I’ll be attending FOSDEM this weekend (albeit not the full weekend).

Unlike previous editions I was hardly involved in the speaker interviews — the very capable K.V. handled those this year. I did contribute to the questions in Brion Vibber’s interview though.

The organizers are once again making a nice leap in quality. Case in point: the cloakroom, the sunday bus home, and of course BDA v3.1.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

When the network is up and running, use it to send a message to Broadcom to demand some hardware specs for the b43 driver authors.

To me, it scored bad points for its awfully long subtitle (Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries — Microsoft .NET Development Series). We’ll refer to it as FDGCIPRNL as a form of silent protest hereafter.

Luckily all is more than made up for having “Krzysztof Cwalina” as one of the author’s names. Can’t do better than that myself.

On to the content.

The book is based on internal documentation used by the creators of the .NET framework (which is better designed than other similar frameworks that I know). It gives great insight in the design process and the many trade offs involved.

Even though the reader might never implement a large framework himself (a framework is designed to be extended, while a library is not), FDGCIPRNLMDS still is valuable in helping better understand the framework that you program against.

The book is also stuffed with generic advice about programming .NET: which classes to avoid, how to name fields, how to deal with exceptions, etcetera.

From time to time, a contributing author comments on the topic at hand in a small blurb, which gives may of the sections a nice personal touch.

Contrary to most technical books, FDGCIPRNLMDS was actually a pretty quick read. All in all, a recommended book for .NET programmers but not so much for practitioners of other platforms. For them, the advice and insight is too biased towards the .NET framework only.

The book I’m reading next seems a much tougher nut to crack, but I’m making progress.

For fun and profit, I decided to check whether you can truly send SMS messages for free using Twitter (Wikipedia).

Yes, it does work, except that you can only send to other Twitters — the free part is more about receiving SMSes rather than sending them. So every receiver that you want to SMS needs to be registered with Twitter. Nonetheless, a pretty impressive improvement!

Especially since you can send the messages in a Jabber client (including Google Talk / GMail chat), right on the PC, typing on a decent keyboard.

The trick is to register the mobile with twitter, and setup your mobile to receive only so-called ‘direct’ Twitter messages.

Then, in the chat client, add twitter@twitter.com as a contact. Talking to this service you can send direct messages with “D [username] [message]“.

You get 250 mobile messages per month. Do keep it quiet before the big telcos find out and decide to block it!

It was not a page-turner like “iWoz”, but just as interesting to read.

Just like with the book by Woz, I already knew some of its contents — this time by accidentally browsing the folklore.org stories that form the basis of the book.

The anecdotal structure of the book makes it easy to read in pieces, but it tends to not ‘draw you into it’ as much. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about this exceptional computer system and its uber-geeky creators.

I figure that the book would be perfect for Mac users and fans, but even for a Linux/Windows guy like me I’d heartily recommended it.

It’s an exceptionally interesting biography, if you care for technology and some personal computing history.

I listened to Wozniak via IT Conversations before (it’s the highest rated talk over there), so I already knew some of the anecdotes and developments, but the humor and engaging style of the book make up for it.

The history of the Apple I and Apple II are very interesting, if only for the fact that they were the start of the microcomputer revolution that continues until today. As a bonus, Wozniak himself is one of the most interesting and entertaining figures in the tech industry.

The end of the book I found a bit disappointing, but it did not make me regret to have read it.

Thanks to the Apple fan (who else?) to have lent it to me!

Het gaat niet.
Het is onmogelijk.
Aaargh!

Een bijzondere eigenschap van dromen is dat cijfers en tekst erin veranderen als je even wegkijkt. Bovendien gedragen technische apparten zich zelden naar behoren in de droomwereld.

De ervaren dromer leert zulke eigenschappen te herkennen en er gebruik van te maken, om zo tot een lucide droom te komen.

Uw dienaar, daarentegen, bleef dapper naar de code staren en op het toetsenbord rammen.

Tevergeefs, of wat dacht u?

Op hun blog kan je goed volgen hoe het eraan toe gaat. En dat is dit jaar enorm spannend: er werd haasje-over gepleegd met de absolute topfavorieten, het Nederlandse Nuon Solar Team van de TU Delft met hun ‘Nuna 4′.

De Belgen moeten morgen nog enkele kilometers afleggen, maar de Hollanders hebben hun tijd al geklokt. Nuon eindigt eerste, Umicore finisht zonder pech tweede. Een geweldige prestatie; vorig jaar hielden technische problemen het vorige team nog ver van een top-3.

Dit jaar zien de wagens er anders uit dan de vorige editie: de bestuurders moeten meer rechtop zitten, waardoor de cockpit hoger is dan voordien. De zonnecellen op hun beurt zijn qua oppervlakte enkele vierkante meters kleiner gemaakt.

Het valt in ieder geval wel op dat de twee snelste wagens genoemd zijn naar een sponsor — ook in deze sport is het budget een allesbepalende factor, al was het maar om de efficiëntste zonnecellen, batterijen en motor te kunnen gebruiken.

Trying out the examples in the book, I was a bit disappointed about the templating system in Rails (called ERB). This is just the same ugly HTML/code/indentation/tag soup mess as one would get with PHP. I’d expected someone would have solved this issue by now, preferably in an elegant, Rails-consistent way.

And lo and behold, via the Riding Rails webblog I notice the existence of Haml, “Markup haiku”. Elegant, readable, indentation-aware — and simple and efficient. Great.

Except for on thing: all code expressions only affect one line, which means that loops and conditionals with markup in them just don’t compile. Which you wouldn’t need anyway if everything is nicely componentized and such, but it still would be handy sometimes. Maybe in a next version?