I’m a long-time desktop Linux user, and one of the big reasons I like it is that it allows you to use hardware that is typically considered ‘obsolete’. So many computers are needlessly thrown away because they don’t run the latest Windows, but that doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze another 4-5 years out of that hardware.

I enjoy flying. I actually dress up for the occasion because I still harbour the illusion that air travel should be a chic thing. However, the reality is that most flying is an ugly, non-romantic affair.

I’ve just had to write a postmortem for a problem that happened at work. The problem wasn’t too serious, but it was an avoidable issue. Nothing is a bigger bummer than when you see something that looks obvious in hindsight.

I just read a great article (linked to on the chess Stack Exchange), where the author Dan Heisman talks about the different levels of chess playing that one will generally engage in.

I’ve been playing a lot with Sinatra lately, and so far I’m pretty impressed with it. It works wonderfully for small operations, but there’s a few creature comforts missing, and one of them is internationalization (i18n for short). Fortunately, it’s possible to use the ‘i18n’ gem (which is used in Rails) to accomplish this.

Richard Stallman (aka RMS) recently just gave his kind-of/sort-of approval to closed source video games. To be honest, I’m surprised that he’s actually weighing the benefits against the harms (if only we could get more politicians doing that...)

I’m not sure if RMS is “giving his permission” or not, but I see a future with games on open systems as a Good Thing.

Since its invention, the wiki has been an excellent tool to collectively gather loose information easily. Since the major project sites (e.g. SourceForge, GitHub) provide them, there’s been a trend for open-source projects to use wikis for documentation. Since wikis are so easy to add to, clearly this has solved the Open-Source documentation problem, right?

As part of a project I’m doing, I wrote a little Python library for doing binary-coded decimal. Grab it on GitHub now!

At a certain point as a developer, you begin to hit a plateau, where new concepts or techniques no longer produce the drastic increases in productivity you once experienced (such as the realization that you can do most of your job with a handful of well-written shell scripts).

You could learn a few more Vim tricks, or finally get around to learning Ruby. But there’s one thing that most developers don’t pursue, yet is beneficial in both programming and non-programming pursuits:

Go faster.

A bizarre bug I ran into today has lots of CUPS users scratching their head, but I’ve fortunately found the source of the problem.

I recently had to write a Bash shell script that had locking capabilities, and I couldn’t find any decent examples online that would do the trick. My colleague Laurie showed me this example that works pretty well.

Edited: The repo was getting quite out of date, so it has been disabled.

As a project of love, I’ve started my own RPM repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux) packages.

I created a patch for the ERP software package WebERP (http://www.weberp.org). Now - for those of you who are paying attention, the SourceForge page where you download the source for this project is https://sourceforge.net/projects/web-erp/ (notice the dash). What do you get when you accidentally leave out the dash in the SourceForge page? A fork that has the website http://www.web-erp.org/ (notice the dash).

I did a talk at the 2011 LinuxCon in Vancouver. I met a lot of cool folks, saw a lot of cool technology, and had an absolute blast. I took notes during the whole event, and put them up for posterity.

I accidentally started a flame war in the Lynx mailing list by mentioning that it would be nice to have a public source code repository (I mentioned using Git). Some highly opinionated characters on the list started howling that Git is terrible, version control system n is absolutely the best there is, etc. As fun as that bike-shedding is, almost everyone missed the point of the original post - I just wanted easier access to the development source code.