Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Coming Out

Today is National Coming Out Day in the UK, I understand that National Coming Out Day was actually yesterday in the US; apparently an International Coming Out Day is hard or something.
I am gay.
That doesn’t really count as coming out though, if I am anything it’s openly gay. In fact a friend once joked [...]

On Sexism

The ongoing debate about Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at the Linux Plumber’s Conference has been bothering me for a little while now, but I’ve been avoiding posting until now.
Before I do, let me make one thing clear (as if it wasn’t already), I am a gay man.
Mark is a heterosexual man. In his LPC keynote [...]

Making a splash

As you probably know by now, even if you’re not following the karmic development closely, Ubuntu has gained new splash screen software called xsplash.  This is the hard work of Cody Russell and Ken VanDine of the Ubuntu Desktop Experience team.
There’s been some press coverage of this already, and various comments from different people raising [...]

The fallacy of high-level languages

There’s been a meme going around the open source community for a while now.  That programming in C is somehow dirty, distasteful and worst-of-all inefficient compared to programming in a high-level language such as C# or Python.
Its detractors will tell you how it takes much longer it takes to program anything in C.  They’ll point [...]

Drabble Contest: The Siege

I’d like to propose a new meme for the Planets, something a little more interesting than the third paragraph in your nearest bowl of Alphabet Soup.  Something, in fact, a little creative.
I wonder if you’ve heard of a Drabble?
A drabble, simply put, is a story, normally science fiction or fantasy that is exactly one hundred [...]

Revision Control Systems suck

My recent series of posts in which I had some difficulty with GIT (1, 2, 3) have garnered a lot of interest, and generated some discussion.  Many of the replies saw the funny side, which is nice as I was hoping to be at least amusing (rants are, after all, a form of entertainment) and [...]

GIT sucks (3)

Unfortunately I have to make a correction to my previous post.
In that post, I suggested that the following git command would work:

quest util-linux% git clone –bare . ssh://kernel.ubuntu.com/srv/kernel.ubuntu.com/git/scott/util-linux.git

I wholeheartedly apologise.  It turns out that what this command does is make the following local directory: $(pwd)/ssh:/kernel.ubuntu.com/srv/kernel.ubuntu.com/git/scott/util-linux.git.
Unfortunately this means that normal service of hating git, while still [...]

GIT sucks (2)

Jason Clinton replied to my virtiolic rant about GIT with a well researched and thought out reply.  Sorry, that’s not what I mean.  He replied to my rant against a piece of technology with a personal attack.
I feel that there’s a few points that I need to reply to.
Romeo Tango Foxtrot Mike
I did, in fact, [...]

GIT sucks

I do not like git.
Let’s take the most mind-numbingly trivial of operations, I want to put a branch I have somewhere so somebody else can get it.  That’s the whole point of distributed revision-control, collaboration.
That’s too fundamental to be covered in the git tutorial, after all, it wouldn’t be fun if it were that easy.
Happily, [...]

Upstart adoption continues

A complete surprise to me, from slides of today’s OSiM Maemo Developer Session it appears that Maemo (the Nokia open source Internet Tablet platform) has adopted Upstart.  Does anyone know whether they are using native jobs or still using SysV compatibility?