January 2007

I see far too much writing on the web using “--” instead of “—”. Most software out there now copes quite happily with UTF-8, so there's no technical reason not to use the “EM DASH” glyph. Actually, I lie, it's less convenient because most keyboards don't have a “—” key, but do have a “-” key. In vim, you can use the “-M” digraph, and in GNOME I find the Character Palette panel applet nearly as handy. Or in HTML-land just use “—” if you prefer.

So, this is a public service announcement: use a real em dash, not the ugly double hyphen. Thank you.

Unicode: it's not just for non-English speakers, it's for punctuation pedants too!

Linux.conf.au is huge this year. Much much larger than last time it was in Sydney. As usual, many of the highlights so far have been meeting and talking to people, rather than the talks.

I've spent most of today at the GNOME miniconf, but I think tomorrow the Gaming miniconf is looking surprisingly interesting...

The best talk I've seen (so far) today was FOSS License for Content Developers (plus the panel that followed). It was a bit unsatisfying in that there were no easy answers, but thought-provoking too. Translating software freedoms we're used to to other kinds of works turns out to be quite challenging. What is “the preferred form” (that the GPL requires) of a sound effect in a game that was generated by tweaking a soft synthesiser, then post-processed in a wave editor? It seems that people are hoping that Creative Commons 3.0 licences will provide a tolerable answer for Free but practical (and GPL-compatible) licensing for content.

The gaming miniconf has been extremely popular. I wonder how many other people thought like me that it was just an excuse for a LAN party (and thus uninteresting) until they saw the program? Reminds me a little of a talk I saw at the main programme in 2001 (Martin's talk about rproxy, or perhaps Wichert's talk about Debian packaging? I forget) — standing room only. Rusty just finished his talk about hacking on Wesnoth, and despite the organisers moving it to a room at least twice the size, it was just as packed.

The main part of the conference started today. Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's keynote was excellent — I found myself involved in several conversations about it over the course of the day, a sure sign that he's provoked some thought. In his opinion computers fail ridiculously often compared to many other everyday objects like TVs and cars, and we ought to be striving for zero “lifetime failures” for the average computer (just as the average TV never fails). He then described a fault-tolerant operating system design, basically keeping as many drivers in user space as possible, and simply restarting them when they fall over. There's a performance penalty, but he argues that the improved reliability is definitely worth the cost. It can't cope with all possible faults, but it sounds like it could probably recover from a significant fraction of them, so perhaps it would be worth the effort. Oh, and he encouraged people to take a look at Minix, of course.

Jonathan Corbet's Kernel Report was fairly interesting. I think I would have found it much more interesting if I hadn't been regularly reading LWN's kernel page every week, but even though I'd read about most of it before it was an enjoyable overview.

Dave Airlie's Nouveau talk was interesting, it was a project I'd heard of but actually knew very little about. In brief: they're doing some very clever things to reverse engineer the driver, but don't expect it to be ready any time soon (alpha quality by the end of 2007 is the current plan).

I actually got a chance to ride around on Geoffrey Bennett's Open Source Segway™ yesterday, but was still enjoyed his talk about it today. I'm not really an electronics geek, but the fact that he could monitor the readings from the components with a cute GTK app (via bluetooth) was very nifty. Even more nifty was that he was casually tuning the settings of the controller on the fly from the same simple GTK app. His description of the development and testing process for it was quite similar to the way software that is built from scratch is developed and tested, although I've never had to worry about my software throwing me off and then running me over if I screw it up.

I'm glad the organisers programmed a break between each session, so that people have time to move to a different room for the next talk, and perhaps strecth their legs. OSDC would have benefitted from this. I just wish that the organisers were stricter about making sure speakers actually finish on time so that the breaks don't evaporate.