“The first performance of John Cage’s 4′33″ created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage’s most notorious composition, his so-called “silent piece”. The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. At the premiere some listeners were unaware that they had heard anything at all.”
Brilliant!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E
There’s no point in having a bug tracker that’s open for the world to see, if…well, if you don’t plan on fixing the bugs! This is especially true for a large company like Sun Micro. I happened to stumble on their bug tracker today and on the left hand navigation bar there is a link to the Top 25 Bugs. Just being curious I happened to clicked on the one with the most votes.
On further inspection, this bug received 813 votes to receive its spot as the number one requested fix. To make things worse, not only is this bug the number one requested fix, but it’s six years old!!!! C’mon, did you purposely hire coders that suck that bad? I wonder if there’s a good story behind this. Reading some of the comments in the bug makes you wonder why they didn’t fix in back in 2002:
Submitted On 22-APR-2002
kkosterI am a senior architect at a major commodities trading firm and am trying to stave off a set of consultants that want to place .NET as the company standard. If we are stymied by SUN’s infrastructure being too restrictive, we will have no choice but to abandon a Java/J2EE solution. Please fix this error in your infrastructure so we can all prevail.
Man, that’s embarassing.
So I just got my shiny new Dell M1330 laptop today and it looks amazing. I boot it up. I’m impressed so far. I see there’s a folder on my desktop that has DELL on it. I open it. I see a file that tells me how to get my fingerprint scanner going. I try it over and over again and I can’t get it to work. So, I spend at least 2 hours on the phone jumping across different service lines and find out nobody knows what is going on except for Canonical. And I really don’t feel like paying for support. This blows. I almost (not really) hope that my fingerprint scanner is defective and not that Dell would ship with hardware that doesn’t work under the pre-installed OS. I’m pissed.
Thanks to summer classes, a lack of funding, and a job, I wasn’t able to attend OSCON 2008 in Portland this year — but I was curious to see what went down. Check out this cool re-cap video:
While on the topic of facebook, here’s a pic from the facebook fan group of Portland, Oregon:
It’s a shoebike!!!
Myspace. I just got my “space” last week, and maybe I’m biased because I’ve been hooked on facebook’s clean look for so long, but it’s REALLY poorly designed. Stuff is oddly placed, and lots of people’s pages are a visual trainwreck. But it raises an interesting question: does a site really have to be well designed to be popular? Apparently not. But it sure does piss me off sometimes. And I’m probably not the only one. Check out the kind of crap that is possible:
Facebook. They just announced last week that their site is getting some visual enhancements and that the new layout can be seen at new.facebook.com. I’ve been using it since then and it’s been pretty good. The proof is in the pudding:
I’m not a genius but I’d say facebook is winning.
So VNC is pretty sweet. If I’m working from home (which I usually am), I’ll start up a server so my boss can see what I’m working on — and he can connect from his windows laptop. Any software that’s platform independent and free is a-ok in my book. Lately I’ve been getting lazy and leaving the server running and I’ll get stuff like this at random times:
Seriously, who wastes their time port scanning random IP addresses? Get a life.
Listen for free over at Pandora:
http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh29663453628664710
Sneezing is orgasmic. Sheesh.
Ok, I admit, this tool probably isn’t for the masses. Only if you consider the masses to be Linux C/C++ developers. Ehh…probably not. But if that’s you, read on.
Have you ever been stuck writing a C program with an unfamiliar or non-standard library you need to include in your program? I was hit with this today as I was trying to write some dbus code in something for work. I can usually figure out the compile options on my own but today I couldn’t. I asked google for help and on the ubuntu forums i found a post that mentioned the pkg-config. Being the curious cat that I am decided to “man” it. Turns out it’s a must have for Linux C/C++ devs. I’ll let this little code snippet speak for it’s usefulness:
ccole@darter:~/source/dbus$ g++ dbus_test.cc -o dbus_test
dbus_test.cc:2:23: error: dbus/dbus.h: No such file or directory
......more errors related to this first one..........
ccole@darter:~/source/dbus$ pkg-config --cflags dbus-1
-I/usr/include/dbus-1.0 -I/usr/lib/dbus-1.0/include
ccole@darter:~/source/dbus$ pkg-config --libs dbus-1
-ldbus-1
ccole@darter:~/source/dbus$ g++ dbus_test.cc -o dbus_test -I/usr/include/dbus-1.0 -I/usr/lib/dbus-1.0/include -ldbus-1
ccole@darter:~/source/dbus$
Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before!?!?