Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:03:00 GMT
Just a quick note to all the wonderful Perlfolk who are eagerly
awaiting news of YAPC|10. (That’s the 10th-anniversary Yet Another
Perl Conference, to be held June 22-24, 2009, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it all
started back in 1999.) Ahem:
Your beloved organizers have been hard at work and will be making
some announcements shortly. Stay tuned to yapc10 on
twitter for the latest and greatest.
Until then, don’t worry: be cool. When it comes to conference
planning, we’re a little less conversation, a little more action.
That’s just how we roll.
Hugs and kisses,
Tom
Tag: YAPC::NA::2009
Posted in perl
Tags elvis, perl, pittsburgh, yapc, yapc10
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:45:00 GMT
After reading about the ordeal a paying customer went through attempting to
get Adobe to fix a simple
mistake, I
was reminded of why I lost my faith in proprietary software. After a
bad experience reinstalling
Win2k, it
dawned upon me that software vendors could waste my time, make me jump
through hoops, and sell me barely functional crap, and all I could do,
as a paying customer with a valid license, was take it.
This poor guy, for example, ordered a Mac OS X version of Flash CS3
and got sent a Windows version by mistake. Not his fault. But he’s
the guy who ended up wasting weeks fighting Adobe’s ineffective
customer support trying to get what he paid for in the first place.
This guy is a paying customer. He paid for that treatment.
Look, folks, the world of open source isn’t perfect, but it’s better
than that. Since dumping Windows for Linux, here’s how much
time I’ve wasted on stupid vendor hoop-jumping: None. Nada. Zero.
In the world of open source, you never have to worry about getting
stuck with the wrong version of software. That’s because you are
always free to download the right version. No need to ask for vendor
approval, fax in your “Letter of Destruction”, or wait for an
activation code. You just type in “yum install whatever”, the software installs, and you go back to work. That’s it.
Until I switched to the open-source lifestyle, I never realized how
much time (and blood and sweat) I had wasted on the side effects of
proprietary software. If you’re still in the proprietary world, take
a moment to consider how much time you have wasted and how much time
you will waste in the next few years on stupid vendor crap. Maybe
it’s time to stop jumping through hoops. Maybe it’s worth your while
to give open source a shot.
Go ahead, grab a Fedora Live
CD and test drive it for a few
days. What have you got to lose but a world of hurt?
Posted in rants
Tags adobe, fedora, freedom, linux, proprietary
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:22:00 GMT
Do you use Emacs? Do you use Git? If so, check out Magit, a delightful Emacs
mode that provides a convenient interface to working with Git. Unlike
many VCS modes, Magit is fully Git-centric: It understands the Git
way of branching, staging, committing, history-rewriting, tagging,
merging, pushing and pulling. It even knows about the reflog and has
some git-svn support.
If you’re a Fedora user,
just install the emacs-magit package. The package is currently in
testing, so install it with the following command:
$ sudo yum --enablereo=updates-testing install emacs-magit
One more thing, Fedora users: please don’t forget to provide
feedback on the package. It’s easy:
- Just visit the emacs-magit page in Bodhi
- Click on the package you installed (e.g., the Fedora 9 or 10 flavor)
- Add a comment, selecting “Works for me” or “Does not work” as appropriate
Hack on!
Posted in programming
Tags emacs, fedora, git, magit
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