Uzbl on Dieter's blog

Handing off uzbl to a new project leader

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:05:35 -0400

As of yesterday, Brendan 'bct' Taylor is the new Uzbl project leader / maintainer.
Yesterday I did the newspost on uzbl.org which explains the reasoning. I can add it feels pretty weird "giving away" and "leaving behind" a project you spent so much time on and which grew a large (well, for a FOSS side project with a hacker audience) base of users and contributors, and which served as inspiration for various other projects.

But I know this was the right thing to do. On one hand there were more and more contributions coming in and changes being proposed but on the other hand I disliked being involved so deeply in a "frontend" project. Early last year, I happened to see some problems with browsing and had some cool ideas to attempt alleviate them, so it was fun kickstarting the project and making some things working, but I don't want to be the guy maintaining a browser.
My demotivation has been holding back the progress of the project, but luckily my request for change did not go unanswered. Brendan stepped up, shared some ideas and because he is well aware of all the work currently going on (including his own) he seems like a good candidate to take uzbl wherever he thinks it should go.

Also, because of the "I just want something that works completely, damnit!" I've never been a full-time Uzbl user. (I think most uzbl users - and users of "hacker browsers" in general - still keep another browser for some specific sites and whatnot). And I think some implementation decisions were a bit too radical and caused a bit too much complexity in return of too little flexibility. Which is very ironic, because clearly plenty of folks love the uzbl architecture, and most say it just needs some finetuning (I.e. some people use the fast C-based cookie daemon rather then the python one, and it seems the problems with the escaping is something most people are okay with working around while waiting for a proper fix, whereas the non-perfect design frustrated me but I wasn't interested fixing it myself). I'm getting intrigued in the advantages an integrated, single-language, tightly-coupled programming api can bring (like how luakit provides lua-bindings to WebkitGtk+), a design like this clearly has its own tradeoffs but at least it seems more easy to build something that works reasonably. So I could try that and see how that works out. Although I'm not looking forward to learning yet another language..
Maybe this is just kind-of a "burnout", I don't know, Brendan (and others) have told me I can sound like I'm trying to discourage. So I'll stop now. At least now, everybody is happy ;-)

Stay tuned for the cool things Brendan will announce shortly, it will make uzbl better for existing and new users.
Good luck, Uzbl community, although I can't help but watching closely...

Uzbl, monitoring, AIF talks

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:06:18 -0400

I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
Uzbl & web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.

Fosdem 2010

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:10:16 -0400

I'll be at fosdem - 10th edition - again this year.

I'll be presenting a lightning talk about uzbl.
Also, Arch Linux guys Roman, JGC, Thomas and me will hang out at the distro miniconf. We might join the infrastructure round-table panel, but there is no concrete information yet.

More stuff I'm looking forward to:

fosdem maemo application
mirrorbrain. a topic often discussed at Arch
clicfs
a 2nd fries van!
openpcf (how would this compare to puppet et al?)
asterisk development
csync (reminds me of my own ddm)
mongodb
cassandra
map/reduce in nosql vs sql on rdms
writing a patch for linux
systemtap
scaling facebook

I'm suprised myself how there are much more topics of interest to me then last year, and I'm not sure if the program is even finished.

Arch Linux interview and Uzbl article

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:30:50 -0400

Apologies for only informing you about the second article now. I assumed most of you follow LWN (you probably should) or found the article anyway.
Of all the articles written about uzbl, no one came close to the quality of Koens work. So even though it's a bit dated it's still worth a read.

Froscon 2009 afterthoughts

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:00:02 -0400

Froscon was great.

It was smaller then I thought, I especially assumed more activity in the devrooms (I'm too used to fosdem which is much bigger), but hey nice conference anyway.
It was great to meet (some of) my Arch Linux colleagues. Mostly the guys from Germany showed up, and Roman who is from Ukraine.
We all got an Arch t-shirt/polo of which we could pick the color ourselves. Woohoo. Thanks donators.
A few people also told me they had tried / were using uzbl (my browser project) so that was really cool.
I had an interesting chat with Thomas Lange, the author of FAI (a tool to automatically mass-install systems, mostly Debian). I've used it in the past, liked it and was somewhat inspired by it when building AIF. (but some design goals are different).

Here is a picture of my "Arch releng partner" Gerhard (right) and I (left). We've done a lot of work together and it was great to talk face to face for once. Here we're showing (proudly) an Arch Linux Froscon disc (which is a slightly modified version of the 2009.08 core images):

Team photo:

Image gallery