this week i

published on the stability of the privatized medicare market.  stackoverflow auto-removes a leading hi when posting an answer

enjoyed at the kennedy center the national ballet of ukraine with special guests shumka, an evening with david sedaris

watched an elephant die in american experience s3e14 coney island, a jeopardy contestant pronounce honduras capital gucci at 2nd & 3rd syllables

first understood own mortality in childhood learning sun eventually engulfs earth, my father attempted calm: don't worry, you'll be long gone by then

drew one of the ceramic arts featured at the izmir history and art museum, then the matryoshkats. canada lynx a challenging feline to sketch out



 

read the cathedral & the bazaar: musings on linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary by eric s. raymond

linus torvalds..lazy like a fox

debugging is parallelizable

i sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever i released, encouraging people to participate

 how ants find food: exploration by diffusion, followed by exploitation mediated by a scalable communication mechanism

to make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill charming people

joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets..it is no mere joke that the linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin

the side with the least invested loses.  interestingly this happens to be the same heuristic that many relational database engines resolve deadlocks.  when two threads are deadlocked over resources, the side with the least invested in the current transaction is selected as the deadlock victim and is terminated

the number of contributors (and, at second order, the success of) projects is strongly and inversely correlated with the number of hoops each project makes a user go through to contribute

there is a very strong social pressure against forking, for good reasons.  nobody wants to be on a picket line, in court, or in a firefight either.  but the right to fork is like the right to strike, the right to sue, or the right to bear arms - you don't want to have to exercise any of these rights, but it's a signal of serious danger when anyone tries to take them away

the full source for doom was released in late 1997

open-source firms hire star hackers for much the same reasons that universities hire star academics.  in both cases, the practice is similar in mechanism and effect to the system of aristocratic patronage that funded most fine art until after the industrial revolution

in an economy rapidly becoming more complex and information-centered, there will always be plenty of work and a healthy demand for people who can make computers do things - no matter how much time and how many secrets they give away

a rather large plastic penguin, booming out "may the source be with you!"

 microsoft tax

10/17