Disqus - Friends of dajobe

Re: Software Stack? Software Network! (And From There to Dependencies)

Edd Dumbill — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:03:06 -0000

While I won't deny there's no issue, I don't think there's an "endless GNOME upgrade cycle". GTK 2 has been binary compatible for a long period--about three years, if I'm not mistaken.

Sure, if you want the new candy, you upgrade.
I'd be worrying about the OS X upgrade cycle more.

For details of the work being done to rationalise the GNOME platform for developers, see http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley

In many ways Ridley is the acting out of extracting the framework from the applications--lots of diverse little libraries being condensed back into one framework.
(It's taken a long time for the GNOME world to come to the point of realising it's not always the abstractions and their boundaries that count most,
but the applications.)

As per Rails, I expect we'll see something akin to what's happened with Zope and platform libraries such as GNOME: products will be released targeting a stable version of the platform, and then need to be rewritten in part for the next stable release.

During the development of GNOME there've been two sorts of change: the long-running major change (1->2), and the incremental improvement (the 2.x series). It seems you need both. Sometimes the 1->2 (or should I say 9->X) change brings greater success, and sometimes it means the end; but I'm not sure it's avoidable.

Re: Colophonically and conversationally yours

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:12:31 -0000

A video welcome

Re: Colophonically and conversationally yours

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:52:57 -0000

I also forgot to say that the best way to deal with FriendFeed is through Thwirl (coincidentally, made by Seesmic).

Re: We're all ops people now

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:23:54 -0000

Video introduction to "We're all ops people now"

Re: GUADEC reflections: supporting innovation in GNOME

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:23:30 -0000

I'm afraid it got eaten. However, archive.org still has it here: http://web.archive.org/web/...

Re: New arrival

Edd Dumbill — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:12:20 -0000

Thanks! They're pretty interested and happy with him. No jealousy to speak of so far.

Re: Low-tech SSL certificate maintenance

Edd Dumbill — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:13:26 -0000

Thanks, that's a great resource!

Re: Secure LDAP replication

Edd Dumbill — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:55:00 -0000

OpenLDAP can do that too I believe, though I've no personal need for it. The key thing here I suspect is I'm not a Windows guy :)

Re: We're all ops people now

Edd Dumbill — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:32:59 -0000

You have a good point, and it illustrates what I meant by saying that we just end up pushing problems to the next level. The transition of application developer into an operations person (ensuring their base OS is always patched, etc.) is exactly my thesis.

The problem you mention is still there with the 'old-school' release. If you compile against a library with a security flaw, as vendor it's still your problem, not the customer's.

If you distribute appliances the game changes slightly: you at least can lock the appliance down more tightly than your customer would firewall, which could mitigate a lot of security issues, but you gain a slightly enlarged set of dependencies. You could argue that fixing these becomes easier, however, as you retain control over the deployment environment.

Also, let's not concentrate exclusively on outside distribution. The vast majority of software is developed and deployed inside the firewall, not outside of it.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Re: Social area networking please

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:46:04 -0000

As a footnote I'll mention that decentralized repository discovery would allay some of my fears about the Github service. I'm disconcerted by how willing many open source developers have been to hitch up to this commercial service. Not that I've anything against Github, it's a nice product. It's the principle of the thing.

Re: Social area networking please

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:48:04 -0000

I think you miss my point: the piece I'm after is the bit which sets
up the VPN in an ad-hoc way based on a selection or group of contacts.

Re: Social area networking please

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:11:07 -0000

That seems like a decent chunk of the machinery there and then.
Ideally only the peers of my choice would have access to the service
records.

Re: The BBC, microformats, RDFa and Resig

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:00:36 -0000

Some context on why this makes me weary... in the XML world we had another one of these wars between RDF and Topic Maps. Though more complex than microformats, TMs played a similar counterpoint in a tedious tech tribal war for a long while. In the end most people figured out the obvious isomorphisms and a way to live together. I don't want to see smart people waste their time on the whole thing all over again.

Yes, the W3C can be arrogant, impenetrable and annoying. But that doesn't mean everything they do is bad.

Yes, microformats are limited in scope. Deliberately, to achieve their ends. And that doesn't mean that observing these limitations is a threat. It's just a fact.

Let's not waste the energy of good brains on this. Everybody's done great things for the web. Mozilla, and the W3C both. In neither case is it a good excuse for dumb tribalism.

Re: The BBC, microformats, RDFa and Resig

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:31:09 -0000

Thanks for your further clarifications, I think that's a great contribution to the debate. I'd not seen the "data-" thing before. Now to see if some RDFa folk want to comment on that...

Re: We're all ops people now

Edd Dumbill — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:34:32 -0000

http://twitter.com/littleid...

From the Velocity conference: "We have developers who think like operations" -- John Alspaw, Yahoo

Re: My OSCON 2008 picks

Edd Dumbill — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:33:07 -0000

No, I've only played with Puppet so farearly days. I'll take a look
at bcfg2, a brief look at the bcfg2 website looks as though it's a lot
less flexible than Puppet, but that can be both positive and negative.
The XML format of bcfg2 configurations is a bit offputting, too.

I'm not entirely sure that Puppet and bcfg2 are the same kind of tool,
so a direct comparison may not be useful.

Re: Secure LDAP replication

Edd Dumbill — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:29:03 -0000

Personally, I'm inexperienced with Java in production, so I don't
follow that space. Also, I don't need something "enterprise" size for
my small business. Thanks for the pointer though!

For other readers, DSEE is here http://www.sun.com/software...

Re: Web 2.0 gas prices (Scripting News)

Edd Dumbill — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:54:14 -0000

Jim, true. But American cars are significantly less efficient than in the UK. A better comparison might be in terms of $ per mile. The last time my American friend filled up their fuel tank it came to about the same price as it costs me in the UK to fill mine.

Re: OSCON: what are your must-see talks?

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:45:25 -0000

I cannot believe I missed that! Added, thanks!

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

Edd Dumbill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:40:26 -0000

Fixed, thanks!

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

Edd Dumbill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:12:28 -0000

Seems to me it's the same principle as using GPL software. In which case, we may remain ideologically irreconcilable.

Also, see the bug list. There's enlightening explanation at http://greyowl.controlezvou...

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

Edd Dumbill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:19:55 -0000

Try again a bit later. The attention spike has meant Evan's moving servers around, with some DNS snags in the process.

Re: Why Identi.ca is important

Edd Dumbill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:58:28 -0000

Sorry, that's just not helpful. Take a look at what I wrote, what it means. Identi.ca's slow right now because a one-man company is funding and scaling EC2 instances from his own pocket, and going without sleep to do it since a bunch of Twitter-refugees jumped on the site over the last 24 hours.

Re: Tolling the bell for the gatekeepers

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:39:07 -0000

I'm rapidly coming round to your point of view on FF. It needs careful pruning to ensure it doesn't descend into dross

Re: Lessons from the O2 failure

Edd Dumbill — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:47:04 -0000

Good write-up. I counted 31 separately served Javascript files, totalling some 360KB.
The thing that got me was the needless Ajaxification of it all, as you said, which meant starting over every time something timed out—I bet that aggravated things considerably. It's also the worst kind of Ajax usage as it breaks the underlying RESTful architecture of the web.
Poor show from O2 all round.