Mike Connor talks about the diminishing amount of time he can dedicate to reviewing Firefox patches. The thing is, this isn’t a new problem. I’m not bashing Mike at all, far from it. There have always been more patches than reviewers can handle, and some folks have noticed there’s the occasional reviewer MIA. Maybe an idea between more reviewers (of limited possibility considering the depth of knowledge about the codebase required) and long lines would be a sort of patch pre-reviewer, or editor. A person or group who are dedicated to one module, who can give a cursory review of a patch to fix obvious mistakes like typos, pointers to hyperspace, etc., and then if a patch passes their muster it can be put into the queue for the module owner. This would cut down on the number of rookie level errors and worthless patches the busy guys need to look over. Something like teacher assistants in college. Something to think about I guess…

Save Enterprise!

This year, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga stepped back from running the daily operations and writing duties of Enterprise. They brought in the fantastically talented Manny Coto to run the show. Since then, the quality of Enterprise has skyrocketed. Season one had promise. Season two broke that promise. Season three finally had purpose, and was watchable. This season, Season Four, has been the best Trek in years, it’s some of the best Trek ever. We finally, after the squandered riches Voyager could have been (although it had it’s moments), the magnificent but unloved stepchild of DS9, we got some of the most wonderfully original and yet TOS-respectful Star Trek ever. It was like water to a man in the desert.

Viacom co-CEO Les Moonves cancelled Enterprise on February 3rd, 2005. Millions of Trek fans, myself included, were crushed. I can understand Les Moonves’ position from a strictly numbers perspective. But, the numbers don’t take into account the change in leadership. Rick Berman has had good ideas for Star Trek over twenty years, but he doesn’t belong in a Producer or Executive Producer role. Brannon Braga has had some good ideas for Trek as well, but more often than not, he’s just better just writing other people’s ideas. He has no business producing a high school play much less a TV and movie franchise. If Les Moonves wants to do some firing, tell Paramount to fire B&B, and put Manny Coto in full control of the show. Then Les will get something else he wants, quality TV that produces good ratings. Even with the move to Friday nights, Enterprise has delivered steady ratings, when most moves to that night watch their ratings dry up.

The core audience is there, Mr. Moonves, the talent is there, and a fantastically rich mine of stories is there. Fire the inept managers, and let the miners deliver you the gold. Save Enterprise!

Wow. Ok, while my DSL was out, I decided to play with Knoppix. Well, the short of it all is I completely hosed my partition table, and nearly lost all my data. That sucked. I asked for help as I was getting errors from Partition Magic and PARTINFO that I couldn’t decipher. I found a whole new range of computer problems I’d never experienced, and was dying to figure it out. I was 10 again for a while, learning something so basic, yet new to me. Looking back, it’s been a blast fixing it, and I’m glad it happened and I didn’t lose too much data (nothing important). For those technically inclined, below is a more detailed account of what happened and how I fixed it. I posted this to the newsgroup too, to let the few folks who chimed in how things went. I post it here for a different and wider audience. Please feel free to comment. 🙂
» Continue reading “Adventures in Hard Disk Geometry Translation”

At these prices, we have to be crazy!

Anyway. For Sale:

• (2) New, Unopened copy of The Grudge with cardboard foil-printed DVD case cover sleeve. $7 via PayPal, includes postage. Amazon’s marketplace has them starting just under $12, not including shipping. These are new, unopened, 100% legit.(they’re both gone. Sorry folks. It is a good film, though, I finally watched my copy)
• (1) AMD Athlon processor Socket A, 1GHz (overclockable with proper cooling). Guaranteed to work. Includes heatsink, but no fan. $30, includes shipping. Pricewatch shows them starting at $53.
• (1) 200MHz and (1) 233MHz Pentium MMX CPUs. Guaranteed to work. $6, includes shipping.

If interested, comment here. I’d like to unload at least the Athlon and DVDs quickly, while they’re still fashionable. 🙂 Thanks.