Happy bear...

Thanks to the efforts of the amazing hvideo, I now have in my hot little hands a DVD of my concert at Baycon. See Bear doing happy dance.

I note in passing that this DVD contains the only known recording so far of me and cflute doing "Ship of Stone" together; I will be extracting the audio fairly soon, since I have Don Simpson's permission to post it on my web site.

Somebody (else) is going to be very happy at a future Interfilk auction.

Album covers

Over the last couple of days the subject of album artwork has come up. I have heard rumors of artists scheming behind my back. Since this is a fairly specialized topic, I'm putting it over in mdlbear_albums, in this post. There's also a little speculation about the next couple of albums. Comments, suggestions, etc. welcome.

Penguins on the phone

Mobile technology companies plan joint Linux platform (Ars Technica)

A group of mobile phone companies including Vodafone, DoCoMo, Motorola, Samsung NEC, and Panasonic, have announced plans to collaboratively develop an open, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. In an attempt to decrease market fragmentation, benefit from community involvement, and avoid the high costs associated with proprietary mobile software solutions, the prominent mobile technology companies hope to facilitate the construction of a complete platform for mobile software development including an API specification, a complete reference implementation, and a comprehensive set of associated development tools.

QOTD

mdlbear: I'm out of my mind; please leave a message.

chaoswolf: I just did: it's on Livejournal.

Why M$ Vista is late

This blog entry by a Microsoft insider goes partway toward explaining just what's broken about Microsoft's development process. Good summary, minus the annoying boldface-every-other-word typography, here at the Inq.

After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team's key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don't-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they're actually great project managers. They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to "figure out how to make it work." The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy -- and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. "You're smart people. Find a way!" This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. "Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss."

Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.

Nicely put, but I don't think he really grasps the whole problem. This is shown by his assertion that Vista is "the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully." He's wrong on the first count -- Debian is bigger -- and probably on the second as well. In any case, communities such as the Linux and Apache communities solve those problems spectacularly well on a regular basis.

Linux in the embedded market -- status and trends

Here are two articles at LinuxDevices.com, discussing the recent CMP survey (June) and their own survey (May). The first shows Linux adoption declining slightly, the second shows it leveling off but still increasing. As they say, "The divergence between CMP's and LinuxDevices.com's results likely reflect biases built into each survey's respondent pools."

Both surveys show Linux to be by far the most popular embedded OS, with somewhere between 28% (CMP) and 47% (LD) of design-ins. The increasing use of Linux in cell phones isn't going to hurt its numbers, either.