maxomai.org

Hello to my pal from Saudi. The experience was educational. Not sure what your motivation was, but if you’d like to get your point across, an email would be better for both of us.

• What happens if Google cancels your accounts, as has happened to several G+ users in the last few weeks? The answer, and what steps you can take to protect yourself, here.
• Two to file under “complex systems are hard” : Oracle ships Java 7 with a severe bug, and GNU EMACS has been a GPL violator since 2009.
• A recent McGill University study shows that documentation can improve the quality of open source code – and that this is especially the case when developers write their own documentation. The process of writing English documentation of one’s code clarifies problems and encourages the developer to fix them. More here. (Thanks to Noirin Plunkett for pointing this out in her OSCON talk.)
• Speaking of Ms. Plunkett, she writes about the ugly, unacceptable phenomenon of sexual harassment at technical conferences here. I’m glad she decided to show up this year; OSCON benefited from her talk.
• It turns out that bitcoin isn’t as anonymous as they claim. More here. Whoops!

• Quite possibly one of the coolest ideas in human history and I’m not exaggerating: SpaceHack, your one-stop shopping center for projects to get personally involved in space observation and exploration. Seriously, go there right now and check out the projects! BTW, the genius who’s driving this vision of commodity space exploration is Ariel Waldman.
• Also a very cool idea: Girls in Tech, a networking and mentoring project for (wait for it) women in tech. (Note: the .com version is unfortunately camped by a porn site.)
• Yesterday at OSCON 2011′s morning keynotes, Microsoft’s Gianugo Rabellino came to present Microsoft’s vision of how they want to work with the Open Source world. Basically, it boils down to two points, one fairly obvious, one fairly insidious.

  The Obvious: Open Source and Proprietary usually work together. Well, sure, Microsoft used the BSD TCP/IP stack for a long time, and these days I mostly run Linux on a VM on my Mac. Ubuntu includes closed source hardware drivers. Exceptions to this, such as a purely open source Debian machine or a purely proprietary UNIX machine, are pretty rare in the real world.

  The Insidious: Rabellino’s assertion that the important concept of open source is an “open surface,” in the form of open APIs, open standards, and so on. I’m trying very hard to not see this as a new spin on Microsoft’s decades-old “embrace and extend” philosophy.

  More on his talk here.

• Why Softpedia thinks PyTranspose is a Windows application is beyond me. I’m thinking their search algorithm has screwed up. Nonetheless, this is a helpful reminder that I need to get PyTranspose ready for Windows…..
• Buttons on demand:

  More here.

Hi everyone. This page is for me to discuss technology – not just the bits and bytes, but also the human side. If you’re looking for my usual political content, go to maxomai.livejournal.com.

Thanks,
The Management.