Thoughts by Ted

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem.

This wasn’t one of the things we were explicitly engineering for when were designing the features that would go into ext4, but one of the things which we’ve found as a pleasant surprise is how much more quickly ext4 filesystems can be checked. Ric Wheeler reported some really good fsck times that were over ten times better than ext3 using filesystems generated using what was admittedly a very artificial/synthetic benchmark.

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem.  So far so good!  So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet.  I will be doing backups a bit more frequently until I’m absolutely sure things are rock solid, though!

Pity poor Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. He gave a talk at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, where according to ZDnet, he lectured Open Source Developers that they needed to learn why DRM and other closed technologies were necessary, because of business issues such as subsidized (device) business models.

Andrew Binstock interviewed Donald Knuth recently, and one of the more amusing tidbits was this:

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

More seriously, I found his comments about about multi-core computers to be very interesting:

There’s been some controversy generated over my use of the terminology of “Organic” and “Non-Organic” Open Source. Asa Dotzler noted that it wasn’t Mozilla’s original intent to “make a distinction between how Mozilla does open source and how others do open source”.

The Open Source Commands

Really good ideas that companies should take to heart.

Brian Aker dropped by and replied to my previous essay by making the following comment:

I believe you are hitting the nail on the “organic” vs “nonorganic” open source. I do not believe we have a model for going from one to the other. Linux and Apache both have very different models for contribution… but I don’t believe either are really optimized at this point.

Optimization to me would lead to a system of “less priests” and more inclusion.

I was recently checking to see what, if any follow-up there had been from Sun’s ham-handed handling of the Open Solaris Trademark, and I ran across this very interesting comment from John Plocher’s Candidate Statement for the Open Solaris Governing Board:

This morning, I just wasted two hours of my life trying to deal with a bill with AT&T. I am a work-at-home employee, and my company has a contract with AT&T so that when I deal 1-700-xxx-xxxx, I can reach the internal corporate phone network. In addition, long distance calls on my home office line are billed to the company at the pre-negotiated corporate rates. I also had a (long-dormant) AT&T long distance account, dating from before I started working at this company. Starting at the beginning of the year, that account grew a $18 monthly fee.

Although I lot of people have been lauding the Kindle, I recently decided to go with the Sony PRS-505 instead. Yes, the Kindle has built-in EVDO access, and the ability to buy books without a computer, or even browse the web; and yes, the Sony has once again demonstrated it can’t create a compelling 21st century computer application to save its life. However, it had a few things that at least for me, made a better choice for me than the Kindle: