11 March 2010
Commercial Gaming, Coming Soon to Linux? | Linux Magazine
This is an interesting article on the state of gaming on Linux. It touches on DirectX dominance, OpenGL, how webGL might matter, and more. I found the included link to a Wikipedia article about games that run natively on Linux interesting, too. The title of the piece is misleading, though. There is only a small bit of the article devoted to commercial gaming might come to Linux.
9 March 2010
Mere Code: Get started with launchpadlib
Jono Lange offers the world's quickest launchpadlib tutorial. It really is easy to hack on Launchpad via the API, and there's no end to the creative uses a clever hacker could make with launchpadlib.
8 March 2010
Book Review: Making an Elephant
This book on his life and writing is good, though not as good as other books I've read like this. I enjoyed the personal passages about his life, more than the thoughts on his craft. The chapter written on his father's death stands out as a moving essay. [...]
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5 March 2010
Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Light: the new look of Ubuntu
I really like Mark's post on the new look for Ubuntu. This is more like a technical post on design decisions, including screenshots that explain the design language choices. The choices are well thought out, and IMHO, effective. We had a similar tour of the design language from Dom Edmunds at the last Launchpad Team Leads meeting. I've been excited about the new brand since I first heard about it, and the results are fantastic. The coming Ubuntu font design is something new I learned from this post, too.
3 March 2010
Unit Testing Achievements
This link is making the rounds among developers. I've not gotten the code or used it, so not sure what it's really like. The achievements on this homepage make me LOL. Any Launchpad developer would appreciate this, given how long our test suite takes to run.
24 February 2010
Scott Chacon | The Geek Talk
Found this following from Simon Willison to Rafe Colburn to Ryan Tomayko. Most people are keying on the quote pulled out on Tomayko about GitHub's dev process.
At GitHub we don't have a project tracker or todo list -- we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. [...] it's the most agile, focused and efficient team I've ever worked with.
A few comments do the "this can't work for X" or "this only works because of Y" meme and some are valid points. I think it's more interesting to ask why this work for GitHub?
My initial take is that it works because GitHub's team is small, has a defined, focused mission for their site, and shares this passion among devs for making the site as good as it can be as fast as possible.
18 February 2010
Bug Triage 101 by Brian Murray
This is a video from a talk Brian Murray gave at a GSLUG meeting about bug triage. There is a ton of useful info here for people interested in triaging Ubuntu bugs or for people just interested in thinking about good bug triage generally. There is also a basic tour of bug tracking using Launchpad. (Via Jorge Castro.)
17 February 2010
Simple Rules for De-Fatting Myself
I've got to lose weight. Working from home and the sweeties that line the red bar in the kitchen 6 feet from my desk are killing me. I can't do diets. So here are my simple principals for de-fatting myself that I plan to stick to for the next 3 months to see if it makes a difference.
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YouTube - Sherman Alexie at ACRL Seattle 2009
I discovered Sherman Alexie in an undergrad American lit class when I was in college. His fiction has something of the same spirit as this reading of "My Sharona." Via Boing Boing.
16 February 2010
Websites Don't Release Anything
A couple weeks ago I was in London for a Launchpad team leads sprint. There were lots of cool discussions, focused mostly on processes within Launchpad. Because of all this process talk, we ended up talking about our release process a fair amount. I had some ideas forming before this, but a week's worth of discussion helped cement my thinking about "releases" for websites. Now some two weeks later, I'm still thinking about this, so here's a quick sketch of what's on my mind.
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12 February 2010
Life Through the Lens of a Machine
Last night I watched Surrogates, which was a fun movie. (Yes, I have kids and watch every movie later than the rest of the movie-going world.) I've also been watching Caprica. Then there's this little film called Avatar, which it seems the entire world has seen. As I finished watching Surrogates last night, I was struck by how much I'm seeing similar themes in sci-fi films and tv shows lately. These stories deal with people living their lives virtually through some intermediary -- an avatar in a virtual world, a robot, or a life-like robotic avatar, and so on. I suspect this will become even more common as time passes.
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11 February 2010
An introduction to collaborative development with Launchpad
Ryan Paul has a nice write up on Launchpad, focusing on particular elements that make Launchpad unique for collaborative development. Being that I work on the bugs app in Launchpad, I particularly like that he favors Launchpad to Github because of Launchpad's better tools for managing bugs.
8 February 2010
Book review -- JavaScript: The Good Parts
Anyone doing a lot of JavaScript development would benefit from reading this book. [...]
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