From Valleywag, my favorite tech gossip rag:
Take poor Joe Shaw from UC-Davis for example. “I bought some ‘enlargement’ pills online,” he writes in the group’s forum. “The next thing you know, boom, it shows up on my news-feed for all my friends to see. The worst part about it: they were breast-enlargement pills!” What a pickle!
I assure you this is not me I have never even been to Davis let alone enrolled at UC there please believe me my breasts don’t need enlarging
The following companies have begun advertising Christmas stuff to me before Thanksgiving, thereby earning themselves a blacklist from my patronage:
On the other hand, Nordstrom’s is awesome.
My second day at ITA has been a little bit of a challenge so far:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
21136 root 25 0 1168g 2.9g 2.9g R 38.6 86.6 14:08.40 yum
It’s a good thing this is a 64-bit machine, or else we would have run out of memory a long time ago, before yum mapped 1 terabyte of memory and kept 2.9 gigabytes of it resident.
(That’s about 5 orders of magnitude more memory than it needs to map in, and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less than it needs to actually use.)
But package upgrades aside, things have been fun so far. Stay tuned.
Dear Lazyweb,
One of the ways Microsoft threatens the Linux community is by telling customers they’re liable for patent infringement if they run it in their data centers, on workstations, etc. Can someone explain to me how and why customers are liable for patent infringement when another party provided them with the infringing product? It would seem to me that since money changed hands from the customer to the entity selling the product, the liability exists solely with the selling entity. Does this mean if I patent a physical widget and a company infringes on that patent while building a dingus and sells that dingus to a million customers then I can sue those customers for violating my patent? Or is software (or more specifically, open source software through its licenses) somehow special?
Please only email me if you know and cite sources. Do not email me about Microsoft, or whether they have a leg to stand on. Shut up, I don’t care about your opinion.
Update: Adam Williamson is my hero. He says:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/patent/35uscs271.html
U.S. Patent Act
..Part III. Patents and Protection of Patent Rights
….Chapt. 28. Infringement of Patents
“Except as otherwise provided in this title [35 USCS Sects. 1 et seq.],
whoever without authority makes, uses or sells any patented invention,
within the United States during the term of the patent therefor,
infringes the patent.”Note: “uses” is included in that paragraph.
Kids these days. In my day you’d get a can of Reddi-wip from the supermarket. It’d get you high and you didn’t have the taste of feces in your mouth. Of course, now it’s harder to get since they moved it behind the counter.
It’s old news that every episode of the Daily Show since Jon Stewart took over is online, but here’s a link (and alternate spelling) to all of the awesome Even Stevphen segments with Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert.
Also, this Android Google phone thingy looks neat. It’s built on top of Linux and Apache licensed. Looking forward to checking out the SDK next week.
Two months shy of my 8 year anniversary at Novell, I’ve decided that it’s time to move on. My last day is today.
I was only 19 when I moved to Boston to work for a startup (later) called Ximian. I’ve had the pleasure to work with and learn from some truly brilliant people, and it’s certainly no exaggeration to say that today I am a vastly better programmer for it and that this experience has changed my life in very good ways.
In particular I want to thank Nat and Miguel for seeing something in me then and giving me the opportunity. I got to work on some very, very cool software over the years and it’s been a lot of fun.
As for the future, later this month I will be joining ITA Software. ITA is solving some of the hardest problems in the travel industry with some very cool technology, and I am very excited to be part of that. If you live in Boston, you will no doubt have seen their hiring ads blanketing the T, and if you’re a fan of Paul Graham, you’ve probably read about them because they’re big real-world users of Lisp. And if you’ve ever used Orbitz, Kayak, Hotwire, or CheapTickets to search for flights, or looked for them directly on Continental, US Airways, Alitalia, or many other airlines’ web sites, you’ve already used ITA’s underlying flight search software. Their Matrix web site is also great for people who fly lots of complex routes. Oh, did I mention that they’re hiring?
I hope to blog a bit more specifically on my role at ITA a bit later, but for now I have to leave you in the dark. I will try to preempt what I suspect will be FAQs: (1) Yes, I will be hacking on Linux software and (2) No, I don’t suspect that I will be doing much if any Lisp.
Wish me luck!
Funny thing about Matt Asay’s blog post about Miguel, Mono, and Moonlight:
You [Miguel], personally, would convince more by going back to the innovation in GNOME that originally made you one of the most interesting developers on the planet. I want the old Miguel (and Nat - where has Nat Friedman been?) back, the one who demo’d Nat’s Dashboard with Nat at OSCON. The one who led and pushed GNOME forward for so many years.
I worked on Dashboard with Nat and others, and the amusing thing is that it was written in C# on Mono. It was exactly Miguel’s (and others’) work to make Mono a nice development environment for Linux desktop hackers that made Dashboard possible and fun to hack on as a rapidly evolving playground.
(Yes, it’s possible that in the absense of Mono Dashboard would have been written in Python or something else — even C — but Matt’s calling out of Dashboard as a counterexample to Miguel’s “time wasting” on Mono is humorous.)
I just want to throw a “shout out” for Google Docs. I love Google Docs.
Brette and I did all our wedding planning using it. We created a spreadsheet containing all the people we wanted to invite, and shared that document with our parents. This was great because our parents filled out the mailing addresses for aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of the families without having to email documents back and forth, or relying on me to make changes in a master copy. Without the sharing and collaborative editing, this would have been a tedious experience.
We used the same spreadsheet to track how many people were invited and how many RSVPed, which was essential for getting an accurate count of invites printed and enough seating, food, and drinks for everybody at the ceremony. Now we’re using it to track gifts.
We also created a word processor document for the ceremony. We decided to write our own, officiated by Brette’s brother Zach, and the three of us would make little edits to the document up until the last minute, when we printed it out and gave the final copy to Zach.
I’m not an office power user, so the majority of the features in OpenOffice aren’t of use to me. With the several different computers I use, online storage and ubiquitous access to my documents is vastly more important than just about everything else. And the collaborative editing features have been much more useful to me than I would have originally expected. Even with work, if I’m working on a document with someone else, I’ll probably use Google Docs rather than a traditional revision control system. I just want to work on the file, not have to deal with infrastructure. Google Docs makes this easy and beautiful.
On Aaron’s post about PodSleuth, there was this comment by Søren Hauberg:
I think you (and many others) are missing one of the main mono problems. From the outside it looks a lot like Novell is pushing mono much harder then is healthy. Mono gets used in places where its the wrong _technical_ choice. Beagle is probably the prime example here. [...] All because somebody made the wrong decision with choice of language.
Maybe we made the wrong decision about the choice of language, but it’s a bit of a stretch to imply that Novell pushed this decision on anybody. We chose Mono for a couple of reasons. The first and biggest one is that we simply weren’t interested in writing desktop apps in C anymore. It’s no surprise that virtually every new GNOME app is either written in Python (Jokosher, Gimme, Conduit, etc.) or for Mono (Tomboy, F-Spot, etc.).
Secondly, at the time (sometime in 2004) Mono was a fairly new, interesting platform that we wanted to learn about. Remember that Mono was largely created for the purpose of making desktop apps easier to develop — the interoperability with Windows was a secondary benefit.
And lastly, having worked with Trow on a reasonably big desktop Python app, we wanted a strongly typed language. Writing real applications in Python requires a discipline that unfortunately most people (including myself, at that time) are unwilling to adhere to, and this easily leads to buggy and hard to maintain programs. You have to be very diligent about unit tests and code coverage for every line of code, because you can’t rely on the compiler to catch errors for you. We had been burned by this a bit, and wanted to get back to a strongly typed, but still easy to use language that integrated well with the desktop.
So there was never a sinister motive here on Novell’s part, and we the developers were unhindered in making a decision about what technology to use. You know how hackers are, they want to use whatever the new and cool technology was. For us, it was Mono. For a lot of web hackers today, it’s Ruby.
And as an aside, I disagree that Mono is inherently unsuitable and the wrong technical choice for something like Beagle, but that’s another discussion entirely.
Søren continues:
My point is simply that Novell is pushing mono so hard that it is being used in applications where it not the best choice. Combine this with the political issues around using MS technology, and its not hard to understand why some people get upset when useful stuff is written with mono.
I’m not exactly clear in what manner and onto whom Novell is trying so hard to push Mono? I can speak for Beagle, and while I’ve obviously advocated my project for inclusion in the distributions, I’ve never even pushed for its inclusion into GNOME. In fact, we were aware of the political sensitivity of Mono and it influenced our technical design of Beagle. That’s why we provide a pure C library for desktop apps to integrate with it, without having to link to Mono (or depend on it) in any way.
As for other Mono apps, only Tomboy is included in GNOME, and that was written and proposed by someone who isn’t even a Novell employee. I don’t think that F-Spot or Banshee have ever been proposed, and it’s hard to argue that they’ve ever been forced onto anybody.
Novell hasn’t been trying to “sneak” Mono into anything. The apps we’ve helped develop help showcase what is possible with it in a Linux desktop context, and how rapidly good desktop apps can be written. Maybe I am biased, but to me our advocacy is entirely rational: Mono should be a first class development environment for the desktop, and I wouldn’t see or have any problem if someone did the same for Python.
