This continues an article I wrote nearly three years ago, Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed. In the three years since I wrote that original piece, Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a … Continue reading Cloud GNU: where are you?
One of my favorite books on cooking is Alice Waters’s “The Art of Simple Food”. In it, there is a section where she describes the necessary equipment for a kitchen that produces resoundingly good food. This is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, because it reminds me of software and my philosophy toward … Continue reading UNIX is the kitchen of the software chef
I made one of my New Year’s resolutions for this year to teach myself Clojure in my spare time. There were a few reasons for this. First, I realized this year that I have been dabbling and/or programming for nearly a decade, with Python as my preferred language throughout that time period. Python is an … Continue reading Clojure as a mind expander
So, here’s the deal. Some startup founders at Curebit.com decided to copy a design used by 37signals’ Highrise product for their own app. They did this in a less-than-gracious way, by simply copy/pasting the code and even leaving in some hard links to the original code. The story on VentureBeat tells the full story. The … Continue reading Getting real about design inspiration
On my LinkedIn profile, I list one of my skills as “thought-driven development”. This is a little tongue-in-cheek; software engineering over the last few years has developed a lot of “XDDs,” such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, model-driven development, etc. etc. “Thought-driven development” doesn’t actually exist, but by it, I simply mean: perhaps we should … Continue reading XDDs: stay healthily skeptical and don’t drink the kool-aid
I came across this wonderful piece of historical retelling by David Beazley, one of my favorite Pythonistas and the author of Python Essential Reference. Here is a man who conquered C++ in just about every way, but ultimately found himself trapped in its byzantine complexity, only to escape by way of Python. Swig grew a … Continue reading The C++ trap
I’ll start off this post with a somewhat controversial claim: I invented Dropbox. I’ll show why this claim doesn’t matter later, but for now, I’ll assure you that it’s true. How many of you out there use Dropbox? If you don’t, you should — it’s an excellent tool. In its free version, it provides you … Continue reading Persistent Folders: Or, why ideas don’t matter, and execution does
This post is only intended for those who actually run GNOME and Linux, just a warning 🙂 I just replaced network-manager on my Ubuntu Jaunty desktop with wicd.  See wicd here: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ What's so great about wicd?  I used to think nm-applet and NetworkManager were the best thing since sliced bread, but have grown increasingly … Continue reading For Linux/GNOME users: tired of nm-applet? Try wicd
Today, I decided to finally sit down and upgrade my Ubuntu Intrepid installation to Ubuntu Jaunty. I torrented the live DVD last night (causing my roommates to complain of major Internet hoggage — it was downloading at 1.2MB/sec!). I then performed a full system backup to a remote hard drive, and then repartitioned my drives … Continue reading Ubuntu Jaunty installation process
I attended PyCon 2009 this year, which was a whole lot of fun. Quite a few people have asked me which talks I liked, so I decided to put together my “top 5 talks” list, in ranked order: A Whirlwind Excursion through Writing a C Extension. This talk by Ned Batchelder (author of coverage.py and … Continue reading Favorite PyCon 2009 talks
