Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Developer Forced To Stop Development on Mercurial due to BitKeeper License

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Ben Collins-Sussman pointed to this blog entry written by a developer on the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System which talks about Larry McVoy contacting his employer about his work on the project. His employer is a licensed user of the BitKeeper software.

I think its sad that an employee of a customer of a software company, with no access to the tools source code, can be told to stop developing open source software because of his use of another software application.

Think about this a minute. Before OpenOffice was useable, what if each developer who had to use Microsoft Word at work was forced to stop working on the software because of their use of the Microsoft products at work?

Much of what is going on in the Bitkeeper world right now was the main reason why there was such an uproar over the licensing of the product when Linus Torvalds started using it to manage the Linux kernel. Looks like the community was right again.

On another note, however, I’m definitely going to take a look at Mercurial. It looks like an interesting piece of software. I think its a travesty that its lost one of its developers due to the decision of his employer on what software package to license.

The full discussion on this can be found on the Subversion Developers mailing list.

Yahoo’s new Podcast Directory

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I just spent some time looking around Yahoo’s new podcast directory. Its pretty cool. Not only can you search for keywords in episode descriptions, but the site also supports tagging, so you can find related podcasts based on tagged keywords that you click on, a really nice addition to the site.

I’m still playing around with it and clicking around the tag-o-sphere, but it looks like a nice and easy way to navigate around the podcasts available. This service seems to have the best of all worlds right now. Tagging, Ajax enablement, and high ease of use. Check it out if you get a chance. I think I just found my new directory.

Emily Rose and Millenium Followup

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[ This posting was written about a month ago (around 9/12) … I just ran out of things to write about, so I’m publishing this ]

I came across this article this morning. It seems that The Exorcism of Emily Rose has struck a chord with people (at least as far as getting them in the theater) as it grossed $30.2M over the weekend making it the third largest September opening ever, despite reviews that pretty much mirror mine.

Apparently I’m not the only one interested in the concept of exorcism — which makes me feel much more normal. 😉

Given the box office numbers though, I’m inclined to wonder what makes these types of movies so attractive to people that they have to go see it? I think that those who were raised hearing about how Satan and demons were the cause of everything bad are more inclined to go see them just out of the curiosity raised through years of hearing about it ad nauseum and finally being able to see something that was supposedly “true”. I think that I really like seeing other peoples interpretation of this phenomenon and the events that surround them.

Just to be clear, I do not believe in actual demonic possession. I do believe, however, that other people believe in it — and can believe in it so much that they can manifest behavior consistent with it if they do not learn to deal with the guilt instilled in them while being initiated, as a child or as an adult, into a religious group in which a fear of Satan forms much of the cornerstone of the doctrine that is taught.

Much of the above is why I also enjoyed the second season of Millennium so much this time around, while “not getting it” when it was actually on TV. Much of the content was around religious beliefs and the fulfilling of prophecy as believed by the “Millennium Group”. A lot of it had to do with what the Millennium Group was doing in order to ensure the outcomes that they believed would signal the end of the world. For some reason the second time around, that really intrigued me.

The second season of the show was quite different than the first. From what I have heard on interviews on the sets, Chris Carter became very busy with the X Files during the second season of Millennium and gave control over to Glenn Morgan and James Wong. The show became quite different than the first season, focusing on the Millennium Group and quite a bit of its religious philosophy and apocalyptic beliefs. Many of the shows took on an almost surreal atmosphere, very unrealistic and “out there”. One episode specifically (I can’t remember the episode but it was towards the end of the season) had very much of a “Natural Born Killers” feel to it — very random and disjointed.

Season Three, which we started watching (we got through almost 3 discs), feels like a melding of Season 1 and Season 2. There is quite a bit of the religious and / or spiritual aspects to what we’ve seen so far, however it is much less surreal than Season 2, getting “back to the basics” of what made the first season so great.

I’m still a little disconnected from Season 3 as compared to Season 1, but I am still enjoying the shows.

Google Reader

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I’ve been using the Google Reader for the last few days since I’ve been away from my home machine, where I usually use FeedDemon for all of my RSS aggregating needs. I have to say, I’m digging it. One nice thing about having Google software to manage this kind of stuff is that they are confident enough to give you the ability to export your feed data to external feed readers if you aren’t happy with it.

Joel Spolsky wrote an article back in 2000 about removing barriers to entry in order to get your product accepted in the market. One of these barriers is allowing the user the option to go back if they feel they have made a mistake. Google has removed this barrier to entry for us, allowing us to go back to what we are comfortable with if we want to.

I’m not sure I’m going to go back. I really like what Google has done with their aggregator. Check it out and see if you don’t feel the same way.