- Rich Burridge had a brief piece on the importance of extensibility today. It brought to mind this paper, titled ‘Toolkits for User Innovation’ by some folks at MIT’s Business School who believe that the best way to serve your customers in virtually any field is to make things extensible. Interesting paper for those who have too much spare time. There is also some followup work where game companies were studied with some analsysis of the costs and benefits of extensibility through toolkits. Interesting stuff. Needless to say, the authors of both of these papers are now utterly fascinated with free software and its lessons for business.
- Speaking of Rich, was amused to see that SuSE ships not just gcalctool but also calctool. Still waiting for qalculate packages. :)
- For those on Planet SuSE, I noticed James blogged a bit about ULB and suse 9.1. We don’t want to tromp on James’s toes- it sounds like he’s done awesome work in the past, and I hope we can work with him to help him any way we can. But it looks like we will be getting GNOME 2.6 plus many ximian patches into PLUS at some point- just a matter of when. So when James rides off into the sunset, there will be definitely still be something for cutting-edge GNOME folks on SuSE to use. Hope he sticks around, though. I want to see that g-s-t work ;)
- jirb points out we’ll have a new bugzilla box soon, apparently donated by a mysterious benefactor. I’m excited, if for no other reason than maybe I’ll finally have the guts to ask for root and be able to fix the thing. Didn’t want root on the main web box- too much responsibility.
- Going to visit the grandparents for Mother’s Day. This trip used to be more fun, but my grandfather is slipping away into Alzheimers and that is really hard to deal with.
- I wish I could say the prison news from Iraq surprised me, but it should not be surprising to anyone who has taken introductory psych. For those who are curious, this article provides some very nice background in the (now mostly banned) research into what very normal people do to each other when authority roles are created. You can find more at the Prison Experiment website. There is nothing quite so comprehensive on the Milgram experiments that I could find, unfortunately.
- Epiphany crashed on me for the first time in ages today when I’d nearly finished this post. I thank the heavens, again, for crash recovery.