For all those out there watching the "sniper chase in America" closely, I present this question:
What if the sniper(s) really aren't driving a white van, but are driving a pink YUGO?
I think this whole case shows how messed up law enforcement is, and how the media has the police waving their guns in the dark.
Terrorism at its best, unfortunately, and I don't even think it's really started. Stay tuned.
How do I get involved in a project? I've been to freshmeat.net and sourceforget.net (are the two related or hold the same projects?), and besides the enjoyment I have received from downloading and installing some of the projects (and shaking my head in disgust at some of other borked projects), I have not really gotten a grasp on how to get started reading the source code and possibly submitting patches as time and coding skills improve and permit.
This IS something that I want to do. I've been using Linux far, far more than I do Windows anymore. I really have no use for Windows anymore, except for having to use it at the college or to do something for my wife on that computer. If not for the frustrations in trying to get printing working (my SAMBA skills are shot) on Linux and getting the printing to look presentable at that, there would be no reason for my wife and I to be using Windows.
Some have told me to take a look at CVS (I think), but after going cross-eyed looking at the documentation on that, I still got no where. Having said the above, I wonder this: how in the world does patching really work, anyway? Perhaps an article could go up on advogato about this? For us newbies? If you submit a patch, and it wasn't really to fix a bug but to add what you feel is a cool feature, how does someone else deal with not liking this new feature? The concept of patching confuses me. Or, what happens if you and someone else at the same time download a version of a project and you wind up submitting the same patch as the other person? Won't there be a conflict in submission of the patches?
Lately, I've decided to do away with the arm-tugging of peeps who decide that their programming language of choice is the better one for a newbie to focus on, and have decided that C and C++ are my route. I really feel naive for saying that, because besides scripting languages, there really aren't that many more compiled (or are there?) languages that I could choose from. Anyway, I am enjoying learning C, and am just now ready to tackle pointers and structs. Actually, I am holding off C++ until I feel I have a firm grasp on C++. Baby steps! I don't feel I am going to hired in this area of shortage of programming jobs for a long time anyway, so I have a lot of time!
Later, and be cool :) And, now before anyone goes off writing that "bytesplit is probably playing mind games again", I'm not :)
apparently raph can't make decisions for himself, and must do what a select few of his band-wagoneers tell him to do: that is, to prevent my entries from showing up in the recent entries. prove me wrong, raph, but at this very instant I am relieved that I don't have social delinquents like yourself working with me. The leeches surrounding you, they know who they are, are all that is wrong with the computing world. You make Bill Gates look like the Mother Theresa of Digital Nirvana.
What you said about programming languages has been said for years, and is all over the Internet. Perhaps that is a project you could take upon yourself, writing a new language that has all the things you do like about C, C++, Perl and Java, and adds in the things you feel should have already be incorporated into programming languages at this stage in the game?
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!