AdamW on Linux and more

There’s a very interesting (if entirely wrong-headed) article over on Slashdot right now, and an even more interesting comment thread again. It’s essentially the classic Luddite argument brought back yet again: increasingly smart automation is going to make all human employment obsolete. We’ll have robots not just to grow food and make cars but “flipping [...]

Reading this neat guide to writing git commit messages, a random thought occurred to me which I hadn’t actually seen written down anywhere before… I wonder how many guides to getting started in open source (whatever) include the single most important instruction I’ve ever come across, which applies to just about any action you can [...]

I always think it’s fun when you can catch those nearly-there-but-just-not-quite-right ideas which always look so funny ten years down the line, right when they actually happen. Motorola’s Lapdock is an absolutely textbook example of the genre. You can kind of see how they got there from here, after all. “Man,” they thought, “it’s a [...]

I’m generally happier working on projects which are small and sort of grassroots-y and generally held together with duct tape, which is why if you ask anyone who works with me at RH they’ll tell you I recoil instinctively whenever anyone asks me anything about RHEL (which I’ve still never actually run). But this is [...]

I’d just like to say a huge thanks to HP and the folks at Canonical who work on Simple Scan – at long last, HP fixed up the ADF support for my 1212nf multifunction printer in hplip, and Simple Scan has completely awesome multiple document scanning / saving capabilities. So I can just load up [...]

When I first heard that Steve Jobs was dead, I shrugged and carried on working. I never met him or interacted with him in any way, and he had little impact on my life; it’s sad that he’s dead, in the general way that it’s sad when anyone dies, but I have no context for [...]

I really, really wish I’d known about the ‘mapchars’ option to mount.cifs before I rsynced my entire music collection to a CIFS share (when I switched from storing it on my HTPC to storing it on a NAS box). Turns out every track with a question mark in its name went missing during that process, [...]

Well, this is messy. Mozilla managed to release Firefox 7.0 with a large bug which means that any add-on for which an update is pending when you install the Firefox 7 update will apparently disappear after the update. We managed to release the update to Fedora 15, thanks to positive feedback, even though I tried [...]

A bittersweet afternoon: I just completed migration of my mail server from Mandriva 2010.1 to Fedora 15. MDV 2010 is out of support now, I don’t trust MDV 2011. I could’ve gone with Mageia, but it just seemed simpler to stick to Fedora for everything. So now all of my personal machines and servers are [...]

So it’s been a long hard slog – see this mini-essay for some details – but we finally have second release candidate for the Fedora 16 Beta. (Yes, you read that right, a release candidate for a Beta: this is not mass-market stuff). If you want to help us ensure the Beta release goes out [...]