Synapse »

I had a great time at SCALE, here’s a wrap-up of some of the things that went on:

• The first day had two tracks all about open source in healthcare. Speakers included Scott Shreeve (co-founder of Medsphere, and founder of Crossover Health) who gave a very motivating talk about the importance of transparency in healthcare, and how open technology can revolutionize the U.S. system (or current lack there of). A marketing executive from Medsphere spoke about the company in general. Christian and Fred Trotter didn’t go easy on him, asking many direct questions about Medsphere’s past attacks on the open-source community and the lawsuit against the founders and unknown members of the community who downloaded the then-release source code. The guy basically knew nothing, I hope Fred will post more information on GPL Medicine or his blog in the coming days.
• Due to a miscommunication, the GNOME event supplies box didn’t make it out. We made a late night run to Kinkos and printed a huge banner, posters, and fliers. Thanks to Rosanna Yuen for her help on IRC figuring out what was going on (sorry for coming off as a stalker!), and to everyone who worked on the GNOME Marketing Materials. The “Happy People” poster was a big hit.
• A group of developers and community members from Foresight Linux were at the booth next to us, it was great to meet and talk to them. Conary is a very interesting package management system, and I certainly plan to learn more about it.
• Since we didn’t have the computer from the event box, Christian brought in his dual display quad-core desktop. He has both of his monitors rotated 90°, and we’re fairly sure that more people came by to talk about that than GNOME. By the end of the conference, the Gentoo folks across from us had done the same with their case-modded strangely mouse-less computer.
• On the second day of the expo, Jeff Schroeder (another fellow GNOME volunteer) and the Foresight folks got there before us, and didn’t have the computer’s password. They asked the Gentoo guys for a Live CD so they could reset it. They asked what operating system the computer was running, and after hearing “Ubuntu”, their response was “FAIL SAUCE”. Of course, their Live CD completely failed to boot so Jeff got a Live CD from the Ubuntu booth which worked perfectly. He returned the Gentoo CD. Ehm, what was that phrase? Ah yes…FAIL SAUCE.
• While standing at the booth, I got a random message on AIM. Since there was nobody coming up to the booth to talk to me at the time, I thought I’d try to engage this person in Linux conversation, which sadly fell on deaf ears. Here’s the log, what do you think? Pedophile trying to cover his ass, intoxicated cop, Chris Hansen, or really a clueless highschool student?
• Christopher Blizzard from Mozilla as well as a few other people expressed interest in my D-Bus Javascript bindings, so I’m going to try to find time soon to answer everyone’s email on the dev-platforms-linux mailing list, and get an initial release out there. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know. The bindings make it possible for XUL application and extension developers to interact with D-Bus services, allowing for deeper integration into the Linux desktop.
• It was incredible how many companies in the expo hall were there promoting closed-source proprietary software. I was especially irritated with the folks from Promise, who didn’t even understand why someone might possibly want an open/free API for querying health information of their RAID hardware. Ironically, their booth was next to OpenBSD and across from the Free Software Foundation.
• There was someone from HP trying to raise awareness about their commitment to linux/opensource. I’ve been very impressed with their open-source printing/scanning software (scanning over the network using XSane works!), so I was happy to see them support SCALE. However, the web interface on the neat little linux-powered NAS device he had on display is not open source, I hope this changes in the near future. Also, although I wasn’t told anything specific, I’ll be watching the news for an announcement about HP laptops preloaded with Linux later this year.
• I had a good chat with one of the Inkscape developers. One of my questions was if there were plans to use a docking library instead of having so many floating windows, and was very surprised/impressed when he showed me that it had already been implemented, and is coming in the next release! Although I’m not an artist myself, it is exciting to see free graphics software continue to improve, the next release will be a big step. Now if only GIMP would hurry up and follow suit…
• The booth to our right was run by a family business called RANDR that develops and maintains open-source business software. Very cool to see what they’ve been able to accomplish, check them out!
• Thanks again to one of the guys running the PostgreSQL booth for letting me borrow his laptop power cable!
• A single person recognized the Toorcon t-shirt I was wearing on the second day of the expo.
• Lastly, I direct your attention to this photograph which perhaps depicts Sun’s true commitment to Linux.

While I absolutely had a great time, I found that very few people hadn’t heard of GNOME, and there wasn’t all that much to say to most people about it. Common questions were people wondering what’s coming in the next release, how to properly pronounce “GNOME”, and of course, why choose GNOME over KDE.

Running a booth and being involved in projects is absolutely the best way to get the most out of conferences, and I look forward to having a project of my own to show off at future expos. We were also tossing around the idea of having a hacker booth with bean bags chairs, music, and soft lighting, etc. where people can work on stuff and learn about open source software development.

Photos from Jordan and Kevin.

I’m heading down to LA tonight for SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. I’ll be volunteering at the GNOME booth in the Exhibition Hall, so if you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!

May ’07: Toorcon Seattle (BETA)

I wrote a separate post about this, see here.

July ’07: Ubuntu Live

I took the train down to Portland with Andy, which is so much more enjoyable than flying, I don’t even know where start. Unfortunately, Amtrak’s trains on the west cost are quite slow, and at least between Seattle and Portland, don’t have priority on the track. The trip home was delayed over two hours because the freight company was using the tracks, so we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for a while.

My happiness with mass transit continued after getting off the train, when I walked a few blocks from the Amtrak station and hopped on Portland’s light rail, which is absolutely wonderful. It dropped me off right in front of my hotel, across the street from the convention center where the conference took place. And best of all, this was all within the free ride zone. Chris and Steve arrived from California by air and also were impressed with the continence of the rail system, which took them from the airport right to the hotel, for under $3.

Fortunately, the first leg of light rail starts operating here in Seattle in 2009, and will eventually stop a block and a half from my apartment. More information on that here.

Onto the conference itself, there were some excellent keynotes, including Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical/Ubuntu) and Eben Moglen (from the SFLC). Eben Moglen’s talked about GPLv3, and also encouraged everyone to shift their thinking from “open source” to “free software”. He had a very positive response from the crowd, which I think is great news.

There was also talk about the effect “web 2.0″ has on software freedom, specifically about how we’ve been moving from proprietary software on the desktop to proprietary software on the web. This time however, we loose control of who controls and has access to our data, not only the file format it’s stored in.

Chris and I are both irritated by all the attention web applications have been getting recently. We both hope developers will start writing great free desktop software again some day soon. The linux desktop should be innovative, NOT just the best shell to the web.

The sessions weren’t as technical as we had hoped, but we all certainly learned something new. Sadly, the BoF I arranged was a non-event, and I was completely blown off by everyone from Canonical.

Someone from OpenMoko had a booth at the vendor area showing off the Neo1978, and I have to say, I don’t like it. It’s rather big and bulky, but more importantly, the screen is inset from the case, which I find to be very unappealing. The lack of EDGE or WiFi is also a big deal breaker, and software is very unintuitive and clunky, but I see there’s good progress being made there.

July ’07: OSCON

I didn’t pay for any sessions at OSCON, but the exhibition hall was HUGE, and I spent almost half the day there. Intel dominated the floor with people demoing their new Thread Building Blocks framework (which looks very cool), as well as their new Moblin hardware platform (which doesn’t interest me at all).

Mozilla also had a solid presence there. Chris and I had a good chat with someone about XUL, which I still need to follow up on.

Sun was there, but I hope nobody else tried to use any of the computers they had on display, some very pissed off looking woman yelled at me and scared me off. Fortunately, I did manage to get some OpenSolaris DVDs before running away. I need to find time to install Nexenta and see what all the ZFS fuss is about.

July ’07: Facebook Developer Garage

At work, we developed a Facebook application, so I figured I’d show up and represent.

There were three people from Facebook who talked a bit about the platform and took questions/feedback from the crowd, but were all very careful not to talk about future plans.

The Facebook Platform is interesting to startups because it provides instant access to a huge user base, and has already proven to be a successful way to bootstrap a product.

Overall, most people were extremely excited about the platform, but at the same time, had complaints about functionality and features. The representatives from Facebook acknowledged everything that was brought up, but because of their policy to not speculate on the future, they made no commitments, and I don’t think anyone left feeling confident that specific things would change. I suspect a Windows developer would feel the same way having run into problems or limitations with their proprietary platform.

Although they claim otherwise, Facebook is a closed, proprietary platform, much like Windows or OS X. As a developer for this platform, you’re limited to a small set of functionality that could change underneath you any day, and may not work as documented.

Facebook is about more than social networking, they are creating a new type of operating system, much like Google has been doing with their online web-based applications.

Personally, I’m not ready to loose the freedom to tinker with applications that I use, or have my data stored online (and possibly owned) by a third party. If this is the case, I’ve lost my freedom, and might as well go back to using Windows.

August ’07: DEFCON

I’ve been saying I’d go to DEFCON for a few years, and this time I actually made it! Just about everyone I know was there, so it would have been a very boring weekend in Seattle had I not. Generally I enjoy the social aspect of conferences more than the talks themselves, and DEFCON offers plenty of other things to do besides attending talks all day. Some friends got second place in the aCTF contest, next year I look forward to being more active in both that and the badge hacking competition.

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!)

Enabling quotas is easy, just add usrquota and grpquota to /etc/fstab, as such:

/dev/sda1       /       reiserfs        defaults,usrquota,grpquota      0 1

Then, remount the filesystem:

$ sudo mount -o remount /

Finally, install and enable the software:

$ sudo apt-get install quota quotatool
$ sudo /etc/init.d/quota start

After getting everything turned on, I quickly realized that the tools for actually setting quotas, while quite powerful, are not very user friendly.

I wanted to give everyone in the “users” group a 100MB quota, except for a few users who would get more. At first I thought I could set a group quota to accomplish this, but eventually figured out that group quotas apply to files owned by the group, not users in the group.

Rather than set every user by hand, I wrote a little script to make life easier.

To use, just change QUOTA_INFO at the top.

QUOTA_INFO = {
        'users' => {
                'eric'      => :unlimited,
                'jazzfreak' => 200,
                :default    => 100
        }
}

I also thought it would be nice if users saw how much disk space they had left upon login, and after searching the web for a while without finding anything, I wrote another quick script to do just that.

I stuck it in /usr/local/bin/ and added it to the bottom of /etc/profile so it would be run automatically on login.

Here’s what it looks like:

$ ssh orion
You have used 187.7 MB of 200 MB. 12.3 MB remaining.

eric@orion:~$

If anyone finds either of these scripts useful, please let me know!

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!)

Due to intense fog at the launch site, we weren’t able to launch as planned. After a lot of consideration, we decided to do a tethered launch to test everything out. This was a huge success, and proved very valuable. The balloon got to around 250 feet and took lots of pictures. All of our systems worked including the MoLoGoGo phone and APRS radio. You can view this data using Google Earth.

The foam payload enclosure suffered some structural damage from the rope, and one of our cameras became disconnected. We can guarantee that AHAB Version 2.0 will fix these problems and more, and everyone is extremely optimistic about trying again. We won’t rest until we set it free!

The weekend as a whole was an amazing experience, and I absolutely cannot wait to do it again. As someone coming from a big city, seeing small town america is something that’s hard to describe. It’s really a different world in some of these places.

The team was amazing, everyone got along great, and had a ton of fun the entire way. The value of this really cannot be overlooked. Big thanks to everyone involved.

We’re hoping to go back early next month, and bring some sun with us this time.

Photos here, more coming soon, along with video!

See also: Bre’s post on the MAKE blog. A podcast episode may be coming soon as well.

Best weekend ever!

There’s a video podcast on MAKE about the project, I’m the poorly prepared guy talking about the hacked CVS camera:

More information:
http://www.imakethings.com/2007/03/03/diy-space-make-video-podcast/

I’ll let you know how everything goes tomorrow, wish us luck and good weather!