Probably it’s very old, but hey I had a good laugh...

Actually, it is a Sun engineer joke. The 10 Mbps predecessor was a chip called the “Big MAC Ethernet” in this case, it was a mere pun, since MAC stands for Media Access Control, i.e. the Ethernet data-link layer. When they designed the 10/100 Mbps chip later on, they decided to turn the pun into a full-out joke, and they called it the “Happy Meal Ethernet.”

528 static void happy_meal_tcvr_write(struct happy_meal *hp,
529                                   void __iomem *tregs, int reg,
530                                   unsigned short value)
531  
532         int tries = TCVR_WRITE_TRIES;
533         
534         ASD((“happy_meal_tcvr_write: reg=0x%02x value=%04x\n”, reg, value));
535 
536         /* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */
537         if (!(hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE))  
538                 happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);
539                 return;
540          
541 
542         /* Would you like fries with that? */
543         hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME,
544                     (FRAME_WRITE   (hp->paddr << 23)  
545                      ((reg & 0xff) << 18)   (value & 0xffff)));
546         while (!(hme_read32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME) & 0x10000) && --tries)
547                 udelay(20);
548 
549         /* Anything else? */
550         if (!tries)
551                 printk(KERN_ERR “happy meal: Aieee, transceiver MIF write bolixed\n”);
552 
553         /* Fifty-two cents is your change, have a nice day. */
554  

[Taken from drivers/net/sunhme.c in linux-2.6]

IBM is now able to slow down light with “fairly standard materials”, and it’s only a question of time when photons replace electrons in computers. Thanks ZDNet for making me smile...

I hate bugzilla. With a vengeance. Not because it doesn't have features or anything; because you need to log on to it to be able to use it. I've got way too many passwords as it is already that I need to remember. I don't want one to be able to file a bug, thank you very much! And no, I'm not going to give you one of my precious other passwords -- especially not one that I use to log on to my system. So that means I'll have to do ugly things to remember it. grumble. Why is it that everyone and their mother uses this fsck'ing I-love-passwords-bugzilla? There are only two Open Source projects that I know of who don't: Debian and FreeBSD. The former uses a home-grown BTS which predates bugzilla by several years; the latter uses Gnats which, ironically (since so many FreeBSD developers have philosophical problems with the GPL), is GNU software. It's no accident that I'm associated with one of them. One advantage of Free Software is that there's so many choice, and that you can use loads of different software—and this happens all the time, everywhere; consider Graphical User Interfaces (KDE, Gnome, ion, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, ...), shells (bash, dash, zsh, tcsh, ...), kernels (FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, ...) etcetera. So why doesn't this happen for bug tracking systems?

Philip Hands says it all

Now with more people blogging about Gobby I could talk a bit about the upcoming 0.3.0 release, which is perhaps sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. We hope to release a new revision as soon as possible and although you wouldn’t see much differences when looking at the running program compared to 0.2.0, many things have changed under the hood. It features a new proven merging algorithm called Jupiter, which replaces the home-made algorithm currently present in obby. This results in less history keeping and a more reliable application of changes. Sadly this still requires Gobby to be a client/server application and does not help it on a way to a peer-to-peer one. Next there are also some new useful features. “Find and replace” with text and regular expressions comes to mind. Yes, we have to reimplement all features of an editor because “gedit” just didn’t meet our expectations when we considered to extend it. Sessions could be serialised into files and restored when needed, while preserving all information like who wrote what. We are currently writing a script which visualises this information on a web page to provide a log of a meeting. Our Tracker lists some more features, although it’s not clear if all could enter this release because of the deadline set by the FSF. I registered all our projects at Launchpad to get them translated through Rosetta. It would be nice if some more could help in translating Gobby. Well to come to an end: Matt Enks informed me today, that the word “gobby” is a slang term for “fellatio” in Australian. It’s a pity, really. It just sounded funny to us, but I won’t talk about the history of the name now because it’s weird. Perhaps we should rename it to something sane at any time in the future. We’ll accept proposals on the Wiki.

Once again it is November, National Novel Writing Month participants have one month to write a 50,000+ word novel. I was going to take part last year but didn't follow through. I had a good excuse though, we were having a baby at that time. This year I am going to try again. The genre is science fiction again and the plot is the same: time travel, telepathic dogs, deep philosophical ruminations on the nature of humanity, and new for this year, robot yogis.

I wrote

"If you want collaborative editing, then try Emacs's File -> New Frame on Display"

in three tips. Philip Kern replied:

"Seriously, this feature is quite dependent on X, right? ... you'll probably run into trouble despite Emacs being ported to all of those platforms like OS X and Windows."

Last I tried, OS X had X with it, while it's a quick download for Windows. It was simple enough and is probably useful for other things, unlike installing a special editor that uses horrible horrible GTK+2. I'm pretty sure it would be possible to make emacs highlight differently depending on the frame doing the input, but isn't collaborative editing meant to help break the "this is mine" ego? (Not that I can find any references about why collaborative editing works now I want them... anyone got some? Replace 2005-2.html# with tb.cgi/ and send trackbacks, or just email me via the top of the page.)