Eek - someone removed their certification of me. I guess I'm becomming less trust worthy.

University should have finished but it hasn't quite so I'm still putting a few things on the back burner until it does or I burn out trying to finish them off.

Woohoo, I've been certified! Thanks to all those who took the time to give me a certification and special thanks to mdekkers who tipped the scale, allowing me to participate more. Now I think Journeyer is a bit high myself but I'm not complaining.

The past few days I've tried to help drive a Mozilla bug confirmation attempt. It all started after when I was hanging out on #mozillazine and someone mentioned there should be a #kill-unco channel. So I made one.

A few days later this lead to Bugzilla being overwhelmed by unnecessarily large queries, slowing things down for other people. Hopefully I'll be able to set up some sort of static caching script to help ease the problem I helped create....

A brief appeal - if you can offer additional help to the confirmation process it will be much appreciated. A staggering number of new bugs are being filed all the time as Mozilla approaches 1.0 and the only hope of keeping up is with more people weeding out the bad reports from the good ones. You don't need to be an expert to help get a bug confirmed - you just need to have a recent build (preferably a nightly build as bugs in the releases are often fixed quickly).

Also if you have filed a bug with an old build, can you check that it is still reproducable in new one? If not resolving worksforme (many people don't realise that they can resolve bugs they have filed themselves). There are also a hardcore collection of untouched unconfirmed gtkmozembed bugs forming that many confirmers lack the tech to reproduce. So anyone who can help to clear those wins ...umm... a less buggy browser!

Hmm I don't think I'm ever going to finish the summary of the lecture :(

I was flipping through the Sunday Times and I noticed that Telsa was mentioned. Here's a link to the article - Put to the crash-test (registration required and it will be useless after the 13th April 2002).

I'm guessing GNOME has more than one tester but if I'm wrong I take my (red) hat off.

The article raised one question for me though. If companies keep their testers and programmers on opposite sides of the building then what do Alan and Telsa do in their house?

John Tucker, Department head of Computer Science at Swansea.
John Jones, BT Ignite Web Services
Alan Cox, Redhat Linux Developer
Dick Porter, Ximian Developer

Tucker: Delighted to see people. Discussions of milestones in computing such as Fortran, Visicalc. There is an invisible part to the world of software development. Many transformations over the past 50 years.

Charles Symmoney (creator of Microsoft Word, Excel). The founder of Adobe. Creator of visicalc which was later surpassed by Lotus. Jeff Raskin. Only well known by those who have been forced to study the arcane history of software.

John then went to to talk about how the two speakers did lots of work at university(?) and that the Swansea Univeristy Computer Society was a nuturing ground for program development.

John Jones: Ignite is part of the reformation of BT. Talked about how an Internet based business should no longer have location as a barrier. Ignite was started in 2000. Many web hosting companies are suffering because they are running out of power and only offered one hotel like service. BT Ignite offers end to end services.

£100,000 investment in building in Cardiff Bay. Awareness of what is on our doorstep. Delighted to sponsor this and many more events.

[Clapping]

TUcker: Big place is increasingly weired up. Alan Cox graduated from Swansea in 1991 and Dick in 1992. Brief plug for itwalesonline newsletter.

Alan Cox: Doing Things Differently Linux, Past, Present and Future

When I was at university peole told me that you needed to work hard and have a plan. However, the reason why I started working on Linux was because I was trying to improve a game I was writing.

People used to throw software in with hardware but this changed wwith Bill Gates when he started to threaten hobbiests who were sharing his BASIC interpreter.

Unix was started by AT&T (and was originally designed to play the game Space War, proving that all good software is originally designed to run games). Originally it was readily available because AT&T were to open their work because they were overcharging and running a monopoly.

Many operating systems courses are often 20 years out of date. Unix licences were expensive so it was not possible to show students the currently in use techniques.

Talked about the development of Uzi and Steve Hosgood's OMU.

Summary of Alan Cox lecture to come...