One of the things about the whole money thing and free software is the question of whether it’ll take all the fun and spontaneity out of hax0ring. As it turns out, that doesn’t even work when you try; so instead of doing dak work last weekend, like I’d planned and like the market was indicating, […]
Contrary to expectations, last week’s AJ Market project turned out to be debootstrap, not dak. Just goes to show a single person can make a difference in today’s world: debootstrap popped into the lead from nearly the bottom thanks to a single contribution. (I wonder if it makes more sense to make contributions anonymous or […]
Hrm, I’m going a bit single issue; I should fix that. But not right now. So it’s been a couple of weeks since I first posted about my little market experiment, which seems as good a time as any to take a look at how it’s working out. On the one hand it’s going fairly […]
So this week’s project was working on dak, in particular getting the tiffani implemention included. What’s tiffani, you ask? It lets you just download the changes to Sources.gz and Packages.gz files, instead of the whole damn thing — if you have main, contrib, and non-free for unstable in your sources.list, this means your apt-get update […]
So, this week’s AJ Market project was the first couple of items on my debbugs TODO list, viz: Finish off usertag support Implement usercategory support Both of these are essentially followup for the initial usertags announcement from last month. The usertags cleanup amounted to adding some basic documentation which will hopefully make it to the […]
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 […]