What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!

Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.

• Christianity
• Cinema
• Computer Games
• Music
• My Life
• Politics
• Random
• Software Development

The above links point to the relevant category. I highly recommend if you read this blog and only some of the above interest you that you subscribe to only the RSS feed for that particular category or categories for your sake and mine.

All that really matters however is that the guy seems to be a really great software engineer and his blog Joel on Software is probably one of the best technical blogs around. Not only does he get into some real technical nitty-gritty sometimes he challenges us younger programmers to be a little more pragmatic and a little less dogmatic about what we believe.

A great example of this appeared in Akregator today (the best RSS feed reader I’ve ever used on any platform) where he weighs in on the recent debate about whether Internet Explorer should ship in “standards-compliant mode” out of the box. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m tending to agree with him that it may well be a bad idea to do so. If you look at the amount of websites that seem to be broken by IE8 then accessing the web will be a pretty horrible experience for its users, which will mean either people still use IE7 or move to Firefox.

It just seems a real shame to me that the IE team, admittedly through past incompetence, has got themselves in a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Ultimately there are a lot of websites that just won’t be rewritten for IE8 so it will be interesting to see what solution they come up with to solve this.

Proprietary or open, algorithmic problems fascinate me but making great software that actually works for “normal people” fascinates me a lot more so I’m intrigued to see how the team will handle this as I believe it is a far harder problem than simply making things go fast or have lots of features.

(For those of you interested in another good software engineering blog I thoroughly recommend Coding Horror, written by a Windows .NET developer but a very good read and is full of language/platform agnostic advice.)

I’m going for my Last.fm top artists and the songs I liked the most at the moment.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones

• Earth Jam
• Scratch and Sniff
• Off The Top
• The Sinister Minister
• Big Country

Neal Morse

• Colder In The Sun
• Sing It High
• Reunion
• The Conclusion
• In The Fire

Spock’s Beard

• At The End Of The Day
• June
• The Light
• Wind At My Back
• She Is Everything

Dream Theater

• Learning To Live
• Metropolis (Part 1)
• Lines In The Sand
• In The Presence Of Enemies (Part 1)
• A Change Of Seasons

Jamiroquai

• Emergency On Planet Earth
• Runaway
• Soul Education
• Canned Heat
• (Don’t) Give Hate A Chance

I tag Gareth, Jonas, Duncan and Thorsten to do the same.

• No, I wasn’t referring specifically to dirk’s blog. There was parts I disagreed with in his post which we have since talked about on IRC but I think he made some good and needed points also. Dirk’s blog was one in which I felt the tone wasn’t great but was did not provoke the post I made, it reminded me of a selection of far less friendly earlier interaction on the Planet since KDE 4.0.0 was released. May I issue a formal and public apology to dirk for the confusion.
• I’m overly touchy about this topic because I’ve seen a major FOSS project that I care about go down the toilet mostly due to (in my observation) snarky blog posts causing a lot of developers to leave.
• I think criticism is necessary and valuable I just think we can all improve our interactions with others; I know I can. I think we should set the bar high on how we seek to treat others online and how we communicate.
• Whilst I agree that it is good that people care enough about the project to get riled up and flame others I don’t think that this is a good outcome, however positive the reasoning behind them may be.

In summary, much was assumed about my post that wasn’t actually my intention and I should have communicated it better. I am intentionally vague about points when I don’t want to criticise individuals but instead general behaviour. If one tiny bit of KDE works a bit better as a result or one relationship within the project is strengthened then I think it has been worth it.

Stay happy folks and apologies again for any offence caused.

If you, as a KDE developer, get annoyed with a KDE feature you didn’t write and feel like blogging about your bad interaction with a part of KDE or a spat with another KDE developer then please don’t. You have every right to do so but it isn’t good for you, it isn’t good for the other developer and it is really bad for KDE.

The problem with a community like KDE doing the majority of their work online is that sometimes we forget basic social rules of interaction. If your blog is on Planet KDE then you are held as a representative of KDE and your blog posts are read by a lot of people. Some of these people are KDE fans, some are other developers and some are journalists. When you publicly insult other people it creates tensions in the community between people.

If there is one thing I have learnt in my (short thusfar) career as a software engineer its that the most important thing for a team to do is get on well and be polite to one another. If I have a serious problem with a coworkers work or behaviour I should privately confront them and explain not only the problem but also how it made me feel. I realise that most FOSS developers are men and most men don’t like talking about their feelings but it is important in resolving conflict that both parties understand why the other feels the way they do. When someone communicates on the internet, unless I’ve hacked their webcam, I can’t tell if they are laughing or crying. You get cues but these are far more subtle than face-to-face or even vocal interaction.

I’ve seen too many FOSS projects destroyed or severly damaged by petty infighting. Please don’t let KDE be another one.

I think KDE needs something like a “Conflict Resolution Manager”. This probably sounds ludicrously stupid but there has to be a better way than flamewars and passive-aggressive blog posts.

I realise this post alone might seem to violate things I’ve said above and for that I’m sorry but I feel the point needed to me made and not just to a few individuals. If anyone wants to call me an idiot, beat me with a stick or let me help them then send me an email, call my mobile or ping me on IRC/IM.

Lets sort this stuff out guys. Be part of the solution, not the problem.

I am, like a lot of people in Europe, strangely attracted to the US primaries and the Democratic race in particular (as it is actually still a race).

Hearing Barrack Obama talk is pretty inspirational and I’m not even vaguely a US citizen. He seems one of the few politicians who seems to truly believe in what he says and Marc Andreessen’s blog has some really good insights into why the man is capturing the hearts of so many of the young voters in the US. Ron Paul was a pretty inspirational guy also and I know the Internet loved him but sadly this doesn’t seem to have actually translated into a huge amount of votes.

Personally, I hope he wins as it would be nice to have a US President with a less aggressive foreign policy.

I leave you with a quote from Marc’s blog that I think is particularly relevant:

[Obama] said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.