“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” — Thomas Jefferson

I never did modern history at school, so I was spellbound by Wikipedia’s entries about World War I and World War II. I hope that Company of Heroes will be the closest thing that I ever get to experience to a real war.

Compare the response given by David Heinemeier Hansson to Alex Payne in the recent Rails and scaling controversy, to Ingo Molnar’s response to Con Kolivas regarding the new Modular Schedule Core in Linux. Which community would you rather be part of based on this little sample?

(Somewhat ironic since it was Hansson himself that said “It’s no[t] the event that matters, but the reaction to it”, as well as being an evangelist for the It Just Doesn’t Matter principle.)

Go Microsoft:

Parallels Desktop for Mac was the first kid on the block to support virtualisation of other PC operating systems on Mac OS X. However, in the past fortnight, I’ve found out that:

1. Parallels allocates just a tad too many unnecessary Quartz windows¹, which causes the Mac OS X WindowServer to start going bonkers on larger monitors. I’ve personally seen the right half of a TextEdit window disappear, and Safari not being able to create a new window while Parallels is running, even with no VM running. (I’ve started a discussion about this on the Parallels forums.)
2. Parallels does evil things with your Windows XP Boot Camp partition, such as replace your ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll file and rewriting the crucial boot.ini file. This causes some rather hard-to-diagnose problems with some low-level software, such as MacDrive, a fine product that’s pretty much essential for my Boot Camp use. Personally, I’d rather not use a virtualisation program that decides to screw around with my operating system kernel, hardware abstraction layer, and boot settings, thank you very much.

VMware Fusion does none of these dumbass things, and provides the same, simple drag’n’drop support and shared folders to share files between Windows XP and Mac OS X. I concur with stuffonfire about VMware Fusion Beta 3: even in beta, it’s a lot better than Parallels so far. Far better host operating system performance, better network support, hard disk snapshots (albeit not with Boot Camp), and DirectX 8.1 support to boot. (A good friend o’ mine reckons that 3D Studio runs faster in VMware Fusion on his Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro than it does natively on his dedicated Athlon 64 Windows machine. Nice.) The only major feature missing from VMware Fusion is Coherence, and I can live without that. It’s very cool, but hardly necessary.

Oh yeah, and since VMWare Fusion in beta right now, it’s free as well. Go get it.

¹ Strictly speaking, allocating a ton of Quartz windows is Qt’s fault, not Parallels’s fault. Google Earth has the same problem. However, I don’t really care if it’s Qt’s fault, considering that it simply means running Parallels at all (even with no VM open) renders my machine unstable.

What’s happened to Kathy Sierra, and what she wrote about angry and negative people, inspired me to write a bit, so let me indulge myself a little. I live in the computing community, with other like-minded geeks. Computing geeks have a (deserved) reputation for being a little negative. This is not without cause: there’s a lot of things wrong in our world. A lot of the technology we use and rely on every day is brittle and breaks often, and as Simon Peyton-Jones says, we’re quite often trying to build buildings out of bananas. Sure, you can do it, but it’s painful, and it’s downright depressing when the bricks are just over there, just out of reach. Our efforts for releasing software is often met with never-ending bug reports and crash reports, and it’s quite sobering looking at our task trackers.

It’s impossible to resist ragging on something or abusing something. This is part of geek computing culture. We have to work with a lot of crap, so it’s easy to be critical and complain about everything around you. However, from this day forward, I’m going to try to at least make any criticism not totally destructive. (I don’t think I’m vitriolic, mind you, but I’ll make a conscious effort to be more constructive now.) Wrap it up in some humour; offer some suggestions or alternatives. Resist using inflammatory language as much as you can when you’re personally attacked, or simply walk away from it. Re-read everything you write and think “Is what I’m writing simply making people more bitter? Is it actually worth somebody’s time to read this?”

Be more gentle with your language and kinder to your fellow netizens. Don’t participate in flamewars. Don’t join the mob mentality and rail on Microsoft or C++ or Ruby or Apple or Linux when everyone else does. (You’re meant to be a scientist after all, aren’t you?) Break away from that self-reinforcing sub-culture that often comes with being a geek.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, back to work!

For those of you who were fortunate enough to see the magnificent Kathy Sierra keynote at Linux.conf.au this year but don’t read her blog, she’s received death threats and sex threats from some anonymous bloggers and comments. It was serious enough that she cancelled a presentation at an upcoming conference, and the police have been informed.

Wikipedia has some updated information on her harassment. Dave Winer, in a remarkably objective post, reckons it’s just a bunch of trolls and that those kind of death threats are nothing new. I think it’s a little too early to tell yet exactly what the hell is going on, but even if it is “just some trolls”, it’s still outrageous behaviour. Be sure to also read her update on the situation if you’re checking out the other links.

Lesson learned: don’t start a Web site that encourages abusive behaviour unless you’re prepared to deal with the consequences. In fact, just don’t start a Web site that encourages abusive behaviour at all. As Kathy herself says, angry and negative people can be bad for you. I wonder whether it was that article that triggered off some power-hungry kid’s frontal lobe.

Godspeed, Kathy. The world needs more people like you. Hopefully whoever made those comments will be punished—and redeem themselves.