Recent Posts

Declare victory and go home

Sometimes I want to declare victory and go home. Of course, that’s usually an admission of defeat, but I really think that with news like Verizon Embraces Linux, that the…

I just won a $300 bet

For the past several years I’ve printed various documents at home by sending them to my wife Amy with a request “Please print…”. And after several years we both know…

config.h considered harmful

Many, many programs written in C or C++ use a file called “config.h” which contains #define statement that control the compilation of the program. These programs are also nearly always built using ‘make’.

I claim that these two attributes are in conflict with each other. Or, in layman’s terms, “config.h sucks”. The problem is that when you have multiple options in config.h, every file which may be compiled differently depending on the values defined therein must be recompiled whenever config.h changes.

Open Source Awards 2008

The Open Source Initiative ran the first Open Source Awards, but when we dropped them, Google and O’Reilly picked up the idea (yay!). Nominations are currently open, but close in…

You need more than free rocks

We’re realizing is that Open Source is more than just free software. Free software is like free rocks. You need rocks, but rocks aren’t enough to build a house. You…

Damn disheartening news from OLPC

The subtitle of this Computer World report quotes Nicholas Negroponte as saying that insitence on Open Source scares people away. Boggle. I believe that without open source, the fundamental purpose…