Finally got our piece-o’-shit Seagate DDS-4 tape drive back from the shop. The second time. My advice is to not buy DDS-4 drives; not just Seagate ones but any DDS-4 drives. Why? Even though the front says IBM or HP, the inside is still manufactured by Seagrate. The last FRU we got was an IBM brand drive, but reading the label carefully you discover that it’s still a Seagrate.
It’s at times like these that I wish the company had money to buy a decent tape library.
So there’s this big flap about whether or not XFree86 should be forked. Doesn’t it seem like we go through this every few months with every other large open source project? I mean some operating systems are a direct result of forking. And then you have Linux with its -dj, -ac, -my_dog_spot branches, and myriads of different releases — 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x, 2.5.x. It’s crazy. Not that the Linux development model (a/k/a complete and utter chaos) should be emulated by anyone.
Mike Harris has an interesting diary entry on why people are so fed up with XFree86, but my point, as I’ve made it above, is that the problems the XFree86 project have are endemic to any large open source project. After a while, any “core” development team becomes so insular it becomes a little “old boys’ club”, and unless there are folks willing to help reverse that trend, you end up with a lot of people outside core being very pissed off, and threatening to fork the code, etc. By and large I think code forks are a Bad Thing except in cases where the project is trying to do two different technical things at the same time. But forking code due to the inability of people to cooperate, and due to the core team becoming so insular — that’s not beneficial to anyone.
Is this supposed to be meaningful to anyone:
When an instance attribute is referenced that isn't a data attribute, its class is searched. If the name denotes a valid class attribute that is a function object, a method object is created by packing (pointers to) the instance object and the function object just found together in an abstract object: this is the method object. When the method object is called with an argument list, it is unpacked again, a new argument list is constructed from the instance object and the original argument list, and the function object is called with this new argument list.
/me curls up in fetal position
So I’ve been trying to figure out what this koremutake thing means — this algorithm that the shorl.com people are using to make their shorter URLs easy to memorize. I figure that "koremutake" is the representation of some significant number using the aforementioned algorithm.
So I tooled around and tried to figure out what the significance of the number is. I see that using the supplied syllable-to-number chart provided, "koremutake" (or more accurately KO RE MU TA KE is really 39 67 52 78 37. Does this number mean anything to anyone?
The web designer just purchased a curtain to put over the entrance to the server room.
© 2003-2012 Julian C. Dunn.