no comment...

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/

A previous blog post of mine was about the above link... well lets just say it was very frank :-)

After 2 people (including one person on #git I have a lot of respect for) seemed to not like it, I took it down.

However, since this blog is as much a sort of "historical bookmarking device for Sitaram", I need that link in there, so here it is.

You, my gentle reader, can draw your own conclusions.

some things in life...

- a brand new Yamaha Fazer for your son: Rs 81,000
- driving classes and test for son: Rs 4000
- 2 tickets to New Moon: Rs 300
- taking your pre-teen daughter on a snazzy "young man's" bike to a
crap movie and having her say "dad I owe you bigtime": priceless

:)

greedy licensing comes home to roost

quote from http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2009-12-14.html

Boggled at Monty.

• Yes - of course it is a lamers business model to have a restrictive license, coupled with copyright assignment, and dominance by a single company. Yes, of course it leads to strangulation of the community, and perpetuated dominance of a single player.
• That this realisation appears to only have occured to Monty now he is trying to make a company fly on the other side of the very wall he himself built, smells pretty suspicious to me

was COBOL this bad?

...maybe it never had the opportunity.

But the COBOL of the Internet (tm) seems to be...

http://lwn.net/Articles/364528

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit
makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather
than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu,
libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point
in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use.
This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as
'I'd like to use this third-party code, but my application is too
special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and
Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.'.
A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java
backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse
it. This behavior should be a last resort, not a first instinct.

and http://lwn.net/Articles/365445/ is even nicer...

malware in Linux?

in a sudden spurt of SNR on /., I found *one* topic with *three* informative comments on this topic...

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1461872&cid=30284956
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1461872&cid=30280222
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1461872&cid=30278934

In addition, this gem landed up somewhere (couldn't find the comment now but it's in there somewhere: "bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow"

breaking the Pareto principle?

quotes from http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2009/11/18/interview-with-greg-kroah-hartman-linux-kernel-devmaintainer/

To give an example, for the 2.5 to 2.6 kernel development series, which took about two years, the top 30 people did 80 percent of the work. Now, the top 30 people do 30 percent of the work. The sheer number of developers has also increased. We were running a couple hundred developers, and now we're running a couple thousand.

[...]

We're also increasing the rate of change in our development. The same amount of work one of the top 10 developers did last year wouldn't have even made it into the top 20 this year. Our individual developers have got the work flow down, so we can actually contribute more, to an extent that's amazing.

perspectives, take 2...

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1460432&cid=30264494

This was in response to someone asking about network security while backpacking for a whole year through South America!

stop the internet!

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2009/11/26/lse_crash_again/#c_635437

Subject: "despite a .NET upgrade overseen by Accenture"

Posted Thursday 26th November 2009 13:40 GMT

Hahaha hahahaha hahahahaha hahahaha <gaaaaaaaasp> ha haha hahahaha
hahahahahaha hahaha.

Stop the internet, nothing can ever beat the humour of this statement.

the ubuntu "mono" culture

lovely comment at http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-11-25-031-35-OS-CY-0019 argues that the slow infiltration of mono-apps in Ubuntu was probably planned that way, and the more such apps get added the easier for non-mono apps to be rejected in favour of a notionally equivalent mono app.

Read the full comment; makes a very cogent point.

finally, something interesting in Brooke's tale

until now, it was pretty boring. I never really liked her blog --
maybe it was too disjointed? or maybe I like my salacity in larger
doses? I don't know.

but this is cool:
http://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/2009/11/16/me-and-belle-de-jour-could-it-be-brooke/
-- an early warning system that depends on googlewhacking