Logiciel Libre

Mayday Programming Brain Teaser

Posted by adam in Interesting

Thanks to Sam for the idea.

int k = 0;
k = k++;

After both lines execute, what is k equal to?

Read the rest of this entry »

Mifos at OSCON 2008

Posted by adam in Interesting, Propaganda, Work

Mifos’s beloved director George Conard will be giving a talk on Mifos at the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The phrase double bottom line refers to having a bottom line besides just profit.

See you there!

Shell History Meme

Posted by adam in Fun, Interesting

As seen on Planet Fedora…

  [adamm@snax ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a)\
{print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
79 svn
68 vim
57 cd
35 ls
32 pwd
25 ant
20 s
19 mysql
19 find
12 mv

“s” is aliased to “cd ..”.

Robocop is Still an Awesome Movie

Posted by adam in Fun

That is all.

Fostering a Volunteer Community

Posted by adam in Interesting, Propaganda

Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) knows a thing or two about fostering a geeky volunteer community. A desire to do well at my current post of “Mr. Open Source” on the Mifos project has led me to try and learn some lessons from people like Jimmy. Here are two crucial points gleaned from an interview with him on FLOSS Weekly:

• small group dialogs are best, too many people on one problem ends in voting/groupthink
• build a system that supports bees and and handles wasps (my verbage)

Eben Moglen on Technology and Freedom

Posted by adam in Interesting, Propaganda

I’ve been enjoying strolling through the FLOSS Weekly archives; a collection of one-on-one interviews with key players in FLOSS. Here’s a quote that really speaks to why FLOSS is something to pay attention to:

“Free as in Freedom” is a really important concept. That is, technology really as to be free in some important ways if people are to have political freedom.

- Eben Moglen, speaking on the GPL version 3 during FLOSS Weekly interview.

Sunstroke Prevention for Fun and Profit

Posted by adam in Fun, Odd, Travel

Bryan recently pointed out that a popular tourist “festival activity” in Beijing is “sunstroke prevention”.

Pidgin, IRC, Freenode

Posted by adam in Fun, Interesting, Work

IRC is an ancient, tried-and-true one-to-many chat protocol. Pidgin is a feature-rich instant messaging client that can handle many protocols, including IRC. Pidgin runs on many different platforms, including the three most popular ones. Pidgin integrates nicely with the desktop.

Here’s how to set up a Freenode IRC account in Pidgin:

1. Open Pidgin; click Accounts -> Add/Edit.
2. Click the Add button.
3. Change the protocol to IRC and enter
   irc.freenode.net as the server.
4. If you have a Screen name (called a “nick” or “nickname” in IRC
   parlance), type it (e.g. MrOpenSource) in the Screen
name field. If you don’t own one yet, make one up.
5. Click on the Advanced tab, and fill in the Real
name field.

Now, register your nickname. This helps people recognize you, protects your
identity, and allows you to send private messages.

1. Click on Buddies -> New Instant Message.
2. Fill in NickServ for Name.
3. Change Account to the Freenode account you just created,
   and click Ok. Now you can “talk” with the
   NickServ robot.
4. The first message you send should be register PASSWORD
   (where PASSWORD is one of your choosing).
5. Next, set an email address. This will give you a way to reset your
   password later should there be a need. Send set hide email on
   to NickServ.
6. Next message should be set email ADDRESS (where
   ADDRESS is your email address)

Then, join #mifos.

Further instructions can be found here or by saying help to NickServ. Commands like /msg NickServ help do work in Pidgin.

This guide was heavily inspired by the following article on freesoftwaremagazine.com.

One more final tip: enable the “Join/Part Hiding” plugin to supress the many “so-and-so joined the room, so-and-so left” messages that will likely show up in the channel.

Kasper Hauser

Posted by adam in Fun

After being utterly and completely brow-beaten by Jesse Thorn plugging Kasper and Hauser, I decided to check them out. And I was rewarded for doing so.

Kasper and Hauser are a comedy team. They’re hit or miss, but when they hit, they really hit. They have a podcast, and a book. Haven’t seen the book, but here are a few hits from the podcast worth checking out:

• Holiday Gift Guide
• Phone Call to the 14th Century
• Mundo de Perros!

Multitaskcraptastic

Posted by adam in Interesting, Odd

There are just too many shiny objects out there. Here’s how I ended up looking at some of the strangest C code I’ve ever seen.

1. Started on the gslug mailing list, reading about a new keyboard layout. I continue to be drawn in to rumors that the QWERTY layout is a conspiracy to slow down typers, so hearing about a new keyboard layout called Colemak piqued my curiosity.
2. Progressed quickly from colemak.com to the Wikipedia entry on Colemak. Cool, Colemak is supposed to be easier to switch to than Dvorak.
3. The Colemak entry on Wikipedia mentions digraphs. I’ve heard of digraphs because I use them in Vim, but you can use them in C, too? Strange.
4. The digraph entry on Wikipedia also mentions trigraphs. Trigraphs!

Sheesh. Interesting, but talk about distracting. I sure hope it isn’t true that multitasking kills your brain.

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