Bye bye, XEmacs

Nice long rant from Stevey on why XEmacs needs to be put out of its misery: “XEmacs is Dead. Long Live XEmacs!”.

Shared links for 2008-04-18

• The smallwig theory of optimization
  +1
• Facebook knows who you are, and that's worth more than you think
  Still, I think Facebook is grossly overvalued.
• Good Times
  Indeed.
• It is the future now
  ... in California.
• Natural History
  More from Andrew Bird and his next album.

Your ecosystem sucks

Come on, Microsoft. Seriously. WTF?

Shared links for 2008-04-06

• Words Will Tell
  Andrew Bird on songmaking.
• Says it all really ....
  (applies to all online collaboration tools)
• Talk on disk as the new RAM
• Wii hacking and the Freeloader
  "Since such an important component failed open, it’s clear higher assurance development techniques are needed for software protection and crypto."

Leaves that are green

I love Sundays because Sinfest in colors is always absolutely gorgeous.

dcmd now in devscripts

In case anyone out there is using my dcmd script, I'll note that it's now included in devscripts (starting with version 2.10.20). The devscripts version doesn't behave differently when called as dscp or drsync, I have the following aliases to get the old behavior:

alias dscp='dcmd scp'
alias drsync='dcmd rsync -av'

As always, feedback welcome.

Shared links for 2008-03-24

• Why coding after a long drinking night is not a good idea
  Heh.
• Extension Developers - Better Background XMLHttpRequests
  Background content fetching that isn't canceled when the window closes, silences authentication prompts and SSL certificate dialogs... and this is supposed to be a good idea?!
• Jed’s Other Poem
  Still love this video.
• Monsters

Cleaner

In the productive procrastination department: I repackaged rcs using debhelper (it feels like the future) and while I was at it, I implemented MadCoder's git maintenance scheme where changes from upstream are maintained in a rebased integration branch and serialized as patches in the Debian branch (master in my case) using git format-patch. It's pretty nice:

• I can use native Git commands to edit/refresh patches, which beats quilt any day;
• Changes to upstream are visible both as a git branch and as separated, commented patches in the Debian branch;
• If necessary (e.g. in case of NMU), outside contributors can just dump a -p1 patch in debian/patches and be done with it.

Of course this is a very low-maintenance package (the last upstream release was 13 years ago) so it doesn't matter very much which maintenance strategy it uses, but after implementing it I'm pretty confident that it works and I might switch my other packages to it.

If you're interested in knowing more about clever ways to use modern VCS for packaging, you may want to join the vcs-pkg mailing-list.

Shared links for 2008-03-19

• Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets”
  Haha.
• Robots are getting better...the Big Dog robot can recover itself...
  Watch the video!
• Apple iPhone bootloader attack
• APIs: "Easy to Use" vs "Hard to Misuse"

GNOME 2.22 in sid: check (mostly)

The status page speaks for itself: most of GNOME 2.22 is now available in sid. A few packages are being staged in experimental to avoid breaking too much stuff, and a few of the remaining missing pieces are waiting in NEW. Special thanks to Sebastian Dröge who's done an incredible work with more than 90 uploads over the past week!