Kiva: Turning a little change into a lot

Back in June, during the Ganymede Poster Contest, Benjamin Cabé introduced me to Kiva Microfunds, a company that connects lenders w/ entrepreneurs in the third world, so that they can start or grow their business, and improve their quality of life.

Now, Kiva stands a chance to win $1.5 million dollars from American Express, which they can parlay into $30 million dollars to support 60,000 entrepreneurs around the world. If you're an AMEX cardholder, you can help by voting for this project. You can of course also help by using Kiva to lend some money to one or more entrepreneurs listed on their site.

Alice in Change

Still more changes & news to report:

• With the explosion of new projects and components in Modeling, do you find installing all your bits to be increasingly a bit of a chore, even with Update Manager? Then come check out the Modeling Amalgamation Project proposal review tomorrow @ 1500 UTC!
• Are you textually active? The drop by the Textual Modeling Framework proposal review, also tomorrow @ 1500 UTC!
• Ever wondered why the EMF project uses Bugzilla's ASSIGNED state to mean "fix in CVS", and RESOLVED:FIXED to mean "fix available in a build?" Wonder no more. We've switched to a more logical workflow, using RESOLVED:FIXED and VERIFIED:FIXED and silently moved all the old bugs to VERIFIED to help with cleaner queries. For details, see bug 206558.

Building Change

Seems everyone's talking about change these days. Hell, people are even ranting about the way media is changing.

But real issues aside, in part two of this series, I'd like to briefly mention two changes happening closer to home, here in releng-land:

• EMF, SDO, and XSD are now being packaged a little differently. Consider this a little social experiment to see who, if anyone, still uses zips to get their downloads, rather than using Update Manager. Do you like the new "sourcedoc" zips? Feel free to let us know what you think (here, on IRC in #eclipse-modeling, or in the newsgroups).
• GEF is now being built by the Common Modeling Build, the first (of many, I'm sure) projects to come over to the dark side. Will DSDP or VE be next? Time will tell.

Personal Changelog

To kick off a new blog series on change and change accessories, I'd like to start with a bit of self-promotion about a great bit of system integration that would not have been possible without the Magic of Co-Op Students^TM. Anyone who's been to the Eclipse Modeling Project's websites has probably seen how we generate release notes per build/release and per-bug deltas & patches. And as I've shamelessly promoted this a number of times in numerous bugzillae, it seems fitting to use a song we've most likely all heard before...

Reach out and touch change

Your own personal Changelog
Something that's accountable
Something able
Your own personal Changelog
Something for forensics
Something that's sick

Hist'ry unknown?
But you're not alone
Commits you own
Bugs that you have pwned
Load your web retriever
It'll make you a believer, oh

Search CVS
Put it the test
Well, it's not Jazz
But it's still real snazz
It will deliver
You know truth's a forgiver, oh

Reach out and track change [x2]

Your own personal Changelog
Something to show off your skillz
Your tricks and your spills
Your own personal Changelog
Something to show you're 1337
(And) don't miss a beat

Reach out, audit change

With hist'ry known
Your devs will come home
Flesh and bone
See what they have pwned
Load your web receiver
It'll make you a believer, oh
It will deliver
The truth's a forgiver, oh

Reach out and watch change

Your own personal Changelog

Reach out and touch change [x5]

Marilyn Manson (Depeche Mode cover) - Personal Jesus