• Will this be officially supported by any phone manufacturer? Will users need to root their phones in order to use Ubuntu?
• Will users be able to run Android applications from within Ubuntu’s interface?
• If yes, then does it mean we will see Android apps running on desktop Ubuntu as well?
• How will this handle software installation? Will users be able to install new *.deb packages from within the Ubuntu app?

Anyway, a bold move by Canonical. One that has a huge chance of being very successful.

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Well for one, the hackish aspect of Jekyll is pretty awesome. I host my blog with Github’s excellent Pages service, which means that I store my blog in the best CMS ever created – git – and I write all my posts (and HTML/CSS) with the best editor there is – Emacs. For me this duo beats any fancy online content management system. Secondly, although it’s possible to have a ‘standalone’ (i.e. not wordpress.com-hosted) WordPress blog, anyone who ever tried to customize a WordPress theme knows it’s not an easy task. Yes, WordPress is of course powerful, but for anyone who doesn’t need all its power it becomes overly complicated (to tune, not necessarily to use). Customizing Jekyll or Octopress-based websites is very, very easy. Especially when it comes to the latter, all you have to do is to change a couple of files placed in all-saying directories called _custom and what you get in exchange is an HTML5/CSS3 website with nice typography and mobile-friendly layout (try resizing the browser window to see how nicely this works), Twitter, Github and Pinboard integration, handy CSS for displaying code snippets, and link-log posts feature. Finally, having a Jekyll/Octopress-based website means it’s very easy to deploy it, back it up and move it. You don’t need a database, and your requirements for the server are just that it has some webserver process running and decent runtime. You don’t care about which version of PHP it has, or whether you can easily set it up with latest Django.

If there is one significant downside to this whole setup, it’s that I need my computer to post anything to my blog. I need my ssh keys, git, ruby 1.9.2, rvm (or rbenv) and rake. As long as I’m using all this, creating new posts is easy as pie: edit a new file in Emacs, save it, rake generate, rake deploy and commit the source to Github. If I’d like to post it from my phone, iPad (which I don’t have) or any other computer (which I also don’t have), it would either be impossible or very difficult. However, since I always have my laptop with me, this hasn’t been a problem yet.

So if you have a WordPress (or Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, whatever) based blog that you’d like to alter/tune and you find this process too difficult, if you’d like to feel more hackish and create a very scalable website that doesn’t need a database to run, give Jekyll³ a try. You can host it for free with Github Pages as mentioned before, or with one-worker Heroku setup. If you’re scared of writing your whole website from scratch, try Jekyll Bootstrap or Octopress. It’s fun.

P.S. Dear RSS subscribers, I’m sorry, but apparently due to my negligence and silliness you’ve been spammed by this blog’s RSS channel. I made some changes to /feed/index.html and didn’t realize I was committing and pushing changes to Github pages directly. Very sorry again.

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I’ve been playing violin since I was 7. I went to music school in my hometown, Skierniewice, and spent six years there, finishing what is called a 1st stage music school in Poland. I did not continue to a 2nd stage school and never became a professionally trained musician, but I’ve spent many years playing in different orchestras, first in Skierniewice, later in Warsaw. I enjoyed improvising jazz¹ with my friends in high school, but that ended when I moved out from Skierniewice. Ever since then my only contact with the instrument was through weekly orchestral rehearsals, some practice in between those, and occasional concerts. And when I moved out from Poland in 2008, I left my violin there and did not play since then.

Having an electric instrument was always a dream. I enjoyed listening to Jean-Luc Ponty’s old albums, I was² a big fan of Mat Maneri’s avant-garde free jazz, and of course I loved (and still love) the very best jazz violinist of all time, Stéphane Grappelli³. At some point a very good friend of mine (whom I spent many years in a couple of orchestras with) bought herself a Fender electric violin, I even had a chance to play them, but did not think of buying an electric instrument for myself back then.

Why have I stopped playing violin after so many years of practice? I guess the main reason was I did not have much time, and I no longer had an orchestra or any other kind of band I could play with. Also, at some point playing violin became a very frustrating experience. Not necessarily because my technical abilities worsened, I feel I’m more or less at the same level of playing technique as I was a couple of years ago, but because my expectations significantly outgrew what I was able to play. I kept listening to a lot of records, and each time I tried playing a piece, I was so disappointed by how bad my performance is that I simply hid the instrument back in the case and played some CDs instead. ‘I am not a professional musician’, I would tell myself, ‘it’s not my job, I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this.’

Then during one of my visits to Groningen, I met Karolina’s friend Tim. Karolina is a cello player⁴, and Tim sometimes plays oboe. Every second weekend or so, they meet at one’s apartment and play music. (Karolina, Tim, if you’re reading this, please skip this paragraph.) Neither is a professional musician, and, seriously speaking, neither plays good. They’re often out of tune, they miss some bars every now and then, and they make a number of other mistakes. Still, their performances are what I’d call decent, or what my friend Erik would probably call adequate. While listening to them I realized it doesn’t really matter if they don’t play like pros, because playing music together and having live music at home is simply an enormous joy. I also realized I miss that. I wanted to go back in the game, wanted to go back to playing music.

There was a problem with an instrument though. Of course I had my old violin back at my parents’ house in Poland, but the instrument was in bad shape (years of neglect) and it actually never was particularly good. One could say that you don’t really need a great instrument if you’re a crappy musician, and that’s one way of looking at it, but then again a bad instrument doesn’t really help if you’re having difficulties playing harmonics or double stops. And then I also recalled that I always dreamed of having an electric violin. I checked the balance of my savings account, looked at how cheap the euro is, went on to http://thomann.de, ordered a Yamaha SV-200 silent electric violin, a carbon bow, a good rosin, a decent (or adequate) shoulder rest, and a lightweight case, pressed ‘buy’ and waited.

Before I tell you how the whole setup feels and sounds, let my give a few words of justification: why this violin and not other?

1. First off, a silent violin allows me to practice technically whenever I want. While unplugged from an amplifier the instrument produces a hardly audible sound, unnoticeable to anyone in another room, allowing me to play late at night using headphones.

2. Secondly, this instrument has a line-out socket, which makes recording multiple parts of a string quartet possible without the need of an expensive microphone (cheap mics + violin = the sound of slaughtering a cat). I always wanted to play Shostakovich’s 1st string quartet, but never had a quartet to play it with. This is no longer a problem.

3. The SV-200 can sound any way I want. If I’m practicing Wieniawski’s caprices, I can make it sound like an ordinary acoustic violin. If I want to imitate Ponty, it produces a full-blown 70s fusion sound.

4. And finally, some practical considerations. It seems it’s much more difficult to damage this instrument than an acoustic violin. It’s less fragile and less sensitive to temperature or humidity.

So now, how does it feel? A bit weird. The fingerboard seems to be a tad shorter than on my acoustic violin. The strings (D’Addario Zyex) seem to be easier to press (the difference is not as big as between an acoustic guitar and an electric one, but still), and of course the sound highly depends on the amplifier. The instrument doesn’t feel at all heavier than an acoustic violin, although according to technical specs it is ~100 grams heavier. I haven’t used a Kun shoulder rest before, but it seems to be better than my old Wolf Forte Secondo. The strings I’ll probably need to replace, I don’t like the sound. In fact I plan on buying a set of Dominants and some Pirastro, and compare which one sounds better. Also, I’ve tested recording a couple of minutes into Garage Band, and it sounded pretty good.

But most important of all, I played some parts of The Four Seasons together with Karolina today. We played together for the first time in many years. It was by all measures musically terrible. But it was an awful lot of fun, too.

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The most straightforward solution is to put some local variables into the file, like (auto-fill-mode -1), but today at StackOverflow I saw a much neater solution: one can put a function that searches for a specific string inside a file and sets minor-modes accordingly. So now there’s a coauthors search function in my .emacs:

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; auto-fill is enabled for TeX...
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
; ...unless I work with the gang
(defun my-auto-fill-disabling-hook ()
  "Check to see if we should disable autofill."
  (save-excursion
    (when (or (re-search-forward "truls" 1000 t)
              (re-search-forward "sjur" 1000 t)
              (re-search-forward "erik" 1000 t))
      (auto-fill-mode -1))))
(add-hook 'find-file-hooks 'my-auto-fill-disabling-hook)

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As a matter of fact it only made things worse. My .emacs and .emacs.d were in terrible shape. Lots of chaotically placed files and elisp functions that I amassed during the years made me feel so sad that I even tried a trial of TextMate. Though initially impressed, I quickly realized how bad¹ TextMate is in comparison with The Editor, and I started looking for a way to easily tweak my .emacs.d and not kill anyone while doing it.

What I found is an Emacs Starter Kit by Kieran Healy. Apparently there are many other starter kits out there, but I started cloning this particular one and found it very nice. All the config files are actually org documents (sic!) which makes reading the configuration a pleasure. The kit comes bundled with many useful modes that I didn’t know before, like YASnippet or Pandoc, and is very easy to customize because of perfect documentation². I backed up my old configuration, copied only the most important keyboard shortcuts and minor tweaks – to my big surprise there were only a few of those – and had a brand new, well documented and ordered Emacs configuration in a breeze.

So if you ever feel depressed and want to give up on that whole PhD thing, try changing your Emacs configuration first.

Update: After trying to find how to change some behavior of certain modes, I reverted to my old configuration. Still, spending some time with Emacs is a good way to impreove one’s mood.

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4. It’s not a vocational school. Unlike traditional vocational schools, this new school will have a rigorous academic component and will prepare students for college. But college is not for everyone—many of the best programmers I know were just not interested enough in a general four year degree and went straight into jobs programming.

This is an interesting experiment. I personally know some great programmers who do not have any degree (not even a BSc), and it seems that you can do very well without attending any CS classes in college. One thing I wonder about is how many of important CS concepts can a teenager’s mind digest. I don’t think I’d have been able to understand recursion, higher order functions and some other CS concepts in high school, but perhaps you don’t really need to know all this stuff, or perhaps I’m slow.

Anyway, a brilliant idea.

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I understand that, you need to be earning money somehow. But why isn’t there a ‘pro’ version of your app? Why can’t I actually pay you money? Why do I have to see the ads?

It’s not only a problem with you, Goodreads, there’s plenty of other nice apps in the app store that are free, and hence serve ads. I like free apps, but I hate ads, and if I’m to choose between paying some small amount of money for a ‘pro’ version of software or having ads, I choose to pay. Given, that is, you allow me.

(As a sidenote: yes, this is on of the problems of software for the linux desktop. If Digikam developers charged $25 for a copy of their software, we wouldn’t need Lightroom for linux).

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The Rambler accompanied me to Adelaide this year for the Single Speed Nationals. Whist I was there I dropped into Booze Brothers to pick up a case of the local brew. Bicycle cycling is not a common virtue in that part of Adelaide and rolling into the drive through on my bike called Scrotum attracted the sideways leering of a table full of blokes in fluro. I made my purchase, unpacked beach towels and related paraphernalia from my bag to make it ready for the beer. This short process became the subject of chatter nearby, and I looked up to find I had an audience of 6. “He ain’t gonna fit that in there mate”. “ Nah he’s done it before, you watchim.” I slid the case down into the expanding middle pocket, packed my other stuff around it and in the other pockets and zipped it all up. “Ah, lookid that, his bag’s a fuckin’ anaconda mate!”. And it was. I tipped my helmet to the lads and bade them good day, cruised a couple of blocks to a backyard seafood feast and sank into the afternoon with friends and fine ale.

via BASILJET TESTIES: THE MISSION WORKSHOP RAMBLER.

I recently bought The Rambler and couldn’t be more happy with it. This is simply the best cycling backpack ever made. And the review linked to above is simply the best review I’ve ever read (note: readers not interested in cycling, backpacks, and the like will most likely still find the above review very entertaining).

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The answer is same as usual: run Emacs and open up an Org- Mode file.

Org is obviously great for any sort of documents, but for those that have a lot of code listings it’s particularly awesome. Whenever you need to embed a listing, just put it between #+begin_src <language> and #+end_src. The default behavior while exporting to LaTeX is to use the listings package, but if you find it lacking (as I do), you can use the far better option that is Minted.

In order for Org to use Minted by default, you can put the following elisp code into your .emacs:

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; minted latex export 
(setq org-export-latex-listings 'minted)
(setq org-export-latex-minted-options '(("frame" "lines") ("fontsize" "\\footnotesize")
    ("linenos" "")))

and then use the Minted package for LaTeX export:

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#+LaTeX_HEADER: \usepackage{minted}
#+LaTeX_HEADER: \usemintedstyle{emacs}

With the sample configuration above you get your listings parsed through Pygments and Minted every time you export your document to PDF via pdfLaTeX, and enjoy both the convenience and power of Org- Mode, as well as beautifully rendered LaTeX output.

Use Org-Mode, folks!

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(…) in our time with the Kindle Fire, it fell far short of what tablets should be able to accomplish. As a vector for Amazon’s video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it’s great. As an e-reader, it’s merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon’s promises.

via Don’t call it a tablet: the Kindle Fire reviewed.

Looks like I was wrong. Too bad.

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ON APRIL 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she opened it that morning to the Gmail account that had been her main communications center for more than six years, it seemed to be responding very slowly and jerkily. She hadn’t fully restarted the computer in several days, and thought that was the problem. So she closed all programs, rebooted the machine, and went off to make coffee and have some breakfast.

via Hacked! - Magazine - The Atlantic.

A great article and a true eye-opener, especially for those who rely on cloud- based services (Google in particular) and don’t use 1Password (or similar software).

Remember:

• sync your email to your hard drive and back it up;

• keep your webmail address book empty;

• you should only know 3 passwords: the one to your main email account, the one to your bank, and the one that unlocks your password manager.

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A long, long time ago, when I was still very enthusiastic about desktop linux and free software in general, an idea of a linux-based cellphone or a ‘palmtop’, as they were called back in the day, was something the FLOSS community dreamed of. There were numerous software and hardware projects (does anyone still remember OpenMoko?), and one of them, Android, was acquired by Google in 2005, and later became one of the most popular operating systems for mobile devices in the world.¹

I never liked Android. Not because I didn’t like the interface or the phones, or the logo, or Google – no. I didn’t like Android because it was a fork of the linux kernel and a linux distribution that didn’t (and from what I know still doesn’t) support the full set of standard GNU libraries or X window system.² And because there was a much better alternative developed by some Gnome project programmers and Nokia, called Maemo, that already in 2005 provided a nice touch-based interface, supported many well- established linux technologies (X.org, Gtk+, ESD, etc.), and was actually used by a device you could buy, namely Nokia’s N770 Internet Tablet. Granted, it wasn’t a phone, but the software was mature compared to Android at that time (first Android devices available to the public were offered in late 2008), and was much more hacker-friendly and linux-friendly. It was easy for desktop linux programmers to integrate their apps with Maemo and to write Maemo software. At least that’s the way I thought about it back in 2006.

In 2009 Nokia released the first smartphone that ran Maemo – the N900. But that was 2009, and Android already had an established user base, and new Android phones were released every couple of months. I’ve seen many N900 phones at FOSDEM in 2010, free software hackers really loved them. I remember everyone being excited about the potential Maemo had, but people also seemed to begin to realize that the battle was lost. Nokia was late, Android was good (or good enough) and popular, and the N900 remained a smartphone good for hackers and hackers only.

However, in February 2010 Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin merged, creating MeeGo³, and then in June Nokia announced that all its smartphones will run MeeGo. There was hope, but not for long. In February 2011 Nokia changed its mind, and decided to team up with Microsoft, and have its new smartphones run the new Windows Phone 7.

It therefore saddens me to read the review of the latest MeeGo-based smartphone, the fantastic N9. It seems like a terrific device, both hardware- and software-wise. Engadget sums the software up in the following way:

MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping – that is, until you remember that you’re dealing with a dead man walking. It’s impossible to dismiss what’s been achieved here – a thoroughly modern, elegant, linux-based OS with inspired design that’s simple and intuitive to use, all developed in house by Nokia.

That’s exactly how things are with N9: it’s awesome in so many ways, but so fundamentally flawed because it’s a dead platform. Dead to most people, that is, because hackers will definitely find ways to upgrade the software, they’ll write apps if they need to, and will be happy to use the wonderful hardware that N9 features. The rest probably won’t even notice such a phone existed, because Nokia said it will not release the N9 in US, UK, Japan, Germany or Canada.

And I will shed a tear, because what seems to be the most innovative and fresh mobile platform today is being buried alive. And why? Probably even people at Nokia do not know.

Discussion on HackerNews.

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Not a long time ago I wrote a short eulegy-like post about Steve Jobs’ passing away, and now another great person in the world of computer science dies. A very different kind of person though.

While Jobs was undoubtedly a famous figure (even my mom knows who he was), Ritchie remained unknown to most people. Even amongst geeks, many just knew him as ‘the R’ in the famous The C Programming Language book by K&R.

Yet although Jobs’ influence on computer science remains controversial (some claim his biggest achievements were in the field of marketing), everyone agrees that computer science would not be where it is today without the C programming language and UNIX.

Rest in peace, Dennis Ritchie.

(Image from Wikipedia)

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;;The following makes C-c-c not ask, just do the default action. Adds C-c-a for asking
(setq TeX-command-force "")
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook
'(lambda()
(define-key LaTeX-mode-map "\C-c\C-a" ; 'a' for ask, change to anything you want
(lambda (arg) (interactive "P")
(let ((TeX-command-force nil))
(TeX-command-master arg))))))

;;Inserts {} automaticly on _ and ^
(setq TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript t)

I hope Eric doesn’t mind me sharing this. Enjoy!

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Everyday the first thing I do after I wake up is I grab my iPhone and check the news, and today’s morning news were particularly upsetting. It’s ironic that I learned about Steve Jobs’ death using his device.

A great visionary, a person that inspired millions of people and pushed technology forward so much that it’s hard to imagine passed away. I’m not sure how much I will personally miss him (we never met, and I’m pretty sure he never knew I exist), but I sure will remember his passionate talks, his inspiring speeches and his stylish turtleneck.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

(Image from Apple’s website)

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First off, all the new Kindles are cheap. Even though what Amazon quotes in their ads are prices for devices ‘with special offers’ (they run commercials as a screensaver), the ordinary price for the touch-screen based wifi Kindle is still $139. If you don’t mind ads on your screensaver, the price goes down to $99. And if you don’t need a touchscreen, it’s $109/$79 – very, very cheap. But it only gets better when you look the tablet, aka Kindle Fire. It sells for $199, offering a 7” IPS touchscreen, an Android-based OS, access to Amazon Appstore, email and a new, fast web browser. All that for less than half the price of the basic iPad.

Secondly, Kindle Fire looks like a device optimized for reading all sorts of media content (illustrated magazines, newspapers, books, and movies), designed and sold by one of the largest providers of these – Amazon. Apple tried (and still tries) to convince us that the iPad is a ‘post-PC era’ computer, and many believe it is the future of all our home computing needs, yet every single iPad owner I know uses the device primarily for reading articles, magazines and books.

If the Kindle Fire allows you to do the same, giving you the access to vast resources of the Amazon store at the same time, why would you spend your money on an iPad?

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The internet “celebrities” I was so nervous to meet are now my friends. I see them a few times each year at conferences. It turns out that we’re all just regular people who like similar things and are in the same little circle of interest.

So next time you’re at a geeky conference and have an opportunity to meet someone whose work you admire, just go up and introduce yourself, because they’re just a regular person, they never get “recognized” during the other 360 days each year, and they’ll probably really appreciate it.

via Celebrity – Marco.org.

The same works for famous researchers. You wouldn’t imagine how humble and modest these people can be.

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1. It has to be simple/intuitive, so that you don’t have to think about how to use it when you use it.

2. It should open/save its notes in a format that is as close to plain text as possible.

3. And finally, what matters probably to people studying/working with logic/mathematics, it should support LaTeX.

As far as I am aware, the only piece of software satisfying all the conditions above is Org-Mode for Emacs.¹

Ad. 1 Despite what other people might tell you, Org-Mode is pretty simple. Or wait, it’s not. It’s exactly as simple as you want it to be. You can use it the way I do, keeping out of its advanced features, although if you’re a typical Emacs user, you will have the urge to dive into your .emacs tweaking that org-mode. As my friend Tikitu once put it, Emacs and its modes (especially the great ones) want to take control over your life. And in case of Org-Mode, this really is a serious risk.

Suppose you do actually want to use Org as simple is possible. How simple is that? Well, given that you have a working Emacs and Org installation (which itself isn’t that hard), you just need to open up some new .org file, type for example something like this in its header:

#+STARTUP: overview 
#+TITLE: Notes from papers 
#+AUTHOR: Piotr Kaźmierczak

And you’re set. Now start typing your notes.

You can separate each topic/note in a number of ways. You can have each note in a separate file, but that’s hardly optimal. You can separate notes with headers, like this:

* This is the first note. 
And here goes its body. 
** This is a subnote.
Interesting, huh? 
* And that's the third note.

That’s very convenient in Org, because each section can be ‘folded’ and ‘unfolded’ when you press tab while the cursor is in the line containing the (sub)section title. This allows to switch from an ‘overview’ mode and looking inside each sections/notes. Here’s how it looks like in ‘overview’:

While writing your notes you can use a simple markup to indicate e.g. *bold* or /italic/ text. You can make plain lists by starting a line with 1. or - and hitting <M-return> at the end of the line (that inserts a new item automatically). You can insert tables as easily. Just start the line with a |, type a header of the column and divide it with another | until you finish the row, press <Tab> and you’re automatically in the second, newly created row. Nothing makes table creation easier than Org-Mode.

Ad. 2 Org-Mode files are plain text files. Simple as that. Org also has a built-in exporter that supports HTML or LaTeX output.

Ad. 3 Now that’s the best part of it: not only can you export your notes into LaTeX, but you can also put math formulas into your notes. You can preview them on the fly, too. And this way Org-Mode also becomes the best tool for drafting papers, too.

Adding to all that the fact that Org-Mode is free, easily extensible and cross-platform makes it a really perfect tool for your average grad student. There’s nothing better out there.

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B&W Zeppelin is one of those devices that really catch one’s eye. It can’t remain unnoticed, but it doesn’t make a good impression. When we saw it in a store today, our initial thought was that it’s a beautiful toy for people willing to spend too much money (€600!) on what basically is just a fancy iPod docking station. Didn’t expect to cycle through the narrow streets of downtown Groningen holding my left hand on a shaky old handlebar of a borrowed oma fiets, and another one on a big white ‘Bowers & Wilkins’ box semi-attached to the rear rack an hour later. That hour was filled with discussions between me and Karolina whether it makes sense to spend such an amount of money on such a small ‘thingy’, and whether the sound really is that good. Well, as everyone probably already expects, it actually is that good.

Of all the iPod docking stations I’ve ever listened to the Zeppelin offers by far the best sound quality. I’m sitting in front of the device while writing this post, and still can’t believe how great the sound is. For such a small device it creates a really big scene. The sound is rich, detailed and dynamic. And it’s difficult to believe how deep the bass goes.¹ The thing really sounds awesome.

And what’s funnier, its design is brilliant. The Zeppelin looks like a creature from outer space. It’s small, but relatively heavy for its size, has only three buttons (power/stand by, volume up, volume down) and a single diode on the front panel which glows in a different color depending on the source. And now here’s the fun part: besides the mini-jack aux input and a standard USB socket, the new Zeppelin features AirPlay-compatible streaming, so once you configure it for the local wireless network it can be accessed via iTunes or iPod app on the iPhone, and the audio can be streamed to it directly.

There’s also a funny little pilot in the box that comes in handy when you’re sitting on the couch with your girlfriend sipping that Italian wine and enjoying the sound of Leszek Możdżer’s piano.

And finally, the Zeppelin has a composite video output socket that can stream the video from an iPod/iPhone to a TV, but this feature we couldn’t test because we don’t own a TV set.

So in the end it all boils down to the question: why wouldn’t you simply buy a nice micro hi-fi system, with separate loudspeakers? Well for one, the Zeppelin is much more portable, and given that Karolina moves statistically 3 times a year since she moved to the Netherlands, it’s pretty important for her to avoid having unnecessary items. In addition, the AirPlay feature is really convenient, especially if you live inside the Apple ecosystem (and we both do). And finally, for this price there aren’t that many micro systems with sound comparable to the Zeppelin.

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