Monthly Archives: October 2008

Best quote from class today

“Dave, I’ve written all these tests, and they fail.  Will you accept tests that fail for our 0.1 release?” What’s going on here?  You’ve got someone who has written tests for a component (in this case, Colour Profiles), and he’s found that the code is somehow broken.  The tests work, but they fail to pass, because [...]
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Working at scale

I was in a meeting last week where I was trying to describe what it means to work on something like Mozilla.  I often use the phrase, “working at scale,” and one of my colleagues stopped me to ask just what that meant.  Explaining it without examples is hard, so I thought I’d give an [...]
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For my wife…

who wanted to know if her RSS Reader was updating. Let me help. I love you.
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James Morrison

My wife got me started listening to James Morrison, and I’m a fan for sure.  I really wish he got some radio play here.  Interwebs to the rescue… This Boy Call the Police These are from his earlier album.  We just got his new album and it’s different but it’s grown on me in a day.
Posted in Digital Swag, family | Comments closed

VMWare Fusion 2 not ready

I made the mistake of upgrading from Fusion 1.1.3 on my MacBook Pro to 2.  First, while I’m ranting, let me just say that VMWare’s upgrade process for Fusion is something right out of 1992.  But let’s say you do go ahead and upgrade.  Here’s what you’re in for. I use Fusion to build Firefox on [...]
Posted in CDOT, Mozilla, Seneca | Comments closed

Big wins come from thinking small

When Mike gave his keynote (.ogg) at FSOSS 06, he emphasized the fact that “small is beautiful” when it comes to open source contributions.  It’s a very inviting message to those who are just starting out, and one that I’ve often repeated to my students as they get started in the largest open source projects.  [...]
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Desiring your tools

So I’m not done talking about tools tonight…you have to watch this talk on dtrace, and do so now.  I’m laughing as I type this, it’s so funny and interesting.  Well done, Bryan Cantrill.
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On the problem of software tools

Today I was treated to a talk by my colleague Jordan Anastasiade on Eclipse WTP bug fixing.  In 45 minutes he went through the structure of Eclipse, showed us how WTP works, demonstrated a bug in the tool, and proceeded to fix it right down to creating the patch, explaining everything as he went.  I [...]
Posted in CDOT, Idea Factory, Seneca | Comments closed