Day: December 31, 2010

Crowd power on steroids

December 31, 2010 / / 0 Comments

This is not a news, but I think there is a big shift happening in the society.

I guess the idea of community sharing is becoming bigger. Opensource movement was a precursor in this regard, I think and a loose collaboration is able to get things done.

This will raise with the creation of more peer to peer networks which have a strong focus and an objective. Collaborative consumption will be the next stop.

Another trend which is worth of noticing is increase of collective intelligence. Making data available to people is opening up a lot of possibilities. From opengoverment to opendata to openknowledge.

I still remember the Time cover with You. Next year I bet it will be “we”.

Happy New Year,

I guess it will be full.

Fixing a bug. The power of opensource

December 31, 2010 / / 1 Comment

 

If you used gnome 2.30 and used two screen, cloning the smaller in the bigger one,  you were annoyed by this bug. At least I was really annoyed. Nothing too bad, just the image was not drawn correctly. In my case was drawn twice at different resolution, one on top of the other. However this was a regression from gnome 2.28 where this was not present. The bug was up for a long time and was also reported upstream at gnome side.

I did some research on it and I had nailed down where was the problematic code, however I was unable to propose the solution because C is no my cup of tea.

Yesterday Florent proposed a fix which was tested by Thomas, which was kind enough to give the instruction how to recompile the package, making a deb out of it and install it. Therefore I just give it a try. Finally, I have the desktop fixed!!

The patch it’s already on the gnome bugzilla and everyone will get this back as it supposed to be.

The thing that I want to underline is the anarchic collaboration:

  • somebody open the bug,
  • other people reported it and the bug was confirmed
  • somebody else found which part of code was interest
  • somebody proposed the solution
  • other people tested on different system

This is the beauty of opensource. Just give an hand if you can and enjoy it.