A nice article in the New York Times on software patents. I hadn’t seen the comparison to pharmaceutical companies before: software companies are getting one patent per $500,000 in R&D costs, while pharmaceutical companies are getting one patent per several hundred million in R&D costs. Seems like a good illustration of the problem that would […]
I did some dbus optimization a while back, but it got lost when we rewrote all the marshaling code to support fully recursive types. Unfortunately, the code now has a distributed bloat problem where the performance issue comes from too many “layers” – to speed this up I think we need someone to come in […]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: enjoyed much more than expected, keeps the spirit of Dahl books. Christopher Lee scenes were awesome. The Island: not recommended. Good cast, potentially the original script was good, but the whole thing got the Michael Bay treatment. Not sure how they got most of the cast to do it (Scarlett […]
Thought I’d pile on and help announce an experimental new project… even though I’ve had nothing to do with designing or building it. ☠ has been in GNOME CVS for a while now, but few have seen it in action. Besides testing the Unicode support of every program that tries to display its name, the […]
My plan was to stay just a couple of nights in Ottawa for desktopcon, skipping the kernel stuff later in the week. But my flight was just canceled and they didn’t have anything until tomorrow, which would mean missing almost the whole thing, since I was already leaving a bit early. So I just asked […]
Federico, the gconf issues there are fairly well-known; I posted a mail a while back with some analysis but Google isn’t finding it again. The big win is not complicated optimizations, it’s just to avoid loading and parsing a ton of documentation translations that will never be used. If you do that then gconfd can […]
I was expecting a summer blockbuster action movie, but War of the Worlds was pretty much a horror film in the tradition of Alien. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-07.html#6)
Software has a state where bugfixing is just as likely to make it worse as it is to make it better. Metacity is kind of in this stage; most (but not all) of the open bugs really are not very important, relative to other aspects of the desktop that people could work on. And a […]
Aha! yum-utils to the rescue, now I can do all sorts of silly things. Thanks Seth. Of course, gtk2 downgrade didn’t fix Evolution. Which random thing to try downgrading next… maybe I should just debug the thing 😉 (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-07.html#2)
Is there any way to convince yum to downgrade a package? Especially relevant since evolution is all busted in rawhide. To downgrade Evolution I did an rpm -e followed by a yum install of a specific Evolution version, but that didn’t help and so I’m guessing I need to downgrade gtk2; rpm -e gtk2 is […]