The Betacantrips Travelogue

Lately there’s been some fuss about Google’s new privacy policy, with this post by Joey Hess (on Planet Debian) and Slashdot’s article about Google’s new opt-out policy.

Joey Hess writes:

With the decade over, and Google rolling out all manner of tracking cookies and javascript, it’s time to move on. Just keeping on top of the torrent of privacy-affecting changes Google is making, and trying to parse the real meaning in the chirpy googlespeak announcements has become more work than the value their search engine adds. (This was the last straw.)

At least for now, I’ll be using Duck Duck Go for search. It’s small, quirky, has features the big competition lacks, and works well enough for my mostly moderate and occasionally intense needs. Sorta like Google in 1999.

While I am in favor of privacy, have not been thrilled with Google’s behavior, and have come to resent the attitude of Google employees and officers, I have to say Duck Duck Go does not meet my search needs. Neither does Bing. Neither does Google, when it comes right down to it. Search is hard, and there are a lot of tricky bits. (Try searching for the Haskell type signature "Int#". For a while it was nearly impossible to find the emacs package "magit", as all you could get were results for "magic".)

So for the time being I’m still using Google Search. With luck, in time everything will just magically get better..

OK, what? Ymacs:

Ymacs is an Emacs-like editor that works in your browser. Which applies, at this state of affairs, only if your browser is Firefox. It looks pretty good with other browsers, but it seems to be almost impossible to catch all the required key bindings—only Firefox allows what we need. Perhaps it can be “fixed” for other browsers, but I haven’t got the time nor the motivation to try yet.

…

2009-12-04 — Look ma, M-x! M-x eval_region, even. And TAB completion for command names. Some commands from that list aren’t meant to be called interactively—I’ll start some refactoring for this soon.

Seen on Coder Who Says Py: a software-design quiz meme.

A good friend of mine has created a personality test to both let you know what kind of developer you are when it comes to designing software as well as gather data for his PhD. If you have the 10 minutes it takes to do the test, please do take it; turns out HR and secretaries don’t like letting PhD students talk to managers to let them give a short online test to their developers.

I’m an improviser (all results are here).

An article on Lambda the Ultimate about literate programming. I didn’t read all of these papers — only the "Programming on a Team Project" — and have never really done any literate programming myself, but it’s an interesting methodology and I sometimes wish it caught on better.

In my experience, healthy projects either have very little in the way of comments, beyond architectural descriptions, or have lots and lots of comments, sometimes one per each line of code (mature projects tend towards this end). I think XP is probably right to suggest that energy spent commenting is better spent refactoring or improving the codebase.

And yet LP still has a compelling power (at least for me)! My feeling is that there are some applications which benefit a lot from a literate style — namely research papers, data analyses, and tutorials. But for everything else I think it’s probably better relegated to the museum of history.

Via Suzanne: a fascinating autobiographical article by Paul Lutus.

You may have heard about me. In the computer business I’m known as the Oregon Hermit. According to rumor, I write personal computer programs in solitude, shunning food and sleep in endless fugues of work. I hang up on important callers in order to keep the next few programming ideas from evaporating, and I live on the end of a dirt road in the wilderness. I’m here to tell you these vicious rumors are true.

Personal favorite line?

Also, I’ve been told that good programmers rarely have mates. This is usually offered as evidence of how asocial we are. Without fail, we’re pictured as disheveled cyber-hobos hanging around computer centers, shunning serious relationships, coding for the sake of coding. I can’t really disagree with this view, but there is something interesting behind it-at least for me. I began to notice, as I got more involved with computers, that acceptance by the machine required absolute precision on my part. The slightest misstep caused the instant erasure of many hours of work; the machine would reject everything with perfect dispassion until each detail was just right. Then the program would suddenly function beautifully, and never fail again… The result of this strange relationship was that for a time I became too spoiled for the flesh-and-blood women around me. I got tired of hearing, "If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times-the answer is maybe!"

Slashdot has an article about a side-effect of business in the virtual space.

‘As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise’s reputation,’ said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. ‘We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.’

This article on LWN surveys the Android landscape now that "the dust has mostly settled after Google’s shutdown of the Cyanogen build".

Solving the rest of the problems should not be all that hard. If the gmail application never becomes available, mail can be read through IMAP instead – and that might just inspire some people to help improve the somewhat painful email application currently shipped with Android.

The article reads (to me) as a mostly positive "to arms!" with regard to Android. But in the intervening month, I think it’s become clear that Android isn’t a "real" open source platform, and doesn’t really sit well in the Linux ecosystem. Personally I’m still feeling burned about Android, but I have a lot of hope for the N900 and new versions of Maemo.

Seen via LWN, a feel-good article about Linux saving the day.

QUICK THINKING open sourcerers might have saved an Australian power supply system after its electrical grid control room network got infected with a virus.

I am also fascinated by the spread of the term "open sourcerers".

Seen on Planet Debian: an interesting article about the BBC’s switch from Silverlight to Flash and the Free Software community’s response. The money quote:

What annoys me here isn’t so much that nothing works. I’m used to there being temporary gaps in Free Software functionality, that’s pretty normal. But I’m greatly vexed that one of these four used to work on a Free platform, and now it doesn’t — and that places like UbuntuForums are filled with people celebrating that fact.

Seen via the Crystal Labs Twitter feed: a brief list of indie games funding development on Kickstarter.

Unfortunately Kickstarter has no tagging mechanism, and its search feature shows the first 16 results only, so it’s pretty hard to search for indie games on it.