Pet peeve

People who comment about something I say without taking the time to actually read what I’ve said. Double peeve points when I can’t reply to their post because of a 404 error. Jmoron thinks that I don’t understand UUID, but I think if he’d take a few minutes to actually read what he linked to, it would be obvious I have a genuine problem, and that UUID is most decidedly the culprit. Oh well. Thanks for linking to me anyway, J. UUID always has been and probably always will be an issue for anybody dual-booting two different UUID systems with a shared SWAP drive.

Last rites

When I gave my presentation on Ubuntu Bug Triage Basics at Penguicon (or whenever anybody asks what triage is), I likened bug triage to the TV show M*A*S*H in which the wounded come in, go through triage, and then are operated on according to their triaged status. While the analogy between software bug triage and human triage isn’t perfect, it’s fairly close.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Father Mulcahy. As the Army minister of the 4077th, he had the unenviable task of performing last rites on those who could not be saved. In much the same fashion, I’ve been invalidating bug reports that have sat around for several months in need of more information. If we don’t have enough information, we can’t operate. If we are unable to operate for too long, the bug report dies. It may not seem like the most useful triage function, but I like to do it for two reasons:

1. It’s quick and (usually) simple. I can crunch out a lot of these is a small amount of time.
2. It’s a good way to decrease the number of open bugs, of which there are way too many for our team of dedicated (mostly volunteer) developers to address them all.

In addition to those obvious reasons, though, there’s some other good that comes out of these “last rites”. Sometimes (in fact, twice in the past two days) the bug filer will get my invalidation notice, and suddenly wake up, see the questions that have been needing answers, and answer them! Kind of like that one episode of M*A*S*H… “This one’s not dead!”

And this, to answer a question from the Penguicon presentation, is another reason we don’t just script the process of invalidating old incomplete bugs.

Note to defense attorney:

Allowing your defendant to plead “I thought they’d get out of my way.” when she is charged with 2nd degree murder for running people down with her car just makes the both of you look stupid.

Guitar Hero Pi

I want this, just for the Coulton.

New Blade Runner ending

Hot rumor of the year: Blade Runner is being updated to be more modern (or is that more post-modern?) this year. I have just been given a link to a frame from the new ending, in which Deckard no longer has to wonder if he is a replicant or not.

Unbelievable numbers

The second unbelievable number is 8. The Detroit Red Wings finished their sweep of the Colorado Avalance in Round 2 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs last night by a score of 8-2. Franzen got his 2nd playoff hat-trick, the first coming just a couple games ago against the same team.

The *first* unbelievable number is 1,201. This is the number of hits for today in my blog stats. As of roughly 6AM. I’ve been Reddited. Can’t wait to see the final number, and welcome to all the new folks who decided to look around and might stay tuned in.

10 easy steps to becoming a Vim expert

Somebody asked for it, and now it’s up on the web. Here’s a link to the PDF of the presentation, and a link to Zonker’s post about it and Penguicon in general.

9 out of 15

I guess that means I’m addicted to Linux. Though the list is rather silly… Understanding a simple command-line instruction is evidence of being addicted? Even some people who don’t use Linux at all want penguins for pets. And I think Linus Torvalds is well known in Redmond, but I doubt they are really Linux addicts.

Still, having 9 out of 15 probably does qualify me.

Tweek it

I’ve been on Twitter for a few months now. I have to say, I got addicted. But I’ve also been complaining since almost the first day about the lack of a good Linux client. Tweets to SMS on my cell are nice, except I’m following too many people who like to talk a lot, and I just can’t keep up. The IM client is nice, and works through Jabber/GoogleTalk, but sometimes it just doesn’t work at all, and that is incredibly annoying.

So, being an Open Source kind of guy, I decided I would build the best, most fully-featured Twitter client around (and build it for my beloved KDE, and launch it first on Kubuntu). I’ve been saying that for well over a month. Today, I finally started. Sort of. Not a line of code yet, but I registered the project on Launchpad, I created a couple blueprints of some of my ideas for what the features should be (with more to come!), and I twittered about it and even got my first volunteer to help with the code work. Depending on how things go for me this weekend, I may even get started on the real work.

Help is sorely needed in one domain: artwork! At the very least, I want a cool icon for use in the start menu, on the task bar, etc. Anybody with desire and at least more talent than me (which should be easy) is welcome to chip in.

Gutsy to Hardy upgrade

I installed Gutsy on my test partition, installed the apps I actually use, then copied over my config files and whatnot from my stable partition to make an almost-clone of stable. Changed the fstab to get rid of the horrid UUID that I hate, and then I did s/gutsy/hardy/g on sources.list and dist-upgraded to Hardy. On reboot, no partitions got mounted by fstab. What used to be hda, hdb, and hdc is now sda, sdb, and sdc. Simple fix, but annoying. Why do the device names have to change? What’s the point? I don’t get it.

Also a very minor problem with Firefox. It wanted to upgrade, but didn’t for some reason through Adept Updater. And I didn’t want it to, because for the time being, Firefox 2 > Firefox 3 (which is the new “Firefox” in Hardy). I tried to install FF2, but that failed. Had to upgrade FF first, then was able to install FF2 with no problem.

Anyhow, the rest of the upgrade seemed to go well. I’ll know better by tomorrow if everything’s working, but for now at least I’m enjoying an improved version of Kopete.