Posted by s.f.
on January 09, 2008
In the wake of the Intel-OLPC fallout, the chief designer of the OLPC technologies asked Groklaw about ideas for an open hardware project. Even better, it made me aware that OLPC itself is still an ongoing process, rather than being cut-n-dried.
To me, this tickles my inner-struggling-hardware-geek in a really good way. Not just in Jepson’s commercial efforts in the “making components public and affordable” part, but also in her advocation of the “we’ve got no vendor secrets, here’s the exact part-list, schematics, and source-code” method of development.
Of course, making it open isn’t a guarantee of success(OGP, OpenMoko), but it’s a nice perceptual move away from the Wintel alliance’s long standing policies of “we know what’s best for you, and there are no user serviceable parts inside”.
(Yes, my reading list for the past two months has included Stross’ Halting State and Vinge’s Rainbow’s End)
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Posted by s.f.
on January 07, 2008
_why had a neat post on Io today, showing off a cool introspection+meta trick that I wasn’t aware of. And since it’s _why, the Io mailing list has shown another flurry of activity, which I’m hoping will snowball into another group of fresh users, to eventually reach that goal of “1.0″..
Interestingly enough, Io was the language I learned right after Ruby, for much the same reason: trying to get a good grip on concurrency in simulation environments, after too much exposure to UnrealScript.
(And along those lines, Thunder and Lightning still stands as the only major game project using Io as a scripting language).
Posted by s.f.
on January 05, 2008
So, Zed spewed. Since I guess I’m now a Rails “professional”, I guess I’m supposed to have some sort of up-in-arms opinion.
I really couldn’t care less.
Once you pick up that Zed writes in a deliberately provocative manner, reminiscent of the SA Forums, the rant’s main points boil down to his personal experiences with consulting, and elements of the Rails community being too uptight.
The only thing I found really entertaining about the affair(outside of the Rubinius praise) are the responses popping up on mailing lists looking to move away from Mongrel, because they just can’t trust software written by a person who posted “something like that”. If your sentiments are similar, I hope you’re not using OpenBSD(Theo), ReiserFS(Reiser), or anything GNU-related(Stallman)
In my professional life I’ve had to use a lot of software I considered brain-damaged(custom Java object-frameworks, antiquated news databases, PHP), but the dislike almost always stemmed from experience with the software itself, not the person/teams behind it.
