Microsoft loses in Eolas patent ruling | CNET News.com

Come on Microsoft - join us in the fight against software patents. This clearly hurts the entire industry - be it big vendors like yourself or small ones.

Let’s not all get royally screwed.

lathiat: Avahi

Trent has been blogging quite often about Avahi. It does look like a good project to watch. Promises ease of use (for the coder who really doesn’t care about Rendezvous/Bonjour/ZeroConf/whatever-they-call-it-this-week internals and just wants Cool Functionality(tm) in their app).

Maybe integrating this would be cool for mysqld and the gui tools. (i’ve toyed with the thoughts of using it in cluster… but do we relaly want another thing that can possibly fail in a HA environment… probably not - considering using DNS is usually a bad idea).

LKML: Linus Torvalds: Re: [OT]Linus trademarks Linux?!!

thoughts on the trademark and notes about slashdot being a big public wanking session (which is, if nothing else - quite accurrate and quite funny)

An old year-2000 mail about the same stuff

The OSDC CFP site is the most annoying CFP in the entire world. So bloody complicated to go through - really makes you examine if you really wanted to do a talk in the first place.

(a general note on what’s good practice)

In C, 0 is false and !0 is true.

In the dim past there was an elsewhere where 0 was true and !0 was false. Why? Because there can be more than one error state and this is usually more interesting than how many ways success could have been acheived.

Well, that sucks too - there’s information on success that could be useful (e.g. we succeeded, but only n bytes worth instead of the m you asked for).

So, the way of <0 on failure and else success came about for packing the maximum amount of information into the int that we commonly return from functions (and usually fits nicely in a register and it all leads to hugs, puppies and a warm feeling inside).

So what do most people do on error? Return -1.

Hrrmm… this casually (if not totally) defeats the point. In any function that does any real work, there’s going to be more than one place where failure …

When a comment above a function says “returns -1 on error” and the code does the exact oposite (returns -1 anyway except if there was out of memory error, which may be #defined to -1 anyway) it’s a bit annoying when you first look at it.

Remember kids, comments in code are evil. They are wrong - or misleading at best. They only ever say what one person at some point in the past thought they beleived the code did. The definitive record is the code itself.

(there are possible exceptions to this rule… maybe… internals can be good to document - but arguably it should be *away* from the code so that you don’t start thinking the documentation is accurate and up to date - because it’s not).

Well, this review over at ZDnet seems to say that the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noice Cancelling headphones have leather. The suck. Well, that strikes them off my list.

In case you didn’t know, I don’t do the leather thing.

There’s also a disturbing review over at Amazon from a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about (Grado make great ‘phones - mine are supurb).

So, the sound quality may not be all that great (although people rave about the …

Well, I can now sit down and do my tax. Urgh. Not looking forward to it.

Although… I wonder if eTax will work under qemu and wine…. sounds like a lot of trouble, maybe I’ll just do it the paper way until they come to their senses and have an eTax that works on more than win32.

So, aparrently our 7 year heater is really old and we shouldn’t expect much from it.

No, really.

A switch had broken. Again. The same one that was replaced less than two years ago.

So, I ask our Northern European friends - what’s a good brand and model for a natural gas central heater that’s not going to require fixing every year?

Every year our heating breaks. Every darn year. Aparrently the way to get a reliable central heating system is to have one that’s 15 years old. Ours is a bit newer and part of the series of heaters (aparrently all of them) that suffer from the Ministry of Crap Design getting involved (meaning they break every year).

It’s bloody freezing in here. maybe 12 degrees. It’s 10 outside.

Bloody miserable cold winter.

I almost feel like getting in my car where the heater works and working from there (wireless signal should be strong enough).