The Betacantrips Travelogue

For those of us who are fans of A Softer World: a book!

Are you looking for the perfect Christmas gift for someone you want to confuse with about 300 mixed signals?

The second Softer World book is here. It is called Second Best isn’t so Bad and you can buy it right now if you like! 244 full colour pages (even the black and white images are printed in glorious full colour, for no reason at all! We are all about excess.) and at the end of the book there’s a collection of the original black and white photocopy versions of A Softer World that we made in an all night copy shop with a stack of photos and an old typewriter. This section is called "Not bad for a first try."

Also, the first Softer World book, Truth and Beauty Bombs is up for sale on the Topatoco site as well! Buy them separate, or together for a discount! What kind of crazy world is this!?

(also, we included all the alt texts. How? IT IS A MYSTERY!)

Seen via LWN, this quote about the Java methodology:

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use. This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as ‘I’d like to use this third-party code, but my application is too special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.’. A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it. This behavior should be a last resort, not a first instinct.

Preach it!