Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I'm way too tired to write something longer than a few lines right now, but before I go to bed, here's a quote by Sean McGrath which Made My Day™:

Emacs is like a laser guided missile. It only has to be slight mis-configured to ruin your whole day.

Yes, I use vim. Yes, I always put on my asbestos underwear at night.

(via the law of averages)

The Bryght guys (a bunch of very competent Drupal developers) seem to have a lot of fun while coding...

A lot of hype is going on lately about OpenSolaris. Here's a short summary (mixed with some stupid comments from me) for those who missed the news until now.

• Although the license (the CDDL) has been OSI-approved, it's not exactly a license I'd consider free. It's especially not GPL-compatible, it seems.
• The usual grep "idiot" * in the source code and similar searches (which do reveal some hits, although the code was cleaned before the release), are being discussed on Slashdot and elsewhere. My personal favourite is this comment in the code:
  Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.
  Bad luck for this guy.
  Lessons learned: Always write your code and comments as if the whole world could read them, because one day that might be the case.
• Jörg Schilling is preparing SchilliX, an OpenSolaris distribution and LiveCD.
• A small analysis of the code, performed by me using David Wheeler's sloccount:
  The whole source contains ca. 4.1 million lines of code (MLOC), spread across ca. 24.000 files. (OpenSolaris ships with a complete Perl distribution in the tarball. I removed that before the analysis).
  Compare this to Linux: ca. 4.2 MLOC (Linux 2.6.11.10) in 18.000 files.
• Rumours about a Debian GNU/OpenSolaris seem to float around. The license might be a problem, I guess. We'll see...

Update: The above quote is from the GRUB source code (included in OpenSolaris), not from the original OpenSolaris code. Thanks for the corrections. Also, Linux has 4.2 MLOC, not 4.2 LOC (yay, I spotted that one myself ;-).

# apt-get update && apt-get install cowsay

# cowsay "Cowsay is a pretty funny program. I mean,
it generates talking cows -- how could it get any cooler?"
 ________________________________________
/ Cowsay is a pretty funny program. I    \
| mean, it generates talking cows -- how |
\ could it get any cooler?               /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

# cowsay -p "OK. A paranoid cow would be cooler."
 _____________________________________
< OK. A paranoid cow would be cooler. >
 -------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (@@)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

# cowsay -f bunny "Did you know there's lots of other animals
you can draw with cowsay? Have a look at /usr/share/cowsay/cows
and use the -f option. There are even web frontends and a Wikipedia
article for cowsay..."
 ________________________________________
/ Did you know there's lots of other     \
| animals you can draw with cowsay? Have |
| a look at /usr/share/cowsay/cows and   |
| use the -f option. There are even web  |
| frontends and a Wikipedia article for  |
\ cowsay...                              /
 ----------------------------------------
  \
   \   \
        \ /\
        ( )
      .( o ).

# cowsay -f dragon-and-cow 'OK sucker, now stop drawing cows and get some work done!'
 ______________________________________
/ OK sucker, now stop drawing cows and \
\ get some work done!                  /
 --------------------------------------
                       \                    ^    /^
                        \                  / \  // \
                         \   |\___/|      /   \//  .\
                          \  /O  O  \__  /    //  | \ \           *----*
                            /     /  \/_/    //   |  \  \          \   |
                            @___@`    \/_   //    |   \   \         \/\ \
                           0/0/|       \/_ //     |    \    \         \  \
                       0/0/0/0/|        \///      |     \     \       |  |
                    0/0/0/0/0/_|_ /   (  //       |      \     _\     |  /
                 0/0/0/0/0/0/`/,_ _ _/  ) ; -.    |    _ _\.-~       /   /
                             ,-}        _      *-.|.-~-.           .~    ~
            \     \__/        `/\      /                 ~-. _ .-~      /
             \____(oo)           *.   }            {                   /
             (    (--)          .----~-.\        \-`                 .~
             //__\\  \__ Ack!   ///.----..<        \             _ -~
            //    \\               ///-._ _ _ _ _ _ _{^ - - - - ~

Hm, how about writing server passwords on a whiteboard and then releasing marketing brochures with photos of that whiteboard? Great idea...

(via A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator)