Nice Saturday. Hans Petter is working on finishing the project Conglomerate sprung out from. He's wading through literally thousands of pages of Oracle documentation to get the storage part working. After all I've heard about the wide-spread use of Oracle for "enterprise" applications, I had expected it to be well-designed, homogenous, and thoroughly logical. But it seems that it's more like the opposite, an incredible collection of hacks and old cruft. According to Hans Petter, it's even more dirty than the code to come out of the worst, most evolutionary free software projects (I assume this brings it even below the level of Perl, and that's a scary thought.

Python bindings to Flux are coming along nicely now. I got a boost since some people contacted me and actually wanted to use it. It's in CVS, and I aim to finish them (well, reasonably finished) for the 0.5.0 release, which should be in about two weeks.

Been thinking a lot about web sites and content lately. There's a lot of crap out there, when it comes to free software sites. Slashdot has gone the way of Usenet long ago, of course, Freshmeat pretty much always sucked, and the whole VA/Andover juggernaut seems to be quite happy with where they are, and the IPO millions are nice to have, thank you. Maybe it's time for something new. Got some ideas, talking to the people here at work to get a go-ahead for that project. We'll see.

The recent controversy over certification, mostly a whine-fest by the Jabber people, shows us more than anything what the results of Eric Raymond's rhetoric truly are. People think that because they throw around "Open Source" and other buzzwords, their project is significant. Well, it's an instant messaging system, whoop! No matter how many buzzwords you use, like "streaming XML", "no chunks" (which is utter bullshit), and whatnot, it's just a workalike for ICQ, with perhaps some extra features. Annoyance.

Going to see Peter Murphy tonight, should be good.