Fiona is my sweet little niece. She's almost two now, and starting to talk. She has understood "I" vs. "You", and can say some easy sentences. Sometimes she's just stringing random sounds together, especially when being carried around when going for a walk (she started with a song she knows, then started singing her own stuff).

Anyway, she's really sweet, always merry. But she keeps you really busy, so I'm pretty tired now. Tonight, when my sister wanted to leave, she spotted the plastic squeaky linux penguin sitting on my speakers and gave him a good squeeze. So we had to take a picture of her with the penguin.

She'll love Linux.

Fiona and the penguin

Next week there is a summit at Google in Mountain View on the summer of code.

The purpose of the summit is to bring together mentors from successful organizations to discuss several topics: how to improve GSoC, how Google can do more for open source, and what you as mentors and representatives of your development communities can do to help one another.

AJ and I will be there to represent the Debian project; and therefore I'd like to know what your impressions about the "summer of code" were. And of course how GSoC could be improved etc. - you've read the "official mission statement".

I'm not only asking mentors; I'm asking everybody interested with opensource. There are some things where having been a mentor is useful - e.g. for streamlining the screening process - but there are lots of things where you don't really need much prior knowledge.

One thing, which is very interesting, is trying to do more cooperation among organizations during (or due to) the summer of code.

So please send me your comments to erich@debian.org.

I guess the term "ajax clouds" is now more appropriate.

Debtags clouds have evolved. They're no longer a static page with a single cloud that will forward you to the more complex browsing tool by Enrico, but now the cloud will adapt to your previous choices, and allow the selection of multiple tags.

The biggest issue probably is tag naming now (e.g. what is the difference between "role", "use" and "scope" (unfold them to get an idea) or between "interface" and "uitoolkit" (interface is mostly commandline vs. fullscreen vs. windowed vs. 3d; uitoolkit is gtk vs. qt vs. whatever) - unless you're familiar with these terms, you'll probably find it still hard to navigate the tag cloud.

Still I hope this inspires you to think of new UIs doable with tag information (which is a small step towards the semantic web; actually these facets here are quite similar to RDF triples...)

These is so much things I'd like to try out with this data...

If you have suggestions, please share them via email.

For those interested in the technical stuff: tag clouds are loaded via ajax, served from a database with ~120 MB of precalculated, precompressed json files. Precalculation is rather expensive; on my 4+ years old laptop it took about 105 minutes (76 minutes of CPU time). Storing them in the filesystem instead of a BerkeleyDB hashtable took more than 4 hours. The outmost (i.e. largest amount of data) set takes 1.1 seconds to compute; there are 344871 precomputed tag selections, so it precalculated 75 selections per second on average. Yes, complexity is not linear; benefits from caching large results are huge.

I'd really love to run a similar interface for e.g. last.fm, but I guess this would not work as well; their tags aren't grouped in facets. But I have some ideas to make up for that.

P.S. This is also my first real Ajax app (except for using json instead of XML). And I still hate Javascript.

[Update: I've worked around an issue with opera (which is stricter on javascript object syntax than mozilla). I havn't tried Internet Exploder yet. But this is a navigation experiment, not an application to be deployed...]