Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
About eighteen months ago I migrated my academic web pages away from a self hosted solution on a Linux box in my living room to Google Sites. Mainly this was done because I was applying for jobs and wanted to make sure that the site…
It’s become the in-vogue thing for experts on various issues to pontificate on events for the coming year. As I’m now a Dr. and I received my doctorate for studying the socio-technical aspects of software engineering communities, I feel like I’m legitimately qualified to put forth…
On Christmas day a young Nigerian man boarded a flight from Lagos to Amsterdam and then later boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. About an hour outside of Detroit, as the plane was descending over Canadian airspace he decided that his religion would martyr…
Round and Round They Go! Where They'll Stop, Monty Knows! Over the weekend the twitterwebs lit up with the #savemysql tag in response to a plea from Monty, the founder of MySQL. The basic gist of Monty’s plea are as follows: MySQL is a critical…
Since I started on my “seekrit project” I’ve asked a few questions on programming related topics at StackOverflow. Thus far I’ve found the answers to be really helpful. While most people know about StackOverflow, lots of folks don’t realize that there three other sites in…
For a new secret project I’ve been putting together an installation of Trac to provide a web interface for task management. I found myself wanting to create a nice looking table within a Trac wiki page to document different dependencies needed by the software. In…
Several years ago I created a nifty little photo gallery webapp for F-Spot users called PennAve. PennAve was designed to be incredibly simple in its use: Tag a set a photos in F-Spot as “Public”, copy the database to your web server, and boom, those…
This past weekend I left New York City and traveled to Columbus, OH for Ohio LinuxFest 2009 (OLF). Unlike many shows, such as LinuxCon and the now defunct OpenSourceWorld, OLF is entirely community run. That means you’ll notice a couple of different things: it’s much…
The Free Software Foundation has, rightfully in most cases, alerted computer and technology users to the problem of “antifeatures“. Briefly, an antifeature is when a program does something to offer a lesser experience that took significant effort to accomplish. Often times antifeatures are used as…
It’s no secret that almost all software has bugs. Even if you are lucky enough to understand how to formally verify a program, odds are that it won’t work for your program. It’s just far too difficult. Rather than eliminate all bugs, which is next…