The unstoppable march of mobile technology

It’s been more than 2 years since my last post about my smartphone. In the time after that post I upgraded my much loved Windows Phone 7 device to Windows Phone 8 (which I got rid of within months, for sucking), briefly used Firefox OS, then eventually used a Nexus 4 for at least a […]

Dear Debian Developers, lrn2gpg

For some strange reason, I’ve been receiving a lot of GPG-signed mail from Debian Developers and Maintainers lately. In response to each of these mails, I need to send a GPG-encrypted reply. The rate at which I’m able to send replies has been significantly hampered by the poor state in which many DD/DM’s maintain their […]

The directhex! In an Adventure with MIPS

We’ve been trying to build Mono on MIPS in Debian for a long time. Just under a decade, in fact. Mono 0.29.99.20040114-3 was the first attempt, back when the Mono source was 10 meg, not today’s ~80. It never worked though. Not once. At the end of 2004, 10 upstream versions later, we gave up, and […]

Windows 8: Blood from a Stone

Ordinarily, I’m a big believer that it is important to keep up to date with what every piece of software which competes with yours is doing, to remain educated on the latest concepts. Sometimes, there are concepts that get added which are definitely worth ripping off. We’ve ripped off plenty of the better design choices […]

Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

Yesterday I received a new serious bug report against Mono in Debian. For those not in the know, “serious” severity is release critical, and can trigger removal of a package from the distribution in order to make a shipping release (e.g. if Debian is in deep freeze, as is the case right now). Bug 692614 relates to […]

How to build a bungalow… begin with the chimney

Whilst nobody was looking, Mono became the most important framework in the world of games. And I mean that with only a smidge more than my usual levels of hyperbole. It really is fantastically important, as far as game development goes. I blogged a long time ago about its use inside EA’s multi-million-selling The Sims […]

Enormity

(This blog post is a more firm version of a series of tweets and forum posts I made a few weeks ago. This should also be considered a refresh of this post by Mirco Bauer a few years ago) It has been said that Mono is bloated, and that people should use “lighter” frameworks that […]

Sleeping with the enemy: my life with Windows Phone

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors – and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since […]

Bansheegeddon

It’s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install – ending a run of 12 […]

Why we mustn’t allow smartphones to become a 2 or 3 horse race

A very popular refrain on tech sites is that the high street cannot support multiple competing phone ecosystems. It’s a reasonable position to take. Do phone stores want to train their employees on six or seven different OSes? Do consumers understand the differences, and should they need to? Do app developers want to rewrite their […]