Brief items

In fact, the introduction of "rich" email formats — in particular HTML email with its pretty fonts, animated icons, and wide array of extraneous adornments — can be reasonably viewed as the key "innovations" that led directly to the modern scourge of spam, phishing attacks, and a wide variety of other email-delivered criminal payloads that routinely ruin innumerable innocent lives.

Guri and his fellow Ben-Gurion researchers have shown, for instance, that it's possible to trick a fully offline computer into leaking data to another nearby device via the noise its internal fan generates, by changing air temperatures in patterns that the receiving computer can detect with thermal sensors, or even by blinking out a stream of information from a computer hard drive LED to the camera on a quadcopter drone hovering outside a nearby window. In new research published today, the Ben-Gurion team has even shown that they can pull data off a computer protected by not only an air gap, but also a Faraday cage designed to block all radio signals.

Smart coffee was also a world of hell. The Brewgenie Smart Coffeemaker I ordered first was "smart" in that it had Bluetooth connectivity, so I could use its custom app on my phone to make it run a pot of coffee, but it wasn't compatible with Echo, so I couldn't say, "Alexa, make me coffee." To remedy this, I ordered the Behmor Connected Customizable Temperature Control Coffee Maker which promised Alexa compatibility. I came to regret this while setting up my Eight Sleep Tracker—a sensor layer that went over my mattress that could track sleep, warm the bed, and connect to "any wifi-enabled device in your house." Its instruction manual, along with dire warnings about possibly setting my bed on fire, informed me that it could automatically brew me coffee when it sensed I was waking up ... but only if I had a WeMo coffeemaker.

I refused to order a third coffee maker for my smart home.

I made do with the Behmor, which makes incredible coffee but had a prickly relationship with Alexa. Each morning, my husband and I begged Alexa to put the coffee on. She would only react to a very specific phrasing of the request and then would only do so sometimes.

Today I debugged an early ENOSPC problem without even adding a printk. The future feels weird.

When I first started on freedreno, qcom support for upstream kernel was pretty dire (ie. I think serial console support might have worked on some ancient SoC). When I started, the only kernel that I could use to get the gpu running was old downstream msm android kernels (initially 2.6.35, and on later boards 3.4 and 3.10). [...] Linaro and qcom have been working quietly in the background to upstream all the various drivers that something like drm/msm depend on to work (clk, genpd, gpio, i2c, and other lower level platform support). This is awesome to see, and the linaro/qcom developers behind this progress deserve all the thanks. Without much fanfare, snapdragon has gone from a hopeless case (from upstream perspective) to one of the better supported platforms!

It is quite common for Debian-based distributions to feature their own tools and packages which do not exist in the official Debian repositories. It seems there is either a barrier or a lack of motivation for developers working on Debian-based projects to get their software included in Debian itself. Which is a shame, because Debian has a lot of children, over 100 active distributions at the time of writing. While all these children use the same package formats, libraries and package managers, they are often prevented from using software developed by their sibling projects.

I suspect part of the problem is developers are already busy enough working on their own software and do not feel they have time to upload their packages to Debian. Perhaps there is not much motivation either. Developers make software for their distribution's users and probably do not see much benefit in spreading their work to other Debian-based projects. There may even be a sense of friendly competition between sibling projects which reduces the motivation to share packages.

Another hurdle to sharing packages though is, I think, the process involved in getting software into Debian's official repositories.

Given that part of our intended audience is geeks, and part of our intention is to attract fresh talent, I'd say it would be fully professional of us to fill a conference booth with cool and crazy, sci-fi / "Inspector Gadget" like Gentoo related stuff. (Has anyone ever tried installing Gentoo on a Dalek?)

Automating all generation and updating of runtime and build time [dependencies] would be a good thing to have. Not an easy thing to achieve, of course.

I, for one, would welcome a general AI for automating this. Skynet is worth it if we can get versioned dependencies right every time.

It took 4 long years and to keep community momentum going we had to release even if we did say it would eat your babies.

When it comes to making money, software developers are an odd bunch. Developers produce code, and code is in high demand. At a glance, it seems obvious that this work pays for itself.

But when a developer produces code of their own choosing, they quickly find that while their code-writing skills have market value, their output (the code they write) has none.