Julien Danjou recently posted a thought-provoking rant about GitHub’s pull request workflow implementation. His main point is essentially that Gerrit provides a more sophisticated review system. Of course I’m not going to disagree with that 😉
I am generally a big fan of Julien’s work and I’m very excited for the future of OpenStack Ceilometer of which he is the current PTL. However, in this case I think his views are understandably biased towards review workflows on very large projects like OpenStack, and I found the length of the rant slightly disproportionate to the actual substance of the points made within it. Somewhat ironically, AFAICS his blog’s own review process could use some improvement due to comments currently being disabled 😉 So here are my thoughts.
Disclaimer: currently I use GitHub for reviews more regularly than Gerrit, so my views are likely to be biased at least as much as Julien’s, but in the opposite direction 😉
Continue reading 'in partial defense of GitHub’s review system'»
UPDATE 26/02/2013: Daniel has replied to this post, and I have replied to his reply.
As George Santayana famously said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. In light of recent news regarding music notation software, I would add with some disappointment and frustration that those who choose to ignore the past are also condemned to repeat it.
For those of you who don’t already know, Sibelius is a proprietary software product for music notation which has for many years been one of the most popular choices for professional musicians and composers. For many of the more experienced customers in the technology industry who have already been burned in the past, a heavy reliance on a single technology is enough to trigger alarm bells – what if the company providing that technology goes bust, or decides to change direction and cease work on it, or simply does an awful job (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) of maintaining and supporting that technology? Then you’re up a certain creek without the proverbial paddle.
In the IT industry, this is a well-known phenomenon called vendor lock-in. A powerful movement based on Free Software was born in the early eighties to free computer users from this lock-in, and is now used on billions of devices world-wide. You may have never heard of Free Software, but if you own an Android phone or a “broadband” router, or have ever used the Firefox browser or Google Chrome, you have already used it. The vast majority of the largest companies in the world all run Free Software in their datacentres around the world; for example, every time you access Google or Facebook you are (indirectly) using Free Software.
What does any of this have to do with Sibelius? Continue reading 'music industry learns nothing from the Avid / Sibelius saga?'»
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Avid, development, Free Software, FSF, GNU, LilyPond, MuseScore, rants, Sibelius, software
When flying, most cellists are faced with either buying an extra ticket or getting a flight case, paying oversized baggage fees, and praying. Experiences vary widely and are in places well documented and full of useful advice, e.g.
My situation is different because I have a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello which is incredibly robust and generally does not even go out of tune when checked in as normal baggage and placed in the hold of the aircraft in a normal hard case. My case is a Bam Hightech measuring 54.5 × 21 × 13.75″.  It seems virtually all airlines policies regarding oversized baggage operate in “linear” or total dimensions, which generally means by summing up the 3 separate dimensions together (although in some cases the wording is so confused, even that’s not clear).  This means my case has a linear dimension of 89.25″ which unfortunately is outside the 62″ standard limit, and even just outside Delta’s second tier limit of 80″.  Having said that, so far I have always managed to get it treated as normal sized baggage just by behaving exactly as if it was a normal suitcase, or even need be simply by confidently pointing out that the height is 54.5″ which is under 62″. In my experience, most staff at the check-in gate are not familiar with the exact terms in their airline’s policies, so having the right attitude (confidently knowledgeable and up-front but non-confrontational) can go a long way.
I’ve done some research on the policies of some popular airlines and referenced the relevant extracts below, with one section per airline. The quotes I’ve taken are focused mainly on national flights within the USA, because despite being from the UK, I’m currently flying around the USA a lot. However the policies for international flights seem similar, although sometimes with higher fees.
Continue reading 'Flying with a (carbon fibre) cello'»
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