Raw Matter

Chris, I think the comments you show us are about as useful as this:

<cmot>   while running autogen.sh:
<cmot>   "possibly undefined macro: AC_DISABLE_STATIC"
<cmot>   what the ...
<KiBi>   That's a possibly undefined macro.
<Clint>  possibly
<cmot>   Ah, now everything becomes clear.
<peterS> which means, possibly, that macro isn't defined
<peterS> which is different from a macro being impossibly defined

With the difference that this sort of thing is funny on IRC but only moderately so in .c files. In other words, I agree with you. I've seen the same thing many times in student assignments (and probably was guilty of it writing my one assignments. The few that I did write.) The problem with reading code is mostly that you only see the details and completely miss the big picture. Comments in the code will almost never solve this, but a big-picture design document is almost never available when you want one. But when writing code, the big picture seems very clear so you don't waste time writing it, either.

A revision control system where just fetching the latest source from a specific branch of a project takes quite a bit of discussion on IRC is just broken.

Yes, I got there in the end (thanks to all who helped or at least made fun of me when I later had to solve a small autoconf issue!), and yes, the instructions on the web I tried to follow were broken which is not git's fault, but I just like the user interface of svn co http://wherever/repository/branch: a single URL specifying the repository and the branch, a single command to fetch what I want. Compared to at least two separate commands with git (clone and checkout) with several commandline arguments. Of course, git gives me much more than just the that single branch, and its distributed approach is great -- this is just a small rant about the user interface which could be more newbie-friendly for the (probably quite big) number of people familiar with the rcs / cvs / svn familiy of version control systems. After all, I didn't want to seriously work with git at this time, but just do the X developers a favor (after ranting at them a few days before) and quickly test the latest version.

I'm constantly amazed how much useful information about Debian is published daily (on web sites, blogs and mailing lists.) I'm also amazed about how much time I spend searching web pages I've seen in the past but haven't bookmarked. So bookmarks.debian.net is an attempt to improve this situation, and have all the links organised in a way so that I actually find what I'm searching for. There are only 14 links right now, and of course lots of standard “places to start” links missing (like pages from debian.org), but I'll add stuff as I use the pages and as submissions come in. I'll think about suggestions on how to organise the categories, but all in all, it's my bookmark collection, not yours, so the final decision is mine. Oh, and: please be patient if I'm not adding your submission immediately.

(Btw, the number one piece of information I never remember is the name of that script to sort a list of packages by maintainer. I know it's on lists.d.o somewhere... :-)

Who'd have thought it ... Dan Lyons (one of the louder SCO backers) actually published a May Culpa, admitting that he was wrong all the time. A respectful nod in his direction from me, I'd not have expected this. Remains to be said that covering a lawsuit by (judging by the description of what he did before publishing the first article) more or less only talking to one party and, probably, not actually knowing much about the actual topic under discussion still seems to be very bad journalism, but at least he doesn't try to wriggle out of it now. And, IIRC, IBM did not talk much about this lawsuit, while SCO talked to everybody who might listen at length, so you might call that mitigating circumstances.

Hmm. Completely unrelated, but ... Konqueror crashes when I try to leave the Forbes web page. Somehow I don't think I'm all too interested in this particular bug being fixed. I still like what the Canberra Times wrote about Forbes Magazine in August 2004:

[Forbes Magazine] looks ... like corporate pornography, giving middle-management dreamers fodder for their fantasies, and this sort of exercise, basically meaningless, hardly seems useful or instructive.

That SCO managed to postpone the trial in SCO vs. Novell by trying to get Chapter 11 protection one more time is old news by now. It just occurs to me that the continuation of glowbulb jokes by SCO is now “How many lawyers do you need to file for bankruptcy” (paraphrasing PJ.) In SCO's case it seems to be “As many as you can pay, and then some more.”

Told you so ;-) When I was optimistic back when the AMD/ATI deal went public, and again when ATI made some statements about helping open source, many didn't share my view. It seems that slowly, ATI is really doing what they promised: allowing free drivers for ATI graphics cards become a reality. Yes, the drivers still need to be written, and currently ATI apparently isn't willing to do this (and I understand that the specs are not complete, lacking the 3D part), but hey, Linux wasn't built in a day...

In other words: Sex sells. We need blue LEDs. Blinking lights. More gadgets.

The new Debian loader to boot into Debian installer from a Windows machine is totally cool. And it has become very obvious that we need a bootsplash in the installer (and if the user selects Desktop or Laptop in tasksel or whatever it's called these days, in the default install, too.) The people we are trying to reach via such migration tools are not technical people but average computer users - and they won't understand why Debian boots DOS at first before the graphical part comes up. (If you don't do tech support to non-technical users: any text mode screen will automatically be referred to as DOS. I've seen that again and again, and it's always difficult to explain to these people that “up to date operating system” doesn't automatically mean “GUI”

Is this important? Of course it's not important for the current average Debian user (who knows his way quite a bit around Linux, and who also, I guess, has moved to Debian after having tried and discarded Fedora or SuSE.) But it's important for new users who migrate to Debian directly from Windows, who have a hard time using Synaptic with the default settings and who were just lucky (instead of having made a choice) when they bought it that their Internet access uses an Ethernet based device instead of a cheap USB modem. Do we want those users? They may be a burden to support in the beginning, but overall I think that the wider our user base, the wider is the pool of potential contributors (translators, or even just users who help other users.)

(... and incidentally: please, please, please let's skip the “accep the GPL” dialog. Or at least check the box by default. After all, the big difference to our proprietary competitors is that we don't restrict use and redistribution of the software at all, and modification only moderately, so if a user has decided to burn this CD-ROM and try this system, we shouldn't annoy him.)

Variation on the old “man wakes up without memory” theme. Well executed, fun to watch, the whole man finds girl, loses her, finds her again part is not overdone, there's a happy end of the sort I like (not too long, not too much kitsch.) I didn't know before but wasn't overly surprised to see Ludlum's name in the credits, I always liked his books.

Eyes Wide Shut: Brrr. Really strange, but in a way I like. Sometimes.