So after spending around 16 hours (and writing about 700 lines of original code) on Saturday preparing an entry for The Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest, I thought I'd share my notes and some thoughts. A chunk of this is Python specific. (see this thread for metrics of entries using …

I recently read an interesting interview with Linus. While I would recommend reading the whole interview, here are some highlights that tend to support some ideas I've been throwing around on my blog.

Open source programs have clearly made some great advances in the past few years. We've seen it …

I attended the BayPiggies meeting where Drew Perttula talked about his lighting system, light9 tonight.

The crowd was a little smaller since there was no free dinner, but there was a pretty good turnout. What a small world, Drew works two buildings away from SpikeSource at PDI, and I play …

Previously I've blogged about Safari's fork of KHTML and the expertise of Apple's browser developers. With the recent news of Konqueror becoming ACID2 compliant, I yearned for more info.

I just conducted an interview with Ivor Hewitt and Allan (carewolf), the developers who merged in Apple's recent ACID2 changes into …

Not quite sure how to react to this. The only reason for the "switch" as I understand from reading the keynote is a speed bump. Since MacOSX will only run on Apple sanctioned x86 hardware, is there really a difference if it is not ppc inside? There "shouldn't" be a …

I attended a discussion by Peter Yared, CEO of Active Grid sponsored by SDForum tonight.

It looks like he has a pretty revolutionary vision of app servers (the java folks might be a little disappointed). Among current IT folks there is a groundswell of support for using LAMP (Linux Apache …

I just saw Revenge of the Sith (yeah I'm a little slow). All in all, I thought it was pretty good. Just have to say (and it's been said before) it's a good thing r2d2 is such a good hacker.

That little guy can fix spaceships in flight, attack others …

It appears that Google has a new way of recruiting, paying students to become open source developers.

I'm thinking about this Summer of Code thing and the only reason I can think of for doing it (other than not being evil and maitaining geek karma) is for recruiting. If google …

For those interested in testing and Open Source, my employer (SpikeSource) is throwing a TestFest on June 17th at our offices in Redwood City, CA. Our Test Upload Service allows you to test your code (open or closed source) against various platforms. Come eat our food, drink our drinks, try …

[forgive the lack of charts, my blogging service is in the middle of an upgrade] I've been thinking about another driver of features in Open Source software given the recent noise surrounding the harmony project.

I'll get back to harmony in a minute. First let's examine another Open Source java …