Welcome to ExoPlanet

Just wanted to let anyone reading know that I'm going to be going on vacation and I probably won't be able to blog, but I WILL be updating my twitter from my cellphone.I'm flying to Irkutsk tonight, and I'll spend...

I have spent a bit over three months in China, trying to find out how FOSS is organised and how it’s different in China from what we see the West. When I met Basile two weeks ago in Beijing, we have come up with the following hypotheses: Language is an impediment. Most FOSS activities take [...]

Technical objects define in their configuration a certain partition of the physical and social world, they attribute roles to certain types of actors - humans and non-humans - and exclude others, they authorise certain modes of relations between these different actors […] in such a way that they participate as a whole to the construction [...]

I've sort of created a routine lately while in Tallinn. Obviously, most of my time is spent hacking and doing some computer related stuff so that hasn't really changed much.

But since I am in Tallinn by myself, I've been spending more time listening to music and podcasts using my iPod. In fact I've been more routinely watching video podcasts such as Geekbrief, Rocketboom and Macbreak. I watch them during intermissions and I get to maximize my time while walking to the office or waiting for food. And in Tallinn, you wait for food.

I am quite happy that FLOSS weekly (or some they claim) is back more regularly and able to hear lots of interesting open source related stories. On the other hand it was sad to hear that Lugradio has ended. Lugradio guys are really funny.

And while in the washroom, I find myself reading my book about chinese characters. I have been learning a bit more (and forgetting) chinese characters. So another good way to spend your time. My favourite character so far is fen 分 radical, which means "divide". There are many words that uses that radical like 吩 (instruct, order), 纷 (disorderly, confused) and 份 (portion, share) and its pretty simple to remember these words by breaking it down to its different components, such as 口 (mouth), 丝 (silk) and 人 (people). It was really enlightening.

And another thing that I've been doing a lot more is climbing the stairs. I moved to a new apartment recently and this building's elevator will be turned off at midnight. And because I've been going hone a bit late, I have to climb up 17 floors. Yes 17 floors! And I did that for like 1-2 weeks before I came to Tallinn and I've been mostly climbing stairs since. I have turned this punishment for going home late to be something beneficial to myself: A bit of exercise every day, in sort of a not so intrusive way. And it only takes 2-3 minutes to climb up 17 floors. Okay I climb 2 steps at a time and I am kinda always racing for time. But life is more fun that way!

十胜石 -- 视频自 17173

红藕香残玉簟秋
轻解罗裳 独上兰舟
云中谁寄锦书来
雁字回时 月满西楼
花自飘零水自流
一种相思 两处闲愁
此情无计可消除
才下眉头 却上心头

      一遍一遍地看《东京爱情故事》，从自己还是个十几岁的孩子的时候第一次看就爱上那个勇敢坚强的女子，渴望着自己也可以永远笑着坚定地追逐自己的梦想。没有数过自己看过多少遍，在每个自己需要勇气的时刻，在每个自己不再坚强的时候，只要想想莉香，仿佛就有了坚定的力量。于是偷偷的在心里告诉自己：我不要再这样，我一定会坚强的！就可以装作自信满满的样子继续走在路上。床前的那杯水不在了。又是在这样一个慵懒的周末，又是等到饿得不行才极不情愿地下床煮方便面，又是默默地在心里对自己说：辉辉，来吃面了。接受这样的称呼，从高中《人间四月天》的剧本在班里开始流行传阅，到班上的同学见面对我说：辉辉，我挚爱的人。用了7年的时间来习惯这样称呼，每到好朋友发来短信，“辉辉，最近忙么？有空过来我这边玩吧” "辉辉：虽然有些遗憾，但是没关系，只要记住有我就好了，在每个想念的日子里。"7年来一直留下来称呼我辉辉的人，还一直在某个角落默默的给我打气，尤其是蕴茹，真的很感谢她在我最最脆弱的时候陪我一起走过的那段日子，但是最疏于联系的也是她。......

     我知道，现在该是我一个人，勇敢坚强的面对生活，常常恨自己不够坚强，想的和做的永远不搭调，总是不争气的想要依赖别人。但是我一定会慢慢坚强起来，像莉香一样勇敢。

Almost 2 weeks ago I was in Vilnius to attend EuroPython 2008. It was my first time in Vilnius and first time to attend a conference about Python, which is the main programming language that I've been using for the past 2 years of work at Exoweb.

It was interesting to meet so many people that are also using Python everyday in their work and projects. In the conference, I met up with Greg and Tomasz, who's Greg's partner in crime in the software business. They are part of Enpoka that is doing outsource software development. I also met up with Tobias, who drove all the way from Tromsø to Vilnius so that he can fix his car in Riga, its more than 2000+ kilometres, pretty crazy!

I attended some talks on Jython and PyPy. I have to say I am pretty impressed with how far Jython has come (and only recently realised the state of development of the JVM in the dynamic languages world) and the grandiose plans for PyPy.

The day ended with Guido's keynote but it was done through video conferencing and I guess it wasn't to the best effect. It was regarding Python 3000 which I've heard at least twice so far.

The next day started with a talk on a tool to visualise relationships between Python objects and duplicate code finder a.k.a CloneDigger. I listened to a talk on LEAN software development by Steve Alexander of Canonical but it was a bit too vague to me, although I thought his approach of using photographed stickies as slides was cool. There were some good talks of Python's more advanced topics (descriptors) and the internals of some of the standard data structures we use everyday like lists, dicts and sets.

I attended the Cython talk but I was getting distracted hacking away with Greg on using greenlets with twisted. Both of us were not so happy with the deferred style of coding asynchronous servers in twisted and wanted to find a more manageable approach. We have a pretty simple prototype and I would want to apply the same idea to a larger code base .

The day ended with a keynote by Hans Rosling, who I admire quite a bit due to his great TED talk he gave. He is more impressive live and I truly enjoyed his talk although it wasn't much about Python. There were some lightning talks before the keynote and the one that I can remember very clearly is gSym, which is a python editor that visualises your code in different ways such as mathematical formulas and lisp style.

For the last day, one of the highlights was a talk about hacking your dna with the amazon cloud. I talked a bit with Mike the DNA hacker and learned quite a bit about his travels in South East Asia which were pretty cool. After the hacking on greenlets and twisted, Greg decided to hold an unconference session on it to discuss about it. Tommi, who knows quite a bit about twisted gave some good insights on the greenlet+twisted approach which is that although it works its dangerous.

There is a lot of material that I would like to catch up on but I haven't found the time to really dig into it. I really enjoyed the conference and thought it was a good chance to learn a few things and meet similar minded people.

I managed to meet briefly with some Django contributors and Jim Baker who's working hard pushing out Jython 2.5. He says he'll be in China in September, maybe he'll come over and give a talk on Python and Jython. I am kinda interested in Jython myself and have been submitting some bug reports, hopefully its useful for them . I was not really ready for the Django sprint and spent a bit of time looking into Django new forms admin. At least I learnt a bit about the new branch that will go into 1.0 soon.

I have bookmarked some of the more interesting stuff I learned from the conference in del.icio.us and also took some pictures while sightseeing.

I have more to say, ok maybe not. Over!

I have participated in the First Beijing City Aesthetic Marathon today, running for about 20 minutes through the hutongs and markets around Tianshuiyuan. The Beijing City Aesthetic Marathon is an art project initiated by HOIO (Samuel Herzog). It’s a sportive challenge and a way to discover Beijing at the same time. The 42.195 kilometres of [...]

Despite the fact that nobody is willing to pay for software and that proprietary software is free as in free beer, there are some points to be considered: FOSS is legal to use, copy, modify, and distribute. Especially in China, where new laws can be enforced within little time, this can be a considerable advantage. However, [...]

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