not waving but drowning

built another desk out of an old door

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

Ivan provides some insider perspective on the OLPC discussions that have been in the news lately, explaining some of the backstory behind public statements. It’s a great post, well worth reading. Absolutely any time you see news about open source software projects, companies around open source, etc., its good to remember that there is always [...]

Just discovered something really fantastic about ipython (well, besides all the cool stuff that was already there). It has some neat support for writing python doctests. If you press%doctest_mode, ipython flips into a different prompt that looks like a doctest, with the leading angle brackets. This mode allows you to paste doctest snippets without needing [...]

3 days left until the release of Ubuntu 8.04. This release means a lot to me personally, because even though I don’t work on the distro team, I started running this version of Ubuntu almost immediately after the archives opened last year, before the first alpha release. There were some times during the development cycle [...]

Wow, for some reason today I discovered a lot of very cool things in a very short period of time. Time for a tab sweep, in a weak imitation of Tim Bray.
First I discovered RescueTime, was about to dismiss them because I use Ubuntu, then discovered a linux client on launchpad.Ridiculously easy time management here [...]

As regular readers know, I work on Launchpad during the day, which is about the coolest job imaginable. It’s pretty exciting to me to see the gradual shift in thinking as more and more people discover distributed development, and start to realize the need for tools to enable incidental or drive-by contributions. It’s also eye-opening [...]

Slow start today, long drive to the doctor and back. On the way home I stopped in at the bookstore, as they often have interesting books that the stores near my home do not. Picked up a copy of Implementing Lean Software Development (From Concept To Cash), very excited about reading it. Last year we [...]

emurphy@jitter-shadow:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
93 sudo
85 cd
53 ls
36 apt-cache
33 vim
32 ssh
30 bzr
12 ..
11 make
9 start-bluetooth-network

Sean tipped me off about mailbucket, it’s a way to turn a mailing list into an RSS feed for people who lurk on high-volume mailing lists. After I posted on the Bazaar mailing list about this, Aaron told me that Gmane had a very similar feature. I’ve used the Gmane web interface to mailing lists [...]

last night signed up for some slices from http://www.slicehost.com/. It was amazing, I was logged into my clean ubuntu install within 3 minutes of requesting it. The thing I’m most looking forward to with these slices? Running all kinds of crazy software without any regard for stability. My goal is to get some hands on [...]