[Travelling with expensive cameras](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_camer.html), from Bruce Schneier.
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
So, the French think that the Saudi’s think that Osama bin is [dead](http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1407712006).
Not that this will really please the Americans, since they wanted his head on a spike.
It’s probably not true anyway.
A [great post](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/56) by Mark Shuttleworth, on how he thinks of Debian and it’s relationship with Ubuntu. I wish I was as coherent a writer - he manages to stretch the “altitude” analogy so far it nearly snaps, but not quite 
Where I think Shuttleworth is perhaps wrong is his belief that the bickering results purely from conflicting goals. Although debian-devel can be pretty shocking, the worst I have ever seen for vicious ad hominem attacks is the various [OpenBSD](http://www.openbsd.org) lists. [Theo de Raadt](http://www.theos.com/) is, unapologetically, a complete bastard on those lists, and will happily berate those who annoy him, and bystanders, pretty nastily.
Theo takes it too far, but he has a point in his unapologeticness, which he has explained sometimes. Quality is vital in an OS distribution, and a lot of the work is very difficult to check. The level of understanding you need to complete a piece of work is immense. Having seen what is required to do this properly, it’s amazing anyone does it for fun. To package a significant piece of software can take weeks or months of research, to completely understand the package. Then you have to understand all of the common use cases, and then you have to understand the whole packaging and distribution system, and the implications of all of the above combined.
There is so much involved, that often there is (after the research) only a single person in the world qualified to check the work - and that’s the person doing it. So, how do you, as an organisation, ensure the quality of the work?
You can have intense vetting procedures, of course, but these only take you so far. Even a quality individual can be careless sometimes. You can perform audits — but you probably aren’t qualified to do them. If you are paying people, or have contracts with them, you can threaten horrendous consequences if they fail to do the work well enough — but these are volunteer organisations.
The only way these organisations can enforce quality is culturally - by having a balance of *cultural* rewards and sanctions that encourage individual quality. At 11.30pm you’ve cut the 33rd version of this release and you could just push the button to release it - but no, you go through the manual checks just once more. You write just one more test case that’s been nagging at you, you do one more test release on some weirdass architecture, just to make absolutely sure it works.
Why? Well part of that, surely, has to be a fear of ridicule, of being found wanting. Nobody rewards you for doing the same good job day in day out, that’s just life, and personal commitment to quality, no matter how strong, only takes you so far.
I hope that Shuttleworth has a community strong enough to encourage that sort of quality even without the viciousness, but it’s possible that by removing the combativeness of the lists he is castrating some of what makes Debian so remarkably good.
There are two things everybody needs to know about fitting new motherboards. First, every mobo requires a blood sacrifice. I got mine over with nice and early, and managed to avoid dripping blood all over the board as I screwed it in. I think you get extra marks if you manage to drip blood on the CPU.
Second, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. No, really. READ THEM. I spent an hour thinking I’d completely broken my motherboard, only to discover that, when putting in a single stick of RAM, put it in slot B-1. Who’d have thought it? Not me obviously.
Here endeth the lesson.
Since we are now [using](http://blog.isotoma.com) [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.com) [everywhere](http://www.sleevenotez.com), I’m moving this blog to MT as well. I’ll be importing all the old blog posts in a bit. The only thing people generally look at though is the gallery which now has a [new url](http://www.winter.cx/gallery).
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