Insights into the Hacker Worldview

From David Miller, one of the most senior kernel hackers, comes this little story:

Say you've been doing nothing for the past few weeks except looking for a real nasty and hard to trigger bug. You think you're getting close and the one piece of debugging information is just around the corner, perheps the next build or the one after that will spit out the debugging message you need to find the bug. All the rest of your work is being blocked by this problem, you have to fix it.

You've been drinking coffee all day, and guzzling water as well.

So now you have to go REALLY BAD, you're about to pee your pants. What do you do? Do you go to the toilet and take care of things or you cross your legs as hard as humanly possible thinking "just one more build, just one more" for the next half hour?

If you're one of the ones who would go to the toilet you're not a programmer.

Fireproofing Firefox

There are already lots of good reasons to use Firefox - the fact that it is more stable, more compliant with Web standards and just more fun to use. But add one more: according to this report, Firefox code is now being vetted for bugs automatically:

The company has licensed Coverity's Prevent to scan the source code of the browser and help detect flaws in the software before its release, Ben Chelf, chief technology officer at Coverity said Thursday. Coverity and Mozilla plan to jointly announce the arrangement on Monday, he said.

Even though the announcement isn't coming until Monday, Mozilla actually licensed the Coverity tool about a year and a half ago, Chelf said. The companies held off on the announcement until Mozilla felt comfortable with the product and it actually yielded some results, he said.

A year and a half ago? Now that's what I call circumspection.

More Ineffable Microsoft FUD

It's always fun to track Microsoft's latest contortions when it comes to open source. I've described its past efforts elsewhere, and here's the latest:

Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model.

Rather below par, I'd say: Microsoft reliable, dependable? As in reliably bug-ridden and dependably vulnerable to viruses?