Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

I found this post by an ex-MS, now google, employee, interesting- he talks about how a patch by a google employee gets to users within days, while a patch by MS core OS employees sits around for years. I know corporate types claim to hate regular updates, but they are growing increasingly accepting of them in a web context, and it seems like linux distros have the ability (if they tried) to offer regular, quick, well-tested fixes.[1] It obviously isn’t something that has commercial potential right now, but I’m surprised no one is at least testing it/poking at the idea (as far as I know), given that everyone has the (non-QA) infrastructure for it.

On a less idle note, I hate it when people have an opportunity to participate in something, are well aware it is going on, and instead of participating, just go and shit on the outcome. I know people are busy, but… c’mon. At least be constructive, like Bryan. Thanks, Bryan. :)

On a more constructive note of my own, I’ve checked in the tiny little bit of microtinder work I once did (I’m going to try to get it running again for 2.11, but not any time in the very short-term future) and dumped a big pile of liveCD stuff into CVS too, in livecd-project. Hopefully that’ll help those move forward and proof them against drive crashes and such.

[1] Well, not well-tested, but LDTP + staged dogfooding could in theory alleviate big chunks, if not all, of that problem.

As our unreviewed patch count creeps back towards 600, it is good to know (or depressing, depending on point of view) that we aren’t the only ones.

Already sent this to the epiphany list, but this might be the most innovative ‘browser’ feature I’ve seen in a while. Very cool.

Used for the first time (well, in second case first time in forever) two apps today, and they both rock, and i wanted to give a shout out-

• gnome-bt: I listened to a cool interview of dj dangermouse and others from the very cool IT conversations this morning, and it reminded me that I’d deleted my copy of the grey album by accident. So I found a torrent and up came gnome-bt, which is installed now by default in ubuntu. Very sweet little app- did what I wanted it to, nothing more, nothing less, just the way an app should be :)
• xchat-gnome- saw someone bitch about xchat this morning, so I did my semi-regular swing over to CIA, which told me that the xchat-gnome guys had been hacking up a small storm, so I built and used it for the first time in ages. The current stuff is pretty nice- still some rough-ish edges, but I think it is good enough now that I’ll try to switch over to it full time. Thanks go out to those guys for tackling an app that is ‘good enough’ and trying to push it to ‘really nice.’ I admit I’m not totally sold on giving up my tabs, but I’ve tried newer and weirder things :)

Email to d-d-l and g-h coming, but while that sits, I’ve updated the Road Map for 2.12- if people want to clean up or add links, covering big-picture work they intend to do in 2.12 or 2.14 (not ‘things that would be nice to see’) that would be awesome.

Addendum: Will McCutchen pointed out avalanche, which is even simpler and more hig-y than bt-download. Most importantly it uses pause instead of stop ;)