BarCamp PDX: Communities Gone Awry session
I facilitated this discussion, which is why my notes may suck more than usual.AccountabilityOnline consensus?Structures? - Hierarchy (org charts) - Total democracy, or representative - Dictator, active...
View ArticleBarCamp PDX: Haskell session
Haskell: How and Why?Bart Massey, Portland State U.Functional programming language - General purposeThe next big thing? Driven by open source adoptionModularityYou give up global variables, and...
View ArticleThe difference between Justice Kennedy and me
From this morning's New York Times story on abortion, but the actual matter is irrelevant to me:Given those stakes, the justice argued, “The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well...
View ArticleThe science of team success
Scientific American has a superb Web site, and I've been subscribed to its weekly updates for quite some time. Today's update included a story called "The science of team success" that talks a lot...
View ArticleX package bumps
I just updated everything I could find in Gentoo for X packages. The last couple of months were backlogged due to other priorities. Please let me know whether I missed anything, and file bugs if you...
View ArticleWhy I volunteer to work on open-source software
A big ruckus came up on the Gentoo development list in the past couple of weeks, and part of it involved Gentoo contributors and their motivations. I'm sure most of us have heard that open-source...
View ArticleQ&A interviews suck
I hate reading Q&A interviews. They're a huge waste of time, and they say to me that the journalist quit halfway through his job. I'm not disparaging the Q&A format as a whole, which can work...
View ArticleImproving Gentoo as a tool
Gentoo is a metadistribution, meaning you're supposed to built whatever you want with it. And we provide some of the tools to make that a reality, but we stop short. We still make it too hard to do...
View ArticleWhat has Gentoo accomplished in the past year?
I'm giving a short talk at OSCON next week on Gentoo's progress in the past year. So please comment on my blog to let me know areas you want me to cover. I'm open to any and all ideas.Thanks!BTW:...
View ArticleLWN at OSCON
If any of you are LWN readers and would really like to see coverage of any specific sessions or topics at OSCON, please leave a comment on here and I'll see what I can do.
View ArticleGentoo slides from OSCON
At OSCON, I gave a lightning talk on what's happened in Gentoo in the past year. It was part of a big session covering about 15 or 20 different projects, and it's been a lot of fun both times I've done...
View ArticleDemocracy as education in OSS projects
Reading the PressThink blog, I came across a couple quotes that apply well to open-source projects:I kept thinking about a famous passage from Christopher Lasch, the great social critic and historian...
View ArticleImproving quality in Gentoo
I recently posted about making Gentoo a better tool. A requirement for being a good tool is being a tool that doesn't break—thus, we need to improve our quality to a more reliable level. I'm going to...
View ArticleNumber 26.
That's my ranking in the "Top Linux blogs," according to Don Marti. I'm a little confused how that happened, given how rarely I've blogged lately. Perhaps he knew I had some more good ideas in the...
View ArticleHOWTO make Gentoo great
Gentoo is good. How do we make it great?Over the past year or so, I've read a few books, and I want to use those ideas to build a better Gentoo. The books:Good to Great, by Jim CollinsThe Five...
View ArticleWho made Gentoo Linux, and when? A commit analysis
LWN just published my story of this name as premium content. I ran a number of analyses on Gentoo's CVS commit history, kindly provided by Robin Johnson, to look at what happened to our developers and...
View ArticleNew GCC hotness
I've been talking with Lance lately about setting up a good development machine, and GCC 4.3 (still unreleased) came up so I checked out its changes. Here's a few I found particularly cool:A new...
View ArticleNew xorg-server for testing in ~arch
I just committed xorg-server 1.4.0.90, which is a prerelease for 1.4.1. Here's the Gentoo ChangeLog:Bump to 1.4.1 release candidate. It's gotta be an improvement over 1.4, so i'm letting it go into...
View ArticleIs Gentoo in crisis?
That's a question a lot of people have been asking lately, with the news about the nonprofit foundation, the lack of news updates on the homepage, and the canceled release. I answer it in a short LWN...
View ArticleImproving Gentoo's PR
This won't be a long post, because I'm tired. Sorry for the dearth of posts on here, but I've been busy writing other things—see below.For anyone who hasn't heard, I took over as lead of Gentoo's...
View ArticleLCA attendees rank Gentoo #4 distro
Everybody who went to LCA entered their distro, editor, and shell upon registration. Peter Lieverdink posted graphs of the results.Gentoo made an excellent showing, coming in 4th after Ubuntu, Debian...
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What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?
I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the...
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Redux: Gentoo's top 3 issues
People were so busy complaining about my pie chart that most of them apparently didn't have a chance to think about the meaning of the actual data. To try helping people look at the information rather...
View ArticleLast post (here)
I moved my blog over to wordpress.com because of a number of problems including increased spam, lack of reader stats, and insufficient customizability. This will be my last post here. The new...
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