Monday, September 26, 2005

Friday, September 23, 2005

Alan Cox (yeah, the #2 Linux guy after Linus) talks about how to avoid software bugs

This is from an old email to myself from 2004.

From the point of view of a developer but this is very easily translatable into the client infrastructure management world.

Does a pretty good job of expressing why I'm so keen to get a QA person. Makes me realize we should probably try to budget for some tools for the QA person to use -- though I think there is a very high likelihood that the best such tools are open source or free as in beer.

Side note: it seems to me that the challenges faced by our distributed extended group are similar to those of multiple code contributors to open source and other collaborative programming projects. Now, those folks have been able to work out some tools and processes for making that endeavor work fairly well. It may be the case that I spend some time next year looking into technologies that could help our extd team work better together -- things like using a Groove workspace (or sharepoint, or RSS, or Live Comm Srvr, or jabber, or whatever) to open up a more informal venue for virtual water cooler conversations. I know I am far closer to [one guy at work who is based in Europe] than to anyone else in EU or AP and the real reason for this is that we are both on IM.

I'd like to make it possible to have that sort of interaction -- and then some -- with anyone who's interested. I expect that 90% of people will have 10% of the contributions, but each of those individual contributions will probably be very important for those people who just say one or two things, and no less likely to be valuable information or suggestions.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Remember this story? 60 Minutes found it.

Remember this bit?

60 Minutes had a segment on it tonight. I missed it but found a transcript on the 60 Minutes website.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

"I want to be sort of an archaeologist..."

Zeb says: "Momma, I want to be sort of an archaeologist -- but not quite an archaeologist -- when I grow up."

Melissa: "Oh? Why?"

Zeb: "Because I want to learn everything about everything -- so that I can teach other people about things they want to know about."

Friday, September 02, 2005

Rhapsody's not working for me on Longhorn Beta 1

Hence the interest in Indy. (See previous post.)

"Indy is a music discovery program that learns what you like, and plays more of it. And it's free."

Indy.TV says this about itself:

Indy is a music discovery program that learns what you like, and plays more of it. And it's free.

Indy makes it easy for you to find great new independent music. Just download Indy and double-click: as it plays songs, you rate what you hear. Indy quickly learns what you like and gets really smart about sending you more music you'll like. Let Indy help you find your place in the collective consciousness as you help other people find theirs.


TidBITS had a good write-up on Indy that piqued my interest - including this:

What's particularly cool about Indy is that it's not attempting to maintain a centralized archive of songs, nor should it in any way run afoul of the jack-booted thugs of the recording industry. That's because, as I noted earlier, all the music is submitted by copyright holders, and because it's served directly from the artists' sites. In other words, Indy is a completely legal front end for discovering music you're likely to enjoy from all around the Web. At the moment, Indy knows about 10,000 songs, which should keep you busy for quite some time.