September 28, 2007
General
5 Comments
Thanks for all the comments – it appears the 3 first hours were the worst, and I only ended up with around 3000 bounces to handle, plus a few stragglers now. It’s a pity, because now libregraphicsmeeting is going to be on every spam blacklist for a few months. But it appears it was a smallish spam run in the end.
For info, removing the MX record from the zone file didn’t take – not sure why, I’ll have to ask Verio about that. So for now the only thing I’m going to do is suck it up, and hope it doesn’t happen again.
September 27, 2007
General
18 Comments
It started about an hour ago, and I have now deleted 1500 bounce notifications which I’m receiving because some spammer is spoofing email addresses in a domain I own.
They’re coming in at a steady flow of about 50 a minute, and I’d really really like to make it stop. Anyone give me any hints? If I delete the MX record for the domain (there are no emails going there), will that do?
September 24, 2007
General, running
1 Comment
Yesterday I ran the Lyon half-marathon. I was a bit disappointed with the organisation – lack of signposting at the start, and kilometre markers that were all over the place (I passed 1km at 5:50, and 2km at 8:30!). It makes it a bit hard to correct your pace if you’re going too fast or too slow.
There were the usual problems of a mass start – it took me about 1500m to see some air and start running at my rhythm. The problem was that I ended up running faster than I wanted to (around 4:15/4:20 per km) – and payed for it in the last 10km. Usually at the end of a race I have a bit of energy to accelerate & finish the last 2km pretty fast, yesterday I had to convince myself a few times to keep running in the last 5km.
Anyway – pleased with the time (1:36) and I’m on course for a sub-1:35 Marseille-Cassis next month.
September 19, 2007
General
No Comments
I’m in Madrid this week for Open Source in Mobile – -it’s a decent CIO-type conference, and companies working with free software are well represented.
I gave a presentation yesterday on how to reconcile having a commercial team of developers working on your software, while trying to build a community. The major lesson is “be transparent, and let the community have control. And don’t forget that the community includes you.”
And that point – letting control go – *really* scares people around here. Because when people think of that, they’re thinking “I’m going to have to ship code I don’t want to on my devices”. That’s a non-sequitur, but it’s perhaps not easy to see why.
No-one can force you to ship code you don’t want to, or not to do work which is essential for your business. But when you are community building, you have to stop thinking of the project as your project.
What you need to do instead is have your development team engage (as individuals) the community to make sure that your voice is heard for the community roadmap. It’s entirely likely that the community leader will be someone working for you.
The code you ship can have a delta with that reference code that the community maintains. Sometimes your patches will be rejected, or you’ll have to remove things you don’t want. The whole point is to move the burden of maintaining that delta from the community (“It’s our code, but feel free to maintain a branch”) to you “You’re the bosses – but for reason X, we need to ship something different”).
It’s all about making sure that community members feel ownership of the project. If any of the things you do erode that, you’re damaging that community and preventing it from growing.
September 13, 2007
General
4 Comments
It is environmentally friendly, compared to a nuclear bomb
What a recommendation for Russia’s newest monstrosity…
September 12, 2007
General
5 Comments
What have I been doing for all these years? What is GNOME? What is the WengoPhone?
Hugh McLeod says that the trick to marketing is to have something so cool, you’d want to talk about it *even* if you weren’t in the business…. Seth Godin encourages us to create a purple cow – something unique, and thus remarkable.
GNOME is a graphical desktop environment.
The WengoPhone is a softphone you can use to make free video calls and cheap phonecalls.
Yawn.
So now I’m wondering – when I’m talking to someone, what is the *really* cool thing about these projects – so cool it makes my eyes twinkle with enthusiasm when describing it (and no, that’s not the alcohol), so cool that people’s ears prick up and they want to hear more?
September 12, 2007
General
2 Comments
An intern in Wengo, Maxime Gaffé, is working on putting in place unit testing frameworks for the WengoPhone. I’d like to test all levels of the application, from sound & video support, low-level APIs, and application internals up to the GUI.
We’ve got something of a dilemma, however. We’d like to have a tool to automate GUI tests which is cross-platform, and which integrates well with QT (that rules out Dogtail or LDTP) – the most promising option we’ve seen so far is squish – a commercial GUI testing application.
I’m interested in hearing about others, because Squish isn’t free, and I don’t want to depend (even optionally) on a commercial tool to allow people to run unit tests on the application.
Any suggestions?
September 10, 2007
General
1 Comment
After complaining about never getting tagged by memes, I found out that I totally missed one from Ken Guest a few weeks ago. It seems reasonably worthwhile to give link karma to charities, so here goes.
The list is getting a bit long, so I’m going to break the chain, and not name anyone. Boo, hiss.
The list of charities so far is:
