koldfront

Sheryl Crow band 2020

Looks like Sheryl Crow has quite the eclectic band - Ted Kaczynski on guitar and a backup singer with an XKCD "Science, it works bitches" shirt. Impressive!

Plain-text email a barrier to kernel development participation?

The Register reports, in Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member:

Linux kernel development – which is driven by plain-text email discussion – needs better or alternative collaborative tooling "to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future," says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft's representative on the Linux Foundation board.

Wauw, such a thinly veiled attempt at getting the the Linux developers to lock themselves into Microsoft GitHub¹.

You can take your sickening embrace attempt and stick it up where the sun don't shine, Microsoft.

"Linux is a cancer" - it might be convenient for you if everybody forgets the past and just jumps on the latest Microsoft-acquired bandwagon, but words and actions have meaning. Sorry.

Or maybe it would be a good thing, like when the whole [BitKeeper debacle] begat git.

Said tooling could be "a text-based, email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with," she added.

Techsplaining to the oldies that the youth can't be bothered to figure out sending plain-text email much?

Novotny has been at Microsoft for just over a year, working in Azure's Office of the CTO where she describes herself as an “open source wonk.”

Rah-rah.

“We have more than half of the Azure cores now are running Linux in some flavor.

Good, more evidence, along with WSL, that Microsoft is losing, and going for the usual bag of tricks.

See also: "Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.", Cory Doctorow.

¹ Yes, I'm calling it "Microsoft GitHub", and so should you.

A Mind at Play #books

I just finished reading the biography of Claude Shannon "A Mind at Play" subtitled "How Claude Shannon invented the information age" by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

I knew of Shannon before I read the book, and it was an interesting glimpse into the life of a genius, who apparently besides being a genius also was modest, humorous, at times lazy, and focused on what ever whim interested him without worrying about how it "looked" - unicycling, juggling, information theory, building machines to solve mazes, etc. etc.

Recommended.

Netgear R6350 experience #hardware #wifi

Plus:

☑ OpenWrt installs easily (bought it specifically for this) ☑ 5 GHz network speed is good

Minus:

☐ 2.4 GHz network close to unusable

I'm not sure if I have a dud or what, but speed is horrible and connectivity spotty on the 2.4 GHz network.

I ended up turning 2.4 GHz off in the Netgear R6350, and configuring the (new) ISP's Genexis Pure ED500 router as my 2.4 GHz access point instead.

(Experience with (the old) ISP's Netgear VVG2000 router, which was flaky when acting as an access point, led me to shun the wifi built into ISP routers since, using a separate access point instead.)

Wavy red underline blindness

Watching a couple of presentations today, it struck me that a lot of people apparently have developed "wavy red underline blindness".

Even screenshots of windows with text included the "you've probably spelled this wrong"-markings, and nobody even raised an eyebrow!

It is always the first thing I turn off in browsers, word processors and everywhere else I encounter it.

Not [only] because I'm excellent at spelling, but because the false positive rate of spelling mistakes is waaay too high for the markings to be useful.

Bonus tip: to spell check the current word in Emacs, press M-$.

Walls (Circus) #music

My jukebox just put on the Tom Petty and the Heartbreaks soundtrack for She's The One. The first song is Walls (Circus) and it starts like like:

Some days are diamonds
Some days are rocks
Some doors are open
Some roads are blocked

I remember going to the cinema to see the soppy romantic comedy, just to hear the songs. The movie was forgettable - I still like the album.

Tom Petty, too soon gone.