I’m back from an incredible holiday in good old ZA. Now I just have to survive my article deadline on Friday and then everything will be just dandy. Fortunately there’s RantRadio to keep my industrial ears happy.
The USA loves OIL!
This is brilliant: “I helped blow up a Bali nightclub — by driving my SUV to work every day!” Thanks for the link, Rudolph.
Read the whole article here. Keep in mind that the USA is responsible for a quarter (25%) of the world’s TOTAL oil usage. This and other interesting tidbits such as the fact that the USA also burns 25% of the world’s TOTAL coal are available here.
Patents suck, HARD.
Damn it, when will these idiots learn that patents are evil?! This article (which might be Slashdotted at the moment) reports how a certain genetic test for breast cancer can not be performed by a British Columbia hospital anymore because the morons of Myriad Genetics have patented the two genes that can signal whether a woman may develop hereditary breast cancer and have legally threatened the hospital.
How the F*CK can one patent a gene? Nevermind the very apparent stupidity and lack of reason behind this (the gene was already there, the company merely discovered it – there’s NO creative innovation here!): just practically speaking, this is screwing the populace over. This test now costs three times as much, just because Myriad went to the trouble of taking out the patent at the even more idiotic patent office.
Urgh, mail server meltdown…
A DIMM in one of our mail servers decided to break today… to make a long story short, I had to install a new imap on my own machine (as I switched incoming MXes) and with the new installation a new SSL key was created. Evolution (the MUA) of course kept on trying the old server key. DOH.
After quite some minutes of swearing, re-installing and doing various other pointless things, I deleted the very suspicious-looking “cert7.db” and “key3.db” files in ~/evolution. Problem solved. This should be somewhere in the Evolution UI or at the very least help system.
A useful tip
So, we all agree that Python is The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread(tm), right? To add several levels of pleasure to your interactive Python experience (ribbed or studded), please try IPython. This is so flexible that one could even consider using it as full-time shell, instead of your bash, (t)csh, zsh or whatever. Hmmm….
Bruce Eckel is even cooler than you thought
As if you didn’t know, Bruce Eckel is responsible for the very popular and electronically freely available and purchasable in paper form Thinking in C++ (and books about lesser languages such as Java too ;). On his FAQ page there are some interesting tidbits, such as his opinion about Ruby compared to Python and especially his opinion about publishing his books on the web (for free) as well as in print.
Good UI != Graphics?
I tried out Ximian Evolution today. It’s an email client, actually more a personal information manager, that looks a lot like Outlook, except that Ximian is free, runs on *ix and will probably not get your computer infected with 298374987 different interesting yet unfriendly viruses.
Hey, interestingly, it seems the correct plural is “viruses” and NOT “viri”. If you’re a pedant, dodge this.
In anycase, usually I use mutt which, unlike Evolution, is exclusively text-based and 100% hot-key (shortcut) driven. For example, to compose a mail, I would go “m”, type the address, the subject and the body of the mail, then ctrl-x-s-x-c and finally “y”. The mail is sent in record-time.
Pragmatism
The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head.
— Aristide Briand (1862 – 1932)
All operating systems suck
At least, all operating systems that I’ve worked with suck in some way or another. These are not minor quibbles, but major problems. It seems these fundamental problems are present in both open and closed source OSen.
You’ve probably read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond, so you know the difference between the two methodologies. Most of the open source development that I’ve come into contact with adheres to the Bazaar philosophy. The problem with the Bazaar philosophy is that almost anyone is allowed to contribute to the code (of Linux for instance). A few of these contributers are very clever people, but in a maverick kind of way. Whatever the case may be, they do not work together in the close-knit coordinated groups that you find in good software houses with effective leadership, but rather in a hackish manner. This wouldn’t have been such a problem, were it not for the fact that the rest (and the majority) of the contributers are not sufficiently experienced, inept or just plain stupid. Partly due to these phenomena, open source software seems to suffer from a total lack of consistency (in form, function and quality). In addition, one finds hundreds of half-assed software efforts on the web that will NEVER be completed. Compare this image to what you read here for instance.