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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Not for the first time, I’ve seen the suggestion in the echo chamber that Mono packages should be moved from Debian into the non-free repository, which is not formally part of Debian. The reason, as it so often is, is patents – specifically this time, the searing risk posed to Debian and its users that [...]

This is a reproduction of a message I sent to Amazon.co.uk tonight, after their Black Friday sales system went to hell on me, and I found their response to the problem less than enlightening. I’m reproducing the message here, as a warning to all. On a related note, links to my Amazon wishlist are gone. [...]

There are corners of the Internest where foolish people congregate, and invent stories. These foolish stories are then read as gospel by trusting people, and reposted, until the original made-up source is concealed from view. As an attempt to stem this flow of disinformation, here are some commonly held – but incorrect – beliefs about [...]