Author: Jordi
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SOCIS 2012 students
Octave has acquired two students for the European Space Agency’s Summer of Code In Space. Wendy Liu is a Django enthusiast who will be working on finishing Agora Octave. She is a capable webdev, having already built several successful websites, and she is also no stranger to free software and free development, as she is…
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OctConf 2012 report
OctConf 2012 was a success. Over the course of five days, we had 20 participants involved, and all but two were there for at least four days. Big thanks to the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques who helped us with all of the organising and logistics. The first two days were informational and dedicated to getting…
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Free vs proprietary licenses
The GPL is frequently seen as a “complicated” license, and thus less desirable than the “simpler” BSD-like family of licenses. I have stumbled upon a description of the situation that really bears repeating (I believe the kids nowadays call this “retweeting”). To summarize, the apparent complexity of free licenses only exists because free licenses are…
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Stallman facts in an Octave release
And now for something completely different… I managed to get an easter egg into Octave. I’ve always been a little sad that we are not having enough fun in Octave, so I added some facts about the world’s greatest hacker to the source tree. Just type fact in the Octave interpreter to read them. Giving…
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Make this Bitbucket free
This is something I wrote a while ago on a Bitbucket bug post. Since then, I’ve close my Bitbucket account, and I still haven’t found satisfactory free hg hosting. I have this, but it feels very makeshift and temporary. I don’t care too much about all the bells and whistles like bug tracker and wiki.…
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Open letter to Apple-consuming hackers
Dear hackers and Emacs users who consume Apple products, Let me try to say that again a bit more eloquently… You are supposed to be hackers. You are using Emacs, fer chrissakes. You are supposed to want development tools, to want them to be infinitely customisable, and to want to do those customisations yourself, because…
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On gitology
Our analysis of git hatred begins with a discussion of gitology, which I now define: gitology (n. from git, a comptemptible fellow or DVCS): The pernicious study of the inner workings of git and how to apply them. Thus gitology refers to the theoretical framework and mental model one must absorb as a prerequisite to…
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Git… enough!
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a software user to disparage a thoroughly hostile DVCS, there is no recourse but to blog about it. Thus, software diplomacy has failed, and we must face the fact that I irredeemably hate git. To prove this, let these facts be submitted to a…
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Sage Days 30
I wrote the narrative below a while ago, but I never got around to publishing it until now. I was present at Sage Days 30, a conference for Sage developers and users which took place in Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Wolfville, Nova Scotia I first need to make some remarks about the trip…
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Code sprint
Welcome to the sprint! Here is how it should proceed: From this list, pick an interesting function that you understand how it should work. Announce in #octave that you want to work on this function and also edit the wiki to say the same. Write a few simple tests for what you think the function…