A puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon

If the anti-Mono crowd were provided with their GPL-compatible patent grant for Mono, which they spend so much time talking about the absence of, how would they react? Well, let’s watch together!

The Pledge

I believe Free Software developers should be free to work without their work being compared to terminal illness [0][1] I believe Free Software developers should be free to pick and choose their development tools [2][3] I believe Free Software developers should be free to contribute without being threatened with eviction from a community [4][5] I […]

Here we go again – why Mono doesn’t suck

This post is a repost for something I sent to Linux Today. Their original message was here, where they invited people who don’t think Mono causes AIDS to justify themselves. I replied here. This is a repost, for the benefit of assorted aggregators. Some context may be lost by not reading the original “invitation” first. […]

Conduct, and codes thereof.

You are not being censored for your opinion. Let me repeat that, for those at the back: You are not being censored for your opinion. Nobody on any of the mailing lists, user forums, bug trackers, or other community interaction sites you use is censoring you for your opinion. There is no vast conspiracy, there […]

Gnot Invented Here

A short missive on Gnote, which ties into my last post about bloat. Gnote is, for those living under a large pile of particularly non-porous rocks, a fork of Tomboy, doing a line-by-line translation of the source into C++. It was announced one month ago today, and has already seen several releases. Gnote is impressive. […]

Don’t gloat about bloat

I’m going to take a moment to talk about bloat. What it means, and why one man’s bloat is another man’s necessity. First, a definition: bloat is an arbitrary measure of subjectively “useful” features minus subjectively “useless” features, divided by the size of something (in memory or on disk or whatever). If you want a […]

Deconstruction of Falling Stars

Congratulations to anyone who read my post about Banshee as default media player in Ubuntu in the past week. You’ve formed part of an interesting social experiment – an analysis into the habits of people who surf the internest, and specifically the kind of people who visit a page with a dry topic like media […]

Fitting the kitchen sink onto a CD

Ubuntu’s main installation method comes on a single bootable CD. By today’s standards, a CD is a rather confined space – as a result, every last megabyte is considered precious. A single stray megabyte could push the CD over the limit, and make it worthless – and a few saved megabytes could help make the […]

Desperately Seeking Mediocrity

One thing I’ve noticed out there in the big wide Internet is the number of people who desperately want GNU/Linux to suck. These are not, as you’d imagine, Windows or Mac OS fanatics who want to see the competition fail – in fact, quite the opposite. These are the folks who cling to GNU/Linux not […]

Xbox 360 repair adventure!

The Xbox 360 is, today, the best current-generation games console. It has the best online experience, and the widest selection of top-tier games. However, it’s enormously unreliable compared to the competition and its predecessors. And, lo and behold, mine’s busted. There are some horror stories concerning Xbox 360 returns, so I thought I’d document the […]