Older blog entries for cpw (starting at number 4)

Quality vs. quantity: glade's separation of XML-encoded UI presentation and program code is the kind of thing that encourages not-confident-coders to participate. Embedding data in the code is Bad, because code is Hard to Read.

I'd like to know how these mentorships get started.

The thing I keep coming back to tonight is this: If developers didn't have massive egos, why would they develop?

Picked up Mandrake 7.1. Looking forward to direct- rendering OpenGL. It should be good practice for the installfest, too.

I wonder if Compaq can be persuaded to open-source VMS? It has the kind of rabid fans that could really make such a project work.

Skud's Quality vs. quantity article was interesting. I wonder if people are afraid to hack other people's code because they once tried to comprehend their own code after a two week break, and figure that it'd have to be that much harder with other people's code. If this actually is part of the problem, I guess the solution is literate programming.

Skud's article also reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while - The Trouble With Freshmeat. If you look at the entries one after the other it looks like a million monkeys wanking on typewriters, which is depressing as hell to watch.

I reckon that free software development should look like that - unless you can filter based on topic (which fm.net allows to some extent) and other criteria such as stability, installed base, user-friendliness and empirical reliability metrics.

You might also want to check the metrics for each project's dependancies and work those into the evaluation. For example, project foo may look OK, but it uses barlib which is a bitch to install, so I don't really want to know about it right now.

I suspect that group-trust-metric-like objects might be useful in evaluating scores for the more warm and fuzzy criteria above.

The front page of useit.com has a quick screed on the merits of careful manual line breaking for small-screened devices. It suggests _ you should attempt to _ break the text _ into meaningful units.

For a device-independance Nazi like me, inserting BRs seems daft.

I wonder how hard it would be to do this automatically using an approximation of an English language parser. Here's the end of a noun phrase - good place to break!

Alternatively, perhaps some more aspects of the text structure could be encoded at authoring. Authoring, however, is already too much work.

Damn natural language problem.

Today is my day at Interact+IT for Linux Users of Victoria. I was hoping that the several years I've avoided such things would make this more fun, but judging from Skud's report it won't be enough. Oh well. Perhaps the LUV contingent will show up. Perhaps people will ask good questions. Perhaps the stand will have a machine with Unreal Tournament installed.

I really need to get XFree86 4.0 up and running on my home machine. That will probably be a good opportunity to rant about nvidia for a bit.

Later: LUV's stall was hopping with LUVsters and punters alike - a success, I'd say, and I had a good time. The rest of the show was lamer than I'd expected, though. Oddity of show goes to the two Acorn True Believers hawking ARM/RISC OS point-of-sale boxes, showing off their custom motherboard and talking about ATX power supplies that couldn't cope with it sucking as little power as it does. It struck me as sad in an Amigaesque kind of way - those Archimedes boxes were so damn cool in 1988, but x86 has triumphed over clever design with clever implementation driven by huge volume sales.

Amigas, Archs and NeXTs are gone, and MIPS, PPC, and Alpha seem to be going. ARM, MIPS and perhaps PPC will survive in portables and embedded systems. Alpha, the only performance contender left, has no such bolthole.

I worry.