The Perth Linux User Group are flying me across next month to speak, complete with on-couch accommodation! But since I can’t find an easily-linkable synopsis of my talk, here are the details: It’s hard to describe the joy of coding, if you haven’t experienced it, but in this talk will try to capture some of …
Author Archives: rusty
linux.conf.au: Hacking your badge for lca2012
Someone mentioned that you had to look at the source code if you wanted to hack your badge this year; I would have considered that cheating if I hadn’t known. (It’s been a few years since I last hacked my badge). But it helps if you look in the right place: http://lca2012.blogspot.com/2011/09/feeling-silly.html Thanks to Tony …
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Speeding CCAN Testing (By Not Optimizing)
So, ccanlint has accreted into a vital tool for me when writing standalone bits of code; it does various sanity checks (licensing, documentation, dependencies) and then runs the tests, offers to run the first failure under gdb, etc.  With the TDB2 work, I just folded in the whole TDB1 code and hence its testsuite, which …
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Professional Photographers and Licensing: Copyright Sucks
So, Alex scoured through wedding photographers, we chose one, met them, got the contract… and it stipulates that they own the copyright, and will license the images to us “for personal use”. So you pay over $3,000 and don’t own the images at the end (without a contract, you would). That means no Wikipedia of …
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License Boilerplates
CCAN is supposed to be about the code, so I’ve avoided the standard GPL boilerplate comment at the top of each source file. I reluctantly include a symlink to the full license text in each directory now, since lawyers approached me to clarify the single “License:” line in _info. A useful discussion on the samba-technical …
Bitcoin for something useful.
I wanted a scalable version of this poster: so I offered 1BTC on the bitcoin forum and someone produced a version I can print and put on my wall in my home office. Here is the SVG. Enjoy!.
Waiting For The Great Bitcoin Crash (GBC)
I like bitcoins. A simple open source client, a well-run developer community, clever algorithms, decentralized assurance model, and of course near-zero transaction fees. For all the economic arguments (some of which sound like early anti-Wikipedia arguments, though I hesitate to argue by analogy), when I first used it to tip a website, I fell in …
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“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”
This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy. Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software means you’ll encounter such people. You may have to work with them. You may have to argue with them (and they may be right). Quite some time ago I …
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A small success: LWN Supporter Option.
I was delighted that Jon Corbet pinged me to say he was finally implementing a supporter option for LWN. It’s been about 12 months since I started asking about it, and 6 since I started asking publicly. When it finally arrived, in classical FOSS brand-suicide style, it was named the “Maniacal supporter” option. I don’t …
On Conference Preparation Time…
Jokes aside, I don’t prepare my conference talks the night before. I took a week off of work to prepare my linux.conf.au talk this year (two weeks before the conference, and I still spent a couple of work days in the week after completing it). That kind of spontaneity takes preparation! Here’s a rough calculator …