OSSPACK

2008 was an interesting yet as Fedora contributor despite a busy session for Graphic Design course. I almost felt exhausted like never before with a combination of exercises such as Capoeira.
As one of Echo icon theme developers, it was almost hard despite a good effort from Martin. Because of the use of axonometric projection, the theme did not make to Fedora 10 release. Echo perspective was started and will require more intensive reworks derived from its axonometric counterpart. I am taking a break in order to recover from mind stress and exhaustion.
On the other part, I took leadership from Display team from FedoraOnXO while tracking project from One Laptop Per Child.

That is how 2008 was from my perspective.

The week of information has freed what thinks the ten history main that are taken care more of the open source for the year of 2008 in advance payment this month. Reminisce all memories that happy we have had of the source opened during this past year: Nestle' with the netbooks, gallops with Google, frolic with Fedora, string to himself with the copyright and even obtain your hands on a mystery of sugoso homicide.

The week of information has freed what thinks the ten history main that are taken care more of the open source for the year of 2008 in advance payment this month. Reminisce all memories that happy we have had of the source opened during this past year: Nestle' with the netbooks, gallops with Google, frolic with Fedora, string to himself with the copyright and even obtain your hands on a mystery of sugoso homicide.

The first release candidate of Snowl 0.2 is now available. This version sports no new features relative to the last preview release, just a bunch of bug fixes. Barring the discovery of unexpected issues, this is the build that will be released as Snowl 0.2.

Notable bug fixes include:

• an updated visual design with platform-specific icons for feeds and people;
• Firefox is more responsive when Snowl is refreshing sources and building views;
• multiple Twitter accounts no longer occasionally get confused for each other;
• views update more consistently when messages and sources are added or removed;
• the river and stream views always show messages in the order they were received.

As of this release, I've also switched to hosting Snowl development on the same infrastructure (source code repository, bug tracker, discussion forums, etc.) as other labs projects to make it easier for participants in those other projects to contribute to Snowl.

Give the release candidate a try, and let me know what you think.

Install Snowl

Discussion Forum | Bug Reports | Report a Bug | Source Code

As Apple demonstrated on the desktop, the way to beat Microsoft is not at its own game, but by changing the nature and, hence, the rules of the game. Min suggests that Linux gaming may be the key to beating Windows-plus-Office, in part because the demographics of gamers mesh well with the demographics of Linux users..

Rather than announcing a road-map for 2009 or sharing all of the accomplishments this year that were made within the Compiz development community, Kristian Lyngstol has shared some grave concerns for this project that brought "desktop bling" to Linux. Kristian has outlined a few areas that that he believes need to be addressed otherwise it could mean the death of Compiz. Compiz in fact is just losing developers at this point and with the different forks taking place there is much stagnation occurring within Compiz.

The ido of NetBeans it is not bad from oneself, but still more practical once that begun to extend them with the specific connections until your needs. In this installment of the plans the Java of opened source, Jeff introduces it to Friesen to the connections of NetBeans leave that it to observe the filesystem of NetBeans, to explore the images on the systems of Windows, to control the code in order to see if there is conformity of champions, to add to the properties to the codes category of Java and to make OpenGL…

The ido of NetBeans it is not bad from oneself, but still more practical once that begun to extend them with the specific connections until your needs. In this installment of the plans the Java of opened source, Jeff introduces it to Friesen to the connections of NetBeans leave that it to observe the filesystem of NetBeans, to explore the images on the systems of Windows, to control the code in order to see if there is conformity of champions, to add to the properties to the codes category of Java and to make OpenGL…

Jesse Keating made a comment in my previous post on leap seconds, which I thought was worth highlighting in another post, for the benefit of those who don’t read the comments.

This is why rarely executed codepaths suck. Whilst it is tempting to gloat over another Microsoft failure, this could easily have been any other OS. I already mentioned that Linux had suffered something similar once. A bug like this in consumer devices is a nightmarish, but imagine if such a bug ended up in something more critical ? “Sorry, your life support system went offline because there was a leap second”. In safety critical systems, rare codepaths are kind of terrifying.

Writing test cases for bugs like this is also not particularly fun. You’d have to have a fake ntp server for testing the rare case.
Now think about all the other potential ‘only runs once every blue moon’ codepaths in your apps, and imagine the effort required to write test plans for all of them. Not impossible, but certainly a lot of potential job security there for QA folks. Just like fuzz-testing, traditional coverage-testing by just running common workloads aren’t the panacea of testing when there are variables outside your control.

What’s still puzzling to me though.. The Zunes died several hours before 00:00:00 UTC.
Quirk of MSFT’s ntp implementation I guess. *shrug*

Over the past few years, scheduled releases of open source projects have become the norm. Projects tend to release new versions according to a regular schedule as opposed to releasing when the developers consider all the work proposed, has been completed. Releasing "When it's done" is based upon the simple proposition that if you only release when you think the software is complete and usable, then that release will be of higher quality. How a project makes that decision of completeness would be up to the project; an active benevolent dictator's project could be simply decreed complete, while a larger community project may use voting or other feedback, to create an aggregate decision. Whichever way though, there will always be the possibility of issues missed, or downgraded without the community noticing and therefore holding up the release while those issues are fixed.