I meant to toss out a couple thoughts when Robert blogged about index funds, reminded by a Wall Street Journal article yesterday pointing out that the S&P 500 has gone nowhere over the last 9 years. Here are said thoughts: Lots of sensible advisers will tell you to buy index funds, but importantly, the advice […]
Elijah posted a humble note about Easy GIT, but don’t be deceived. Easy GIT is completely usable for daily work, and it’s a one-file perl script you can just add to your path. It hides git almost completely and is pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for. Elijah rocks, which I already knew, but […]
Samurai-Sword Maker’s Reactor Monopoly May Cool Nuclear Revival Japan Steel Works apparently melts 600 tons of steel at once into a giant one-piece nuclear reactor component that costs $350 million. They also make $10,000 samurai swords. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2008–03.html#14.2)
For the GTK+ hackfest I wanted to start a discussion about why people are doing custom “canvas” things (HippoCanvas, Clutter, GooCanvas, Pigment, etc.) and how GTK+ could evolve to address the same problems. The proposal in a nutshell is that widgets should be one kind of object in a more flexible scene graph. But there […]
Browsing from an old interview with Elijah I found a post I wrote a couple years ago. Here is an idea I still like, but had forgotten to keep using: The old usability cliche “users are busy not stupid” is exactly right, because the issue is that they are busy doing something and they will […]
Spent part of today torturing the Clutter guys with disruptive, untested patches … woo hoo! (I do plan to clean up and debug the patch, if the idea goes over well.) Clutter is a pretty fun change from the usual 2D toolkit stuff, and nicely done in general. The other day I also wrote up […]
My new company is called LiTL, and we have some job listings up. We’re looking for desktop developers, web developers, QA engineers, and Linux distribution wranglers, among others. Send us a note (to jobs @ litl) to introduce yourself. We’d love to meet you and tell you more about the company. (This post was originally […]
I thought this was a good post on how to recognize and hire good software developers if you aren’t a software developer yourself. Or even if you are a software developer yourself. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2008–02.html#4)
Jeff started a blog thread about handling out-of-memory. For anyone who’s interested in this, check out D‑Bus (or rather, the libdbus C implementation of D‑Bus) for an example of nontrivial code that attempts to handle out-of-memory. I would wildly guess that the OOM handling adds 30–40% or so to the number of lines of code, […]
If you want to play with compositing on Fedora 8 using the Intel drivers, here’s how I got it working. For testing, you can run a second X server on the hardware. However, you first need to disable DRI on the main X server (and not use a compositing WM on the main X server). […]