[01:30] <dilys> Merge to rocketfuel@canonical.com/launchpad--production--1.8: sync with devel (patch-20)
[02:25] <stub> lifeless: Ta
[04:29] !lilo:*! Outage New Year's Eve morning; news item on http://freenode.net/news.shtml .... thanks, and thank you for using freenode! :)
[01:35] <SteveA> kiko: dude, you were burgled?
[01:35] <kiko> SteveA, yeah, I sort of guessed it before leaving.
[01:35] <kiko> how are you doing? back in .lt?
[01:36] <SteveA> yeah, back in lithuania.  strangely, no white christmas this year.  but it snowed yesterday.
[01:37] <kiko> must feel good being home after so much fivestarring.
[01:38] <kiko> I've still got to get my act together, my house is still a proper mess
[01:38] <SteveA> but you have a shower now? 
[01:38] <kiko> inbox is also still scary, 833/1478
[01:38] <kiko> yeah, we got a shower a few months ago -- but I still miss the cold douche
[01:39] <kiko> electric showers kind of suck
[01:42] <SteveA> i was going to play with shtoom today, but sound for i810 is broken in hoary at the moment
[01:43] <kiko> SteveA, how's aiste?
[01:44] <SteveA> she's okay.  came 3rd in a horse jumping contest yesterday, actually
[01:45] <SteveA> that is, being on a horse, jumping over obstacles.  not jumping over horses.
[01:45] <kiko> she did indeed say something about horsejumping over the holiday season
[02:08] <SteveA> hi matt
[04:10] <dilys> Merge to rocketfuel@canonical.com/dists--devel--0: roomba snapshot (buildbot/autotest) (patch-43, david.allouche@canonical.com)
[07:57] !lilo:*! Hi all.  If you're aware of a *working* pastebot on the network (you invite it to your channel, it announces pastes) whose owners don't mind having added to some arbitrary development channel, please /msg me....thanks!
[08:33] !lilo:*! A new channel, for your convenience: #freenode-pastebots contains all known pastebots which can be invited to channels on freenode.
[09:39] <dilys> Merge to rocketfuel@canonical.com/dists--devel--0: fix roomba snapshot (patch-44, david.allouche@canonical.com)
[10:12] <TD> hi, i'm having big problems with the launchpad. is anybody around?
[11:05] <kiko> sure
[11:06] <kiko> TD, what's up?
[11:06] <TD> i can't figure out how to add a new POT file, for one
[11:06] <kiko> for an existing project?
[11:07] <TD> yes
[11:07] <kiko> which project is that?
[11:07] <TD> it has one pot, i'd like to add another
[11:07] <TD> autopackage
[11:08] <stub> Morning
[11:08] <kiko> https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta/products/autopackage/autopackage-1.0
[11:08] <kiko> TD, you've tried "edit this template", I assume?
[11:09] <TD> that would edit the pot file for the main program, yes? i wanted to add a new pot for a different program
[11:10] <kiko> TD, wouldn't that be a different product? i.e., not autopackage?
[11:11] <TD> well, it's a component of it. it's a frontend program for the core code
[11:12] <TD> i thought autopackage was the project, and autopackage-1.0 was the template for the core, and that for other POT files, i'd add new templates
[11:12] <TD> rather than actual new projects
[11:12] <kiko> hmmm, indeed, there is support for more than one template per product
[11:13] <kiko> otoh, I don't seem to see an option for me to do it
[11:13] <kiko> are you Mike Hearn, TD?
[11:13] <TD> yep
[11:13] <kiko> hmmm
[11:13] <ddaa> ha... I remember seeing you in #arch :)
[11:13] <TD> right :) 
[11:13] <TD> i'm afraid i'm using svk these days ...
[11:13] <kiko> it may be that this functionality is disabled in the version in production
[11:13] <ddaa> you are beta testing rosetta?
[11:14] <TD> it's still in beta?
[11:14] <TD> oops :)
[11:14] <TD> oh well. it *looked* ready when i played with it
[11:14] <kiko> TD, I'd suggest trying to grab a hold of daf or carlos, which is probably only going to happen on monday!
[11:14] <ddaa> hu... well, I think so... I'm not a rosetta person...
[11:15] <TD> ok
[11:15] <kiko> it's all rather alpha-ish, though it does offer the essential po-import/export functionality.
[11:15] <TD> yeah
[11:15] <TD> alright
[11:16] <ddaa> except the boss felt like he needed to put something out to keep the world looking in our general direction, or he thought that was the best way to keep the productivity up, or something like that :)
[11:17] <TD> ddaa: you work for mark now huh?
[11:17] <ddaa> Yep. Been on payroll since july.
[11:17] <kiko> ddaa, it's more that he wants to validate the general concepts, AFAICT
[11:17] <TD> ok
[11:17] <ddaa> kiko: you're certainly better aware of what is going on than I
[11:18] <TD> yeah the constant "not ready yet" signs are a bit annoying
[11:18] <TD> i'm still trying to figure out what your business model is :)
[11:18] <kiko> wait for January. :)
[11:18] <TD> "corporate desktop debian" is about the best guess so far
[11:19] <ddaa> TD: actually it is _much_ broader than that.
[11:20] <kiko> indeed
[11:20] <TD> ok. "make pots of cash out of debian" :)
[11:20] <TD> and save the world while you're at it
[11:21] <ddaa> More like "change the opensource world, and sell associated services".
[11:22] <ddaa> Quite vague, indeed, but I'm not too concerned about that. Our job is to make software that rocks. We leave cashflow issues to the execs :)
[11:22] <TD> hmm :)
[11:24] <TD> i'd personally want to know the business model before committing to a job, but that's perhaps just me
[11:26] <TD> ddaa: i guess you are a bazaar hacker, yes?
[11:27] <ddaa> At the time, my perspective was "i'm looking for a job, that stuff is going to be fun, it actually has a small chance of going big and profitable, and in any case it's going to be good on my resume". When you have only one year of employment behind you, that's often enough.
[11:28] <ddaa> I did not actually hack on bazaar yet. I have some responsibilities in some yet-unannounced project, and I have a plenty of work to do on pyarch and pybaz. Actually I already have more work than I can handle. So I leave baz to the rest of the team. 
[11:29] <TD> ok, fair enough :)
[11:29] <ddaa> np
[11:29] <ddaa> nice to see you on board
[11:31] <TD> heh, i meant i can't talk about job stability etc, i work for codeweavers after all :)
[11:31] <TD> pretty much the textbook case of risky business
[11:31] <TD> but it's fun :)
[11:32] <ddaa> so, in a nutshell, what is the business plan of codeweavers?
[11:33] <TD> make money selling services and products based on wine
[11:34] <TD> it's fairly sound. we do make money, so i guess there must be something to it :)
[11:34] <TD> the travel is nice too though i don't get to do much of that being a student
[11:35] <ddaa> I guess the risk in the business is that if the app developers decide to become obstructive (I can imagine M$ doing that) they can actually sink the value.
[11:36] <TD> it's not so much that. the risk is more simply that of surviving until desktop linux really takes off
[11:36] <TD> you can survive on selling to the enthusiast/end user market, we know this because we have
[11:36] <TD> but it's not much of an existence. we're all waiting for corp desktop to take off
[11:36] <TD> the other risk is that you never know how much it'll cost to make an app work before you actually do it :)
[11:36] <TD> naturally customers don't like that
[11:38] <ddaa> I see what you mean. There is also the fact that your window of existence is between "desktop linux is taken seriously enough to generate profit for the company" and "desktop linux is mature enough not to need wine".
[11:38] <ddaa> otoh there are plenty of nice markets in that window, some of them may last for a long time.
[11:38] <ddaa> * niche markets
[11:40] <TD> well, i doubt that wine will ever be unnecessary. the main problem is that there's lots of custom/vertical-market software in the world, and it doesn't make much sense to rewrite it
[11:40] <TD> same way that lots of systems run on DOS
[11:40] <TD> or have text-mode UIs etc. old software hangs around for ages
[11:40] <ddaa> yeah, these the niche markets I was referring to.
[11:40] <TD> ok, so it will one day be unnecessary. but by that point i'll be an old man smoking a pipe and won't care :)
[11:40] <TD> right
[11:41] <TD> also we hope to get a nice slice of the porting market. at the moment we aren't as slick at that as we'd like to be
[11:41] <ddaa> you mean native porting?
[11:41] <TD> we've done a few ports, but we don't have the resources to do proper ports (eg with GTK+ guis). also the customers don't ask for them, which is a problem when i'm trying to sell this to my boss :)
[11:41] <ddaa> consulting for porting windoze apps to unix?
[11:41] <TD> at the moment we do winelib porting
[11:42] <TD> ie, improving wine so that app works better, giving you a "port"
[11:42] <TD> it's not really native though. the next step is to do consulting for hybrid ports
[11:42] <TD> where the app stays using some win32 apis like file/memory management and boring stuff, but gets native UI, native package management, icon theme integration etc
[11:42] <ddaa> you can only go that far in a demand-driven way
[11:43] <ddaa> most users have no conscious demand for good UI
[11:43] <TD> right now though most of the ports we deal with are quite specialist apps and the companies typically don't sell many copies, so native-ness isn't a big deal for them
[11:43] <TD> by demand i meant, demand from the companies doing the ports
[11:43] <TD> like I said, they're so specialist that the free market doesn't optimize out the non-native GUIs like it would for commodity apps
[11:43] <ddaa> they know a really bad UI when they use it. They (sometimes) know a really good UI when they use it, but anything in between makes no difference to corporate users.
[11:45] <ddaa> That's one thing I really hate with the software market. A lot of the niche software is incredibly bad UI-wise, but the users are not the prescriptors, so what gets out is a general feeling that "computers are ugly and unfriendly".
[11:46] <TD> yes, it's bad. but just a manifestation of "software is an immature industry"
[11:46] <TD> most developers have no usability training
[11:46] <ddaa> I have slightly different perspective.
[11:47] <ddaa> In most niche markets, you need not be usable. It's more the execs having no notion of what software usability means.
[11:47] <ddaa> And wider issues of execs disregarding the work experience of the clerks.
[11:48] <TD> hmm, perhaps
[11:48] <ddaa> Training developers in usability would only marginally improve the situation. The economic logic that leads to such bad UI in nich software remains.
[11:48] <TD> there are proprietary apps with good UI though, so i don't think that applies universally
[11:49] <ddaa> The "marginally" lies in that developpers, when given a choice prefer to do something better.
[11:50] <ddaa> I always feel pain when I see clerks using booking, banking, administrative, etc. software... and see them curse. </rant>
[11:51] <ddaa> TD: yes, when there is a competition, a better UI is an asset. Often, there is no competition to speak of in niche markets.
[11:51] <TD> yep
[11:51] <TD> i do think usability training can help with that. people think about it as they go