Entries in Life

I came across Joel Spokely’s assertion that “… the most satisfying careers, if you’re a software developer, are at actual software companies.” Something here didn’t sound quite right. “What about Open Source Software?” I thought. Then I saw POSSE: Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE) is a local organization of entrepreneurs who rely on and develop OSS to help businesses succeed. See, there’s this whole other group of programmers besides the money-and-fame rock stars that Joel is talking about. Sure, they’re awesome developers and they’re excited about what they do. But people who work on Free Software are doing amazing things, too. Usually, it has been in their free time, often for their own use, so it doesn’t have the spit-and-polish that commercial software has. Even that is changing, though. Things like Beagle, Firefox and Ubuntu Linux show us that even Free Software has the power to be “remarkable software.” The sort of stuff the Joel says you need rock stars for.

Perlism for the day:

   sub any(&@) {     my $sub = shift;       for(@_) {return 1 if $sub->()};     return undef;  }    print "blah\n" if any {$_==1} 0, 1, 2;  

Cargo Cult Science in action.  Watch it work for children’s car seats.

Freakonomics author find that the seats don’t save lives.  New York Times does a review.  Researcher confirms the conclusions (and NYT doesn’t publish his letter).  Publisher of disproved report writes a letter to the NYT re-asserting their claims and NYT publishes the letter.

Of further interest: The highway commission evidently refused to publish a report that showed (no matter how they twisted the data) that children’s car seats in the 70s were worse than just using a safety belt.