Older blog entries for bneely (starting at number 32)

Nobody talks about mindshare anymore. What a relief!

15 Jan 2001 (updated 15 Jan 2001 at 20:49 UTC) »

Fire alarm tests during work hours are infinitely annoying. Makes me want to start a real fire.

I'll probably be working through the next two weekends to verify Nautilus bugs for our next milestone (PR3) and look for show-stopper bugs. We're always looking for people to help out with Nautilus testing. </plug>

Have I mentioned recently that I love bugzilla?

I'm having a good time at work, even though reality is beginning to settle in. I really need to curb distractions for the next few weeks. Also, I'm overdue to purchase a car for quicker commuting than unfortunately inconvenient public transportation. Sadly, I often can't motivate myself to read, do a little work, or otherwise occupy myself effectively on the train. It also gives me a one-way commute of up to two hours. It's sad that one mile within one's commute can take up to 30 minutes, no matter what method is used. Anyway, I will try a day of telecommuting in a week.

19 Dec 2000 (updated 19 Dec 2000 at 20:40 UTC) »

A day in the life of .. (stomach version)

Dry rainforest flakes cereal. Green tea, no sugar. Strawberry pop tarts. Chicken burrito. Lots of water. Ravioli with abused tomato sauce, garlic, and parsley. Hunk of bread. More water. Ice cream in a waffle cone.

Something software-related

Do I really have to? Nah.

Back to work

I'm now employed at Eazel, where I get to work with really great people, and work on interesting and challenging things.

Advogato Diaries

I just started paying regular attention to Advogato again a couple weeks ago. It seems that the pace of new diary entries is quite a bit slower than, say, six months ago, despite the steady influx of new users. On that note, I saw someone recently mention that it's difficult for an isolated user to "break in" to the certification loop. Not exactly. The trust metric is supposed to be based on contributions to the open source community, so if you work on open source projects, tell everyone what they are.

It seems fashionable to compose Advogato diaries (and also perhaps articles) in one's preferred editor, and paste it into Advogato's forms later, in order to avoid browser crashes and loss of data. I should begin doing this myself. Is it possible that we could have an 'upload' option for diary/article content so that remote textfiles can be used? Otherwise, I guess I just don't know the trick for using cut-n-paste in X on a multi-screen textfile in one shot.

People

mbp, it was good to see you again. Hope you enjoy the rest of your stay!
I saw another smashing episode of Iron Chef with mjs, stephane, elise, crackmonkey, and others. What a rocking show.

Abstract

Dysfunctional.

Unfortunately, I can relate.

one big paragraph no sentence-separating punctuation la la la went to two fun parties this weekend saw elise stephane mjs eskil nick rebecka and many others i have a second-round interview on monday that i'm looking forward to sent out a couple more resumes enjoying my time off wondering how i'm going to get any christmas shopping done ever in my life missing my ex-coworkers enjoying music as always hoping nautilus works better on debian soon trying to conserve money feeling inept with perl recently finished some php programs for a little website for my friends reading up on sql looking forward to thanksgiving hoping to get some more interviews but sometimes people don't call or write back oh well will be at balug on tuesday done

RANTS

The following things currently piss me off:

  1. People referring to the recent U.S. Presidential election as a "mess" or "disaster"
  2. BMG trying to capitalize on Napster
  3. Top level domains being considered/added

The U.S. Presidential election

OK, if our electoral system cracks under the pressure of a close vote, there's a problem with the electoral system. Unfortunately, it has been getting by on the reality that most state-by-state elections aren't close. Who needs vote tally accuracy? Not us! So instead of being able to capitalize on the extremely close poll results in Florida and earning the right to emphasize that "Every vote counts!", we must endure totally justified criticism of our polling methods. How long should it take to perform a recount of an entire state worth of ballots? Why wouldn't the first count be accurate? Can't there be a running total that includes the absentee ballots as they arrive? I won't bother to go into the issue of confusing ballots. Al Gore "invented" the Internet, yet you or I can't use the Internet to vote for (or against) him. What's up with that?

Napster

Napster good. Napster woke up the record labels and said, quite clearly in my opinion: "Distribute your products online in digital format!" OK, fine. Someone has to figure out how to make money from this. BMG? Napster? But hold it. Napster is a bunch of people encoding songs on their own with free/stolen/commercial encoders, and then allowing their machines to act as servers for other users who will then effectively get these files for free. By turning Napster into a subscription service, do I pay for the right to download a questionable-quality encoding from another anonymous user? Do I get a discount for each song downloaded from my machine? Is the new Napster going to generate revenue from the time and money I spent encoding and serving these files? If I encode songs at the best possible quality, utilize a high-speed DSL connection, and thus attract a large number of downloads, do I get to profit from all this? Probably not. So how is BMG planning to operate Napster as a profitable online music distribution service? All they're trying to solve is the problem of unlicensed music distribution online. That's fine. But they can't simply set up a turnstile and then hand the quarters out to their artists. The users that provide the file-serving portion of Napster (as it exists today) will (or should) realize they can pack up their bags and go home. Am I missing something here? Once you take away the peer-to-peer aspect of Napster, it essentially wipes away the technology on which entire system is based. At that point, all you're left with is a peaceful resolution to a lawsuit and a brand name. If Napster introduces self-encoded files and centralized servers, paying customers will debate about the encoding quality and methods, server reliability, offensive chat users, inaccurate song information, slow download times, and so on.

Top Level Domains

Be the first to register your .biz domain! Got a .web site yet? Register your WebSite (.ws) domain now! Be the first .kid on your block! Wow, fantastic .. all these choices. But new TLDs don't fix any problems, they only add money to the registrars. Companies that have found a domain name that works will reach out and protect this name across multiple TLDs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Linuxcare, for example, has obtained the rights to linuxcare.com, linuxscare.com, linuxcare.com.au, linuxcare.co.jp, linuxcare.ca, linuxcare.it, kerneltraffic.com, kerneltraffic.org, and more. This prevents anyone else from being effective by using these names and phrases that Linuxcare either owns as a service mark/trademark, or helped to popularize. When new TLDs come into existence, they either get swarmed by people trying to protect their brands along with cybersquatters trying to capitalize, or they get ignored. Only if a TLD gets swarmed does it add any value to your own registrations within that TLD. Therefore, adding TLDs is not an effective way of solving Internet namespace problems.

Thanks for listening.

I just want to say that I'm sorry that the Linuxcare Italia people no longer work for Linuxcare. It's a relief to hear they will likely stay together as a group and continue to do great work on open source software. I know davidw from the time he spent working at Linuxcare in San Francisco, and his influence was helpful for my migration to Debian. Ciro was one of the developers for the SUN T3 driver that Linuxcare developed, and I worked with him briefly to get the project hosting website together.

Best of luck, folks!

3 Nov 2000 (updated 3 Nov 2000 at 08:41 UTC) »
Hey man, fish are Crazy!

I've been doing voluntary testing of Nautilus. It's been pretty interesting. It was probably my first mostly-successful experience with fetching code from a CVS repository and building it. Around the time I nearly got it working on my Debian system, I was able to get another machine at work on which to install Red Hat. Also, Eazel started supplying hourly RPM builds around that same time, so this makes it very easy to stay reasonably up to date with the code. So, I've been writing a few bug reports and also verifying resolved bugs.

In the music realm, I am collecting 80s music. This involves bands like the Police, Talking Heads, Culture Club, Naked Eyes, Til Tuesday, Chicago, Journey, Mr. Mister, Duran Duran, Men at Work, Night Ranger, Tears for Fears, etc. I've collected around 350 songs so far, and I also came across the Ben Liebrand grandmixes for 1983-1989 which I've included in my collection. It's been a lot of fun to rediscover this music.

Hey this <person> tag is great. Can we have a <project> tag too?

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