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Comment an option: configuration management (Score 2) 136

This isn't necessarily what you were asking for but I maintain a small group of configuration management modules that extend a base class just for this. This allows me to maintain a common configuration standard that I can push across a wide variety of hardware and software configurations. I can spin up an ArchLinux development instance in my VM stack and have it configured the same as production which makes things convenient, doubly so when I decide it's time to pick up a *BSD again or what have you.

Comment The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Score 1) 570

If you want your money to go really, really far, I have to recommend the videogame museum we started here in downtown Oakland. We raised $20,000 on Kickstarter and 100% of that money has gone to rent, Internet, and insurance. We've not spent a dime on anything except those expenses. Everything else in the museum is donated, save for the meager tables and shelves we have, which we purchased via funds donated by people visiting the museum (About $400).

Any funds donated to the MADE will be used to continue to keep the doors open. Why is that important? Because we are offering free programming classes for local inner city kids. We currently only have 2 teachers, but we're looking for more. Those teachers spend 1 hour teaching the kids MIT Scratch, then a second hour teaching Python.

Of course, we also have exhibits, events, talks, and adult classes, but all of those are just icing on the cake for our "everything playable" videogame museum. The real change the world part of our organization are our classes. We've only been open since November, but with some more monetary donations and volunteers, we'll be able to expand our classes in 2012, and maybe even offer after school programs instead of just weekend classes.

Oh, and we're 100% volunteer run.

http://www.themade.org/

Comment Giant nerd questions (Score 1) 188

OK, I've been a fan since about 89, so I have a lot of questions to ask.

First: For each of you, which 1 song of yours is your favorite.

Second: The World's Address is a sad pun that reflects a sadder mess. Where did the idea for this song come from, and why the violin version?

Third: Who thinks she's Edith Head? Some specific person you knew?

Fourth: Any chance of releasing the visual song tie-in games from No on the Web?

Fifth: Do ya'll actually use metal detectors at the beach?

Sixth: What was it like trying to play the that bazookie thing in "older than you've ever been?" Was it a klezmer?

Seventh: I've seen you in concert a few times, and Angel is a tough one to get ya'll to play. It's a popular tune with the fans, is it out of favor with ya'll?

Eighth: What did ya'll think of the Tiny Toons episode your songs were in?

Music

Noisebridge Attempts to Teach Science To Juggalos 198

Working on the assumption that the Insane Clown Posse's song Miracles was indeed a tribute to the wonder of nature and not the cleverest troll ever, some folks from the hackerspace Noisebridge decided to try and educate ICP fans. Surprisingly, most of the fans seemed to enjoy the science lesson, but representatives of the band didn't seem to think it was funny.
PHP

Submission + - Facebook rewrites PHP runtime (sdtimes.com)

VonGuard writes: Facebook has gotten fed up with the speed of PHP. The company has been working on a skunkworks project to rewrite the PHP runtime, and on Tuesday of this week, they will be announcing the availability of their new PHP runtime as an open source project. The rumor around this began last week when the Facebook team invited some of the core PHP contributors to their campus to discuss some new open source project. I've written up everything I know about this story on the SD Times Blog.
Linux Business

How Nokia Learned To Love Openness 180

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Once Sebastian Nyström laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within Nokia to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so has the logic behind open source — the openness that allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all. That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way."
Microsoft

Microsoft's Code Contribution Due To GPL Violation 508

ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as 'a break from the ordinary,' and the press spoke of them as going to great lengths to engage the open source community,' as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

Comment GameRanger saved the day (Score 1) 70

Two things: There was little stress testing because GPG has a byzantine Internet policy, and forbids its workers from using anything but the Web at work. No holes were poked for them to test online.

Second, Scott Kevill's GameRanger quickly pulled the slack in for Demigod, and supported the game online just two days after launch. As I write this, there are around 100 people playing Demigod on GameRanger right now.

http://www.gameranger.com/

Mozilla

Submission + - Brendan Eich Explains ECMAScript 3.1 to Developers (sdtimes.com)

VonGuard writes: "On April 9, ECMA International produced the final draft for the first major update to JavaScript since 1999. It's called ECMAScript 3.1, but will soon be known as ECMAScript, Fifth Edition. You'll know it as JavaScript, the Next Generation. Mozilla will begin implementing these features after Firefox 3.5, and Microsoft is already showing prototypes behind closed doors. The question, however, is what this will change for JavaScript coders. To get those answers, I tracked down Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and the creator of JavaScript. I transcribed the interview without any editorial since he explains, perfectly, what's changing for programmers. Long story short: Json will be safer, getters and setters will be standard, and strict mode will make things easier to debug."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Plug-in Architecture On the Way for GCC (sdtimes.com)

VonGuard writes: "This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU Operating System. A major part of that system has always been the GNU Compiler Collection. This year, some of the earliest bits of GCC also turn 25, and yet some of the collection's most interesting years of growth may still be ahead. The GCC team announced today that the long-standing discussion over how to allow plug-ins to be written for GCC has been settled. The FSF and the GCC team have decided to apply the GPL to plug-ins. That means all that's left is to build a framework for plug-ins; no small task to be sure. But building this framework should make it easier for people to contribute to the GCC project, and some universities are already working on building windows into the compilation process, with the intent of releasing plug-ins."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Nets

A cancer cell's blood supply. Ick.

Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Behind the Scenes at Sony's NOC (sysmannews.com)

VonGuard writes: "Earlier this year, I spoke to Mark Rizzo, the man who manages the people who run Sony's online game servers. Rizzo learned the ropes of MMO hosting back on Ultima Online, and we chatted about where the tough problems were then versus now. Rizzo compares the operation to a 24/7 scientific simulation, albeit with some sassier and more involved end-users. His favorite innovation since those early days? Rapidly provisioning and deploying Linux installations tailor-made to their purposes. For the June 1 issue of the new newspaper, The Systems Management News, I wrote up this piece on Rizzo and his band of 50-some-odd sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters."
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Unknown Atari 2600 Game Found at Flea Market (gism.net) 2

VonGuard writes: "I was at the flea market in Oakland, yesterday, when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home, I found that they were actually prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited print runs like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crowning jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released, and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So, now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."

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