Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools. This isn’t to say that autotools is necessarily that deficient, but the new CMake system we’re using is a lot more suitable for our kind of project. This has brought some immediate benefits – much simpler build system, much quicker compiles and installations (‘make install’ in particular is now much faster), and a slightly simpler source tree. We can also now build binaries out-of-source, which is a huge boon.
MJ Ray has some interesting thoughts on the recent discussion of BoycottNovell’s lash out at people criticising RMS’ GCDS keynote. For the sake of being open, my reaction to RMS’ speech (which I didn’t see) was that it sounded pretty distasteful: I don’t think there was any sexist intent, but the choice of words was pretty poor.
I think a key problem with BoycottNovell is that it left the lands of “corporate judo” a long time ago: motivating people to spend (or not) their money is one thing (to be applauded – it’s a basic tenet of capitalism, after all), and telling people why they shouldn’t buy a certain company’s products empowers them to make better choices. Rallying against individuals rather than the corporation, though, rather crosses that line.
Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing.
Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important. A number of people on Facebook started a group to protest this, and took to the streets of Wallington last night.
As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.
Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory‘s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.
It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters. I don’t know if speeches like Stallman’s were co-ordinated – I suspect more likely happenstance – but it all seemed very well timed.
Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.
For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.
Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach). I tried to vote for bettter communication (though most candidates were pro- that), and for those who had a track record of commitment: these various “posts” don’t really have much in terms of power, so I mostly am interested in a. what the person would bring in terms of time and resources, and b. the attitude of the person.
I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really. Andy’s take on this is really worth interesting, although I personally think he’s defending Bitfolk’s pricing unnecessarily.
My basic philosophy on this is that price isn’t an issue; things cost what they cost. What is really at stake is the value of the service: is what I’m paying for worth it? Of course there are plenty of businesses which are effectively discount-merchants – the Ryanairs and Tescos of this world – but they don’t offer an awful lot of value. Trying to compete on price caters for a certain type of customer, but it’s a limited market.
I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.
Problem: Windows Vista / XP machine on a wireless network behaving extremely oddly. You can often browse to Google, for example, but basically nowhere else – it’s like other websites just time out.
I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.
Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick. Over time we accreted more and more things into our build which no-one understood fully and that would occasionally blow up in our face.
It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.
As Rawhide, I’ve been using it on and off for a while now, and to be honest aside from the few things I ended up filing, there hasn’t been an awful lot wrong with it. One thing I’d particularly like to call out are the small improvements arriving in virt-manager, which is slowly improving release by release into a really tasty piece of software.
