17 Feb 2003
… read this! It’s really long, but really worth it.
Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There’s nothing wrong with the system; it’s just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age. This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn’t help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes. I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen year old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy.
14 Feb 2003
“If you don’t go looking for trouble, it follows you around and bites you on the ass.”
13 Feb 2003
Worried that someone will mess up your sf.net Tracker? Here’s a script to backup your tracker every night. It makes use of the xml export page. sftracker-backup.py
13 Jan 2003
Mike Harris a developer at RedHat is trying to get the XFree86 team to open up. Poor Mike has a bunch of patches for the Radeon that depend on other patchs the XFree86 team has been sitting on for months.
XFree86 is a critical part of the linux infrastructure, and right now the XFree86 team is not acting in the “Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, and Everybody can improve it” manner it which you need for good software infrastructure. What led to this problem is that in the past an offical XFree86 developer had access to NDA’ed docs that had been released to the XFree86 team. This isn’t happening anymore, as card makers are only doing NDA’s with single developers more (if at all). So there are diminishing reason for a closed policy.
XFree86 needs a public bugtracker, and to open up their CVS access. I’ve noticed they’ve moved to their mailing list to Mailman which should work a little better than how they used to do it (one time I asked to be remove from the xfree86-devel mailing list and an email back asking why. I explained I was moving to a new email address and they still didn’t take me off).
It will be intresting to see how this plays out.
10 Jan 2003
Look! I have a Decepticon named after me!… really! Believe!
