It took a month to show up, despite my paying more on shipping. I’d guess they couldn’t get the parts for some reason - hopefully they’re not being discontinued, but i did notice that they’re not in the latest Dell catalog. Still, eventually, after a few “official do you still want it?” emails it was announced that it had been shipped (which was odd given my lack of answer to the latest “do you still want it, please answer or we cancel?” email.

Simple hardware setup - hardest task is adding the legs where you want them. Boot up into Vista, identify that things seem to work then in goes the Ubuntu 9.10 CD that the Mac had burnt while the setup was happening. It hopped into the live demo mode (I wasn’t paying a lot of attention and that’s the default). I got the wireless card working via the installation of a proprietary driver and things were golden. I double clicked on the install ubuntu icon and things seemed to get unhappy… unsure. I held down the power button (I love acting like a clueless user) and chose to install on restart. Gave it all the disk, no more Vista, and let it do its thing. Fixed some custard and poured it on digestive biscuits.

All was good - except no wireless. No proprietary driver. Seems that it was on the boot disk, but didn’t get installed. Grrr.

Mac laptop to the rescue. Set up a network bridge. Auto Eth0 on the Hybrid (now christened Runt) and after poking it as to why it wasn’t the network address I expected (to which it Mac/Runt combination told me they knew better than I and I acquiesced) it was online.

Open up the package manager. Search for broadcom. Install the package.

Nothing.

No worries - it’s a kernel driver and I’m a user with no qualms about doing manual work. I rebooted.

Ubuntu came up. Wireless there. Finish its setup and *bang* I’m online.

Very, very cool. Graphics seem fine. No sound, but that would be the lack of speakers. I can recommend Ubuntu on the Hybrid and put paid to the ‘does it, doesn’t it’ forum posts out there.

SEO: Hybrid. Ubuntu. Linux. Actually works actually.

Non-Native-American-Nations-Territorial-Claims-over-NAFTA-countries-1750-2008.gif

I like reading this: http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/29/questioning-the-merit-of-meritocracy/ - being in the male, white, English as first language, degree holding camp, it’s still valuable. We can be self-effacing too. It was very noticeable to me that I had to change my style of doing things once I was doing computing as a job, and once I got more involved at Apache. Of the two I’ve not found Open Source to require more pushiness, but I have found it easier to be pushy there (online decouples things). That led to a bit of burn out online, while in the dayjob I have to remind myself in things like self performance reviews to think about selling myself instead of always critiquing myself.

So agreed - we don’t have meritocracies. We aim for meritocracies, but all too often they become shoutocracies.

• The Unlicense
• CC0 (surprisingly hard license to find the url for)

Welcome to the next frontier of license proliferation.

JIRA 4.0 also appears to be out. Looking at the June Atlassian Summit presentation, it looks like the major topics are JQL (do more interesting searches), Gadgets (aka AJAX based portlets by the look of it and the 4.0 install I did the other week), Actions from the Issue Navigator (hopefully pluggable actions too, and a new Browse Project HUD that may or may not be anything to write home about.

I’m looking forward to both using and updating my plugins for the new Gadget world. I also keep meaning to write a pair of Issue actions to move a project up or down a version.

# ARGV contains a list of filters to ignore
# stdin contains a file

svn_separator = "------------------------------------------------------------------------n";

entries = $stdin.read.split(svn_separator);

ARGV.each do |revision|
  match = "^r#{revision}"
  entries = entries.select do |entry|
    entry !~ /#{revision}/
  end
end

if(entries.length > 1) then
  puts entries.join(svn_separator);
  puts svn_separator
end

Ugandan king ‘not backing down’

First instinct: Yikes, things getting scary in Uganda.
Second instinct: Of course it’s the Internet, so untrusted sources are taken with a pinch of salt.
Third instinct: Yet the crowd can be trusted to self-manage; ie) the comments have a common message to them rather than a typical zealot/flamewar.
Fourth instinct: But there is an editor, so a series of conflicting messages can be massaged into a common message.

So it comes down to whether I trust the BBC to edit. I largely trust the BBC (more than others anyway) to report without bias. Why do I find myself not immediately applying that to the editing? Odd.

Summary: Yikes, looks like things are getting scary in Uganda.

Thought I’d share the status of Lang 3.0.

• 65 resolved issues out of 131. Basically around 50% of the way there.
• 65 contributors involved, with 55 patches and 340 comments. Thanks to everyone out there for the work so far.
• First commit on 25 Mar 2008, so about 18 months along now. That was one week after the last release (2.4).

Ideally… March 2010 would be a great time to see 3.0 come out.

I’ve started moving some issues to 3.x that don’t have anything actionable. Things like “Maybe add a RegexUtils?” etc. Basically ideas.

There’s one JDK 1.6 dependent issue in there. WIth a circa March 2010 release, I think that’s a fine dependency given that 1.5 goes end of life in Nov 2008.

There are a good range of simple and complex issues in there to work on.

Stupid dumb licensing statement of the day from the Wordle site:

May I make money off of Wordle images?

Yes. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

A tool. That I put input in to. Whose owner claims ownership of the output of the tool by determining the licensing. That’s evil.
Of course he does state before that:

May I use my Wordles for…

Yes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose. (snip…)

So they’re mine to use in any way I choose… but he defines the license. Of course… it sounds like what I have to do is provide attribution to myself (obviously not the intent… but if I own it and have to use that license…hmm).

I can only assume it’s the font. Which is an interesting question that I was pondering idly the other day; font licensing. If I print up a lorum ipsem etc in a particular font, do I own that piece of paper? Presumably it’s messy.

Effectively this is the Afferro permissive (aka badgeware) license that I pondered on a year back. Rather than existing properly, it’s surfacing in dubious application of existing licensing.

Excellent blog entry back in April from Stephen Colebourne on No Java SE 7 - The ASF perspective. I’ve been there for much of it and found it informative myself to see the history being discussed. As it is… Sun have shown one of the great dangers of IP to a project being locked up in one (for-profit) entity (as MySQL AB had done beforehand) by being bought by Oracle and suddenly all our foundations are crumbly and jellified. I read elsewhere that the Oracle/Sun deal is on hold for four months - hopefully good news for any threatened with layoffs.

Another excellent entry (also in April… my how slow I am at reading) from James Strachan on Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?. Groovy begetter picks Scala as successor to Java splash across the tabloid blogs near and far. Of course James is one of the greatest “shiny thing!” creators out there, so who knows what he’ll like next year Still. A kick in the arse to go read more on Scala.

Atlassian have their JIRA 4.0 release coming out someday and have nudged plugin authors to make sure their plugins work and maybe to think about tying their own release dates. I don’t currently have any pending work on my plugins, but do need to sit down and prod the 4.0 beta to make sure the plugins work. They probably won’t - I seem to relish in finding JIRA APIs that are going to be modified. I also need to work on Apache’s JIRA instance - I merged 3 JIRAs into the main one and there was a tiny bit of custom data mangling that I’ve still not worked out the database fu to fix. That’s blocking the Struts and ActiveMQ ones merging in and ending up on the “one true JIRA(tm)”. It really needs time to focus though… my dim sum life really doesn’t allow for that right now.

Speaking of… dim sum increments and glacial development are a process I’ve been mastering (imo) for the last few years. Add glacial administration and glacial project management to that as well. I seem to specialize in working on things that have no defined end goal, but instead they move a little bit further each increment. Often the increment is a daily event, but only 30minutes. Context switching makes that 30minutes a tricky one to maximise. Still - it’s how various Commons libraries have been released. Need to write up Glacial Development one of these days. My older name, which I probably prefer, is Tortoise Development. Amusing that I’d forgotten about that, come up with Glacial and then remembered. The tortoise doesn’t know where the milestone is, just puts one foot in front of the other and moves forward. Obviously it’s not as simple as that - for example you could end up on a life long death march if you weren’t defining forward as closer to some realizable goal. Still… probably is a life long death march

Two major code things I want to be working on right now but lack the impetus are Commons Lang 3.0 and migrating Jakarta Taglibs to Tomcat Taglibs (along with the creation of the Extended Taglib and release of a JSTL 1.2 implementation). The Taglibs migration will end my involvement with Jakarta after 8 years (probably 9 by the time I’m done). That’ll be quite the day. Really need to use that to drive me on.

We reinstated our Netflix subscription now that a bunch of movies have built up. So nights currently are spent watching the play on demand and the delivered dvd’s. Fill the time etc. Plus I’ve robbed the open source time kitty of an hour each night to clean the house. At 2:30am in the morning, said kitty is way overdrawn and in need of rescuing.

Apache Licensing/Trademark lists are also being ignored. There are others who can jump in, not a low bus count there thankfully

Waiting on the muse. Reading library books on the bus. Buying Willard Price out of print books to complete the collection that my children probably won’t care about anyway. Looking at explodingdog.com pictures. Wanting to write AA Milne type poems for the kids (not managed to achieve the blend of innocence and maturity that AA Milne manages yet) and create a maze creation bit of software for the eldest. Engaging in retail therapy at REI. Waiting on the… well, let’s be honest. It ain’t a muse. No creative spark in this here realm. Just waiting on the energy to pick up the mop and do some more open source janitorial work. Someday.