Author Archives: admin

Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu

I’ve largely stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu because of the condescending and dismissive attitude from their developers.

I cut my Linux teeth on RedHat back in 1998, and soon after settled on Debian as the best of several flawed but promising choices of Linux distributions. When I switched to Ubuntu 4.10 in October 2004, I was excited by the promise of a distribution with the quality of Debian and frequent releases and a focus on the desktop.

Today I stumbled across what unfortunately seems like another typical example of what happens when you report a bug to them: aumix in Ubuntu 7.10 was compiled wrong, such that it won’t even launch. Recompiling the source package without making any changes to the source fixes the problem. Instead of just doing that, the Ubuntu developers spent far more time and effort bickering on the bug report and justifying their inaction by referring to official protocol. Shallow thoughts outlines the issues with aumix and contains this quote:

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First Impressions: Java

This is the first in a series of first impressions that I’m going to write each time I learn a new language or start using a new set of tools. I hope to keep track of what I thought and reexamine each in a few years. It will be interesting to see how my opinions change over time. This post is about Java. As I’ve been working in Python for the last few years, that colors my opinions about Java quite a bit.

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Farscape’s loose ends

I just rewatched Farscape’s Peacekeeper Wars, the miniseries that followed the fourth season. The show was intended to run for five seasons, and the story was left unfinished after the fourth. The miniseries tried to finish up the story, but it left a lot of loose ends. (Don’t keep reading if you haven’t watched all of Farscape — the rest of this post contains some major spoilers.)

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Plastic seas

There’s a huge trash field floating in the North Pacific gyre (E on the map):

trashing-oceans-plastic4nov02.GIF

A segment on NPR about the same trash field noted that it does not show up on satellite photos because most plastic floats just under the surface of the water, where it is invisible unless you are close to the surface.

You’re a crappy programmer, your language sucks, and I’m better than you

I agree with all twelve of Damien Katz’s Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it). I’d even add two more signs:

  • You want to reinvent the wheel.
    You look forward to implementing all the building blocks of your program without first checking for libraries and packages that can do most of the job for you. You are so excited about building an object-oriented email-sending library that you don’t even notice that the language you’re using already has all the email-sending functions you’ll ever need in its standard library. This is a failure to focus on getting the task at hand done, and it’s also a variation of talking just to hear the sound of your own voice. Get over it.
  • You use language constructs without really understanding what they are for.
    You use multiple inheritance from a large set of empty classes, or multiple empty interfaces, as configuration “flags” for your classes, and then test for the flag’s presence with issubclass(). Or you encapsulate related data into an object, and then write a function that takes that object as an argument and operates on it, instead of a method on the object. Or you buffer input and output between short strings and regular expression operations. You are just like those annoying people who simultaneously overuse and misuse some big word like obsequious or audacious. Get a manual, and learn the language you’re speaking.

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