Where to begin? One of the things that’s most struck me about Ubuntu is how far it’s progressed with little more than Debian as a base, some reasonable cash to cover a professional level of work, and some dedication to promoting itself and community building. As an experiment, in July, August and September I tried [...]
From my irclogs of last month: <aj> vorlon: sounds like you should write up a OFTC #dd code of conduct :) In the tradition of all good free software hackers, Steve naturally managed to palm that back off onto me. In the end, we’ve decided to put together a new channel for Debian development discussion, [...]
Pia asks: Why is it that older, heterosexual, Christian, married, white males, who probably only make up ~16% of our totaly population are making the decisions for all of us? So much for representative politics :) Let’s consider the alternatives. Younger rather than older means less life experience, which means you’re probably electing a party [...]
So it appears Michael Brown’s been moved aside from managing the Katrina response, and will probably be leaving FEMA entirely soon. No big surprise there; what’s interesting (to me) is this quote: Asked ahead of the announcement if he was being made a scapegoat, Brown told The Associated Press after a long pause: “By the [...]
Today’s issue of Linux Weekly News includes a security response time comparison amongst major distros. Debian comes last on all the vulnerabilities examined bar one; here’s a summary of response times: Debian Fedora GenToo Red Hat SuSE Ubuntu Average days 19.8 5.8 7.4 12.0 12.7 5.0 Maximum days 35 16 14 28 16 12 Minimum [...]
Some interesting notes from American news. Below the fold, because politics isn’t what’s important. It seems the current meme is that President Bush isn’t doing enough to help resolve the chaos left in Katrina’s wake. Interestingly, one thing that apparently he did do, was ensure the evacuation of New Orleans was a mandatory event, rather [...]
Back in June, I noted that LaunchPad isn’t free sotware, and because of that concluded: And that’s pretty much the point where Canonical’s not a free software company, but a vendor providing proprietary services for the free software community. I got a couple of private comments (which are reflected in an update to that post) [...]
It’s Debian’s 12th birthday, and bubbles’ alphabetical birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with some recipe blogging? Bubbles Bread Ingredients: 1 slice of bread mustard mayonnaise Cover the bread with the mustard and mayonnaise. Be artistic! Serves 1.
Mikal writes: Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting. People in Mikal’s shoes might’ve noticed a few changes in the Debian bug tracking system (BTS) lately, such as the long awaited roll out of version tracking to help us deal with tracking bugs amongst the multiple versions of [...]
Stewart and Michael have chimed in on whether comments in code are evil or not. Michael reiterates the industry wisdom: Getting the level of commenting right is hard, especially if you haven’t written much code, or if you are unfamiliar with the domain or the implementation language. But commenting done right can greatly assist yourself [...]
So, having been out of the country for the past few weeks, I haven’t really been up on what’s been happening with Linux in Australia. Slack, I know. It seems lots has. We’ve had Jon seeking fame and fortune in the opinion pages of the IT press, we’ve had the inaugural “LA Update” podcast, we’ve [...]
Okay, I admit it, I left the tv on after Desperate Housewives, and not only caught Last Man Standing, but a small amount of the Hiltons’ Simple Life 3 – Interns. Anyway, having been referenced by name in the prestigious Australian IT press, how could I not continue the thread I left dangling last week? [...]
I’m giving a talk on debbugs at debconf5. Since they’re trying printed proceedings and are planning on handing them out in advance of the talks, I wrote up a paper that should be useful background material for people interested in hacking on debbugs. This is the abstract: This paper aims to serve as a useful [...]
More minutes and such: a second face to face session (covering organisational strategy, media strategy, projects review and some other stuff) which went over a second day (covering and included a formal session, as well as two formal meetings in May, one covering general business, the other specifically for some formal LCA2006 stuff immediately after [...]
I refer, of course, to the appearance of Bug#313400 in the archive and making unstable bootstrapping break in subtle ways on the very day I make my first debootstrap upload in a year and a half. Bastard. I noticed the bug when converting the sid script to have the nifty detailed progress support Colin Watson [...]