Notes from BubbleCity

Last day in California, blogging from a little cafe in the Fillmore area of San Francisco.

Silicon Valley is dead boring, I ran away from it on Friday afternoon, but I like the big city up here. Went to Berkeley (slightly disappointing), done the sightseeing thing downtown (Fisherman's Wharf, Russian Hill, Alamo Square, Chinatown, built-in-Milan cablecars, etc) which wasn't fantastic, much better just to walk around up&down the hills, Lower Haight, Octavia, Fulton, to get a feeling for the lovely (upscale) 'hoods.

Got lucky and landed in JapanTown on the first saturday of Cherry-Blossom Festival, so the entire district was all tarted up and in full swing (including long queues for the International Asian Film Festival), I really enjoyed it (but the hyashi-chuka was average).

It can be as seductive as NYC at times, even though the character is very different; NYC feels like the place where you go "to be the best", while you come to SF "to be yourself" or "to find what's next". It looks like a fundamentally mexican/asian city, rather than white, and this is fantastic. Whereas Santa Clara/Silicon Valley is such a whitey, middle-class, boring place, it's no wonder that waves of geeks are escaping to SF-SOMA (South-Of-MArket-street) and commute from there.

Been to the scenic SF Giants stadium (ahh, one day I have to see a live match) which was recently built on reclaimed land facing the bay and it's gorgeous. I still didn't see the western area, Golden Gate Park etc, but hey, you have to keep something for the next visit!

Blogging does something to your mind

I am currently into a deeply technical internal training session, and the temptation to liveblog it is huge. Of course I won't (but if I could, I'm sure that my colleagues back in the UK would really like it).

And now Frisco...

Just a few weeks after our fantastic trip to NYC, tomorrow my company puts me on a plane for San Francisco. I don't know anything about the place and I only have a day or so to spend there... I have to say, it's going to be hard to top what NYC gave me: walking on the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, in a clear night of full moon, was so fantastic...

But hey Frisco, give us your best shot ;)

Some Good News, For Once

Amnesty International has a list of Good News (with a feed). That's nice, newspapers should have this sort of thing on their front-pages every day, it would give us back some faith in humanity... but I forget that the papers' job is to keep you distracted, dispirited and depressed, so that their backers (investors and advertisers) will keep screwing you.

There's also a Call To Action page (again with feed). Some things you might find silly ("demonstration" is such a XIX century concept), but you can choose your preferred way to help. For example, I have a credit card that will donate 0.25% of every transaction to Amnesty. It seems such a little thing, but it raised £1.5million in the last 15 years; that's an average of £100.000 donated each year, just by shopping! I've had this card since I opened a current account here in the UK, six years ago -- which was (by the way) with an ethical bank, Cooperative, so I know that my money will not be invested in producing or dealing weapons (among other things). Oh, and did I say that my ADSL provider's profit help developing Free Software?

There are ways to make a difference, day by day, voting with your wallet. I'm no hippie (fuck, do I hate vegans and home-recycling schemes), but in all my laziness I try to help good people, a little bit. I just got a big bonus, and I think it's time to pay back some debts to my parents; i know that they will be happy to hear that I want half the money to be donated to a charity. Eh, I'm a bastard ;)

KDED & me (& Python)

It's clear that KDelicious needs a background service to periodically synchronize with the server without user intervention. KDED seems the perfect answer to this, right? You can build modules that will be started and stopped with the desktop and managed with the "Service Manager" screen in the Control Center (KControl).

Unfortunately, KDED will only load a compiled shared library, not a script or a generic command (which would have been quite handy). I've no idea why, but I guess the KDE devs had their motives when they designed the system. The latest version of kdedistutils (in the pykdeextensions package, hosted on currently-down simonzone.org) only supports the creation of C++ "glue" modules for kparts and kpartplugins, so once again I'm a bit stuck. I guess what one would need is a stub similar to the one that pykdedistutils generates for KControl plugins, KParts and KPartPlugins... I'm not fluent in C++, but I'll see if I can hack my way through. If I manage, i'll send Simon a patch for pykdedistutils.

On a side note, I noticed a few issues with kdedistutils when building KControl modules:

• it fails creating source distributions (but maybe it's me doing something daft)
• when building a binary distribution (bdist), it doesn't do static linking, which means that the produced libs are not really portable and require libpythonize to be in the exact same position on the target host.