Striving for greatness

There’s an article (registration required) in the NY Times on compromise in politics, and its decline.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to compromise in modern politics, Mr. Remini and other historians said, is the absence of a leader with the gift for compromise and the determination to make it happen.

Although that article says the driving force against compromise in politics is religion, it’s worth thinking about parallels in open source. Why don’t we compromise?

Very cool post from Rich Burridge on Planet Sun about it.

To whet your appetite:

Using this approach, I’m still able to use today a calcalator program that was originally written in 1987. It’s seen numerous toolkits (SunView, X11, NeWS, XView, Motif, MGR, Gtk+ and even a curses version) …

Very cool LWN article (subscribers only, this week) about XMMS2 and its client-server architecture. The Python and Ruby bindings sound particularly cool.

I started working my way through all the X bugs backwards tonight, marking fixed, upstream, needinfo, etc. Got from ~95000 to ~65000, which is roughly half the open X bugs. We stand at 126 open bugs now, compared with about 200 last week.

Anyone know of some nice blogs talking about technology and/or intellectual property, particularly as they relate to open source?

So far I’ve found Lawrence Lessig, William Patry and a conglomerate called rethink(ip). I really wish Lawrence Rosen had one; if he does, I can’t find it.

I also found EEJD, which is occasionally relevant, and a potentially interesting one called IP::JUR, and IPcentral by The Progress and Freedom Foundation, and Dennis Kennedy.

I spent some time today fixing science and cluster bugs. If it’s anything in either of those herds that I touch, it’s probably fixed: lam-mpi, pvm, pssh, clusterssh, mpqc, opendx, moldy, grace, gnuplot, pdflib … plus a couple of X things.

Grant, hope you don’t mind that I added a patch to gnuplot. Some guy filed a bug saying it didn’t compile against pdflib 6.0, which wasn’t even in the tree. That motivated me to go dig out the patch and to add the new version of pdflib. As a result of pdflib 6.0, I also had to bump grace to a version that worked with it.

Good question. I saw this on O’Reilly’s Radar, which is a collection of blogs well worth reading.

Mark McLoughlin wrote an awesome Evo plugin to clean out bugzilla email for resolved bugs.

But it won’t build yet on Gentoo apparently, according to the comments, because some headers aren’t installed.

In other news, I threw in a bunch of xorg updates last night. So if you’ve been waiting for something, it might be done.

Bug cartoons.