Monday, March 17, 2008
Memories of contributing to Open Source
I was reminded of my first contribution to an open source project. It was a documentation patch to Perl about rand(0) being the same as rand(1). Here is the actual email with the patch. I waited with anticipation for the usual "Thanks, applied" from Jarkko. That came a few hours later, but if you look close enough at my email, some of you may notice the subtle typo in the email text. I did run spell check, and it came back clean. For those of you who still don't notice it, look up the difference between gentile and gentle. I got a private email back from a prominent p5p list member to me and to Jarkko asking if he had to smear bacon all over patch to make it gentile. My embarrassment quickly disappeared as the comedy of the whole thread. I responded with some lame attempt at humor that has sense been forgotten. Somewhere I have a copy of that email thread, and if I am able to dig it up, I'll post it here.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Yarr
In this months Dr. Dobb's Journal, there was an insert attached for the latest Microsoft Visual Studio ad campaign that might be sending the wrong message. The front of the insert (which is a very well illustrated map) can be seen in this post. When I think of software, and then pirates in the same thought, I think of software piracy. Showing a co-worker, and a few friends, they all came to the same conclusion, Microsoft seems to wants us to pirate their software. At least that is the impression given with this advertisement. After opening up the insert, there is a tag line that further enforces this idea. "Microsoft Visual Studio. Made for the likes of developers, and other scoundrels." It also has link to a website that has an online PDF of the map, with another PDF with game pieces and cards to make this a game.Either the ad agency in charge of this either is clueless, or is trying to generate buzz with this approach. I am surprised that this got a stamp of approval from how ever many people that would have to give an approval to an ad campaign.
Just to be clear. I do not endorse, nor condone any software piracy.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Begining...
I have had this blogger account for quite a while. Sitting there doing nothing. I've played around with "blogging" in the past at various times. I had a LiveJournal account for a while, but never really posted stuff to it. I've installed Moveable Type and other blog software to play around with them. Every time I decided to try it again, life got busy, and I pushed it to the back burner.
As of late, it seems more and more of my family and friends are starting to dabble with their own blogs for various purposes. This is great, as it allows me to subscribe to their RSS feeds and keep up to date on what they are doing, or writing about.
For me, it has always been trying to decide what to do with the blog. What to write there. Blogs that are full of all kinds of personal tidbits is not my thing. Nor is a bunch of posts that offer little meaningful content. Currently there is no "theme" planned for this blog. Over time a theme might form, but I don't want to lock myself into anything yet.
Some of the possible posts on this blog in the future will deal with things I deal with on a daily basis in some form or another. It probably will lean towards "geek" in nature, as I am a self proclaimed geek. Since I deal with computers and programing at work, I imagine that there will be posts dealing with those. As a husband and proud father of a son (and another arriving soon) there might be some family related posts. Also, as someone who reads a bunch of websites (via their RSS feeds), I've come across quite a bunch of what can be best called "random" items. My wife is always surprised at what weird website I found. I might be posting links to those as well, hopefully with some commentary of my own. There also will probably be posts about games (of all types) as well. My wife and I are both involved in World of Warcraft, and play quite a bit. I might post articles about those here as well.
That's enough about me for now.
-- Larry
As of late, it seems more and more of my family and friends are starting to dabble with their own blogs for various purposes. This is great, as it allows me to subscribe to their RSS feeds and keep up to date on what they are doing, or writing about.
For me, it has always been trying to decide what to do with the blog. What to write there. Blogs that are full of all kinds of personal tidbits is not my thing. Nor is a bunch of posts that offer little meaningful content. Currently there is no "theme" planned for this blog. Over time a theme might form, but I don't want to lock myself into anything yet.
Some of the possible posts on this blog in the future will deal with things I deal with on a daily basis in some form or another. It probably will lean towards "geek" in nature, as I am a self proclaimed geek. Since I deal with computers and programing at work, I imagine that there will be posts dealing with those. As a husband and proud father of a son (and another arriving soon) there might be some family related posts. Also, as someone who reads a bunch of websites (via their RSS feeds), I've come across quite a bunch of what can be best called "random" items. My wife is always surprised at what weird website I found. I might be posting links to those as well, hopefully with some commentary of my own. There also will probably be posts about games (of all types) as well. My wife and I are both involved in World of Warcraft, and play quite a bit. I might post articles about those here as well.
That's enough about me for now.
-- Larry
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