links for 2007-10-17

October 17, 2007 General No Comments

links for 2007-10-16

October 16, 2007 General 4 Comments

links for 2007-10-15

October 15, 2007 General No Comments

In Rainbows

October 12, 2007 General 4 Comments

So, after paying for “In Rainbows”, the new Radiohead album, yesterday (I decided that £3 was a nice compromise between paying cost & encouraging the effort), the burning question was: is it any good?

I’ve never been a huge Radiohead fan. I liked “OK Computer” and “The Bends”, but then again, “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” passed me by completely (probably because of their total absence from the airwaves). So I did what I figured was best for a Radiohead album, put it on at work today on repeat.

And after 3 or 4 listenings, I can say: it’s great working music. Atmospheric, slightly hypnotic, there when you want to listen to it, fading to the background when you’re concentrating on other things.

I like it. It’s not aggressive overwhelming rock, it’s not *trying* to be experimental navel-gazing (which is one thing I was afraid of), and there are some cracking songs on there. All in all, a good listen. And well worth 3 quid.

GStreamer, Fluendo and Collabora

October 8, 2007 General, maemo 3 Comments

I tagged an announcement by Collabora that they were hiring Christian, Edward and Wim from GStreamer, formerly of Fluendo, with the comment “Is this how Free Software acquisitions work?”

That got some response in the comments, and especially from Julien Moutte, CEO of Fluendo.

First, let me say that I wish the project well. I’m convinced that GStreamer is a core part of Collabora’s activity, and that GStreamer consultancy will make up a decent chunk of revenue for them. I also expect that Fluendo will continue to invest in a core technology that they depend on for their growing range of products, and that others depending on GStreamer such as Nokia will continue to support and encourage its development.

Julien confirms that Fluendo are continuing investment in GStreamer (great!), and affirms that all of a sudden, it’s just become a much more open project, since people are spread across many companies.

I hope that’s the case, but it’s not an automatic consequence of a few people leaving. Project governance is much more complicated than who employs the N most active hackers.

In the past, there has been rumblings that decisions affecting the project were being made in private in Barcelona, and then discovered by the community (see comment on GStreamer design – I remember other similar comments, but can’t find them right now).

GStreamer’s not alone in this – pretty much every project with one primary company sponsor/owner runs into the problem (OOo, Java, Mozilla, Evolution, and yes, even OpenWengo come to mind). The results are that company employees feel frustrated that they’re not getting community traction, and the community is frustrated because they have a feeling the company is looking for cheap labour to implement its agenda, rather than equal partners.

Whether GStreamer in particular becomes a more open project depends, now, on the governance model that is put in place. A model can be informal and ad-hoc, as long as it’s efective. Who gets to say what goes into the main tree? What’s the patch review process? Who are the core developers who can just commit? If those processes aren’t in place, or if one company controls all of the processes, then you will continue to see the kinds of problems which OpenOffice is currently seeing, even if there are many companies and individuals bearing the burden of development.

links for 2007-10-05

October 5, 2007 General 7 Comments

links for 2007-10-04

October 4, 2007 General 1 Comment

links for 2007-10-02

October 2, 2007 General No Comments

Thanks for all your comments!

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.

Spam flood

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?

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