The Mozilla FireFox ad in the New York Times has finally been published today, along with the names of 10,000 people who helped pay for it (myself included). My attempts to get a copy in central Manchester have failed miserably, but I’m sure some enterprising person will start selling copies on eBay soon.
Hopefully this will lead to more open source projects embracing the power of advertising.
This is really a test to see if I really can blog from my mobile, so forgive the shortness of the entry. I’m currently on the train on my way back from Leeds after seeing Alan Cox and Stephen Tweedie of Redhat (I reserve the right to be completely wrong about his name as I can’t really remember). It was a very interesting talk (two talks really) about how Linux has developed and grown and about how it is managed. Alan also talked about code quality and testing, with a talk entitled "All software sucks". It was interesting to hear about the rate of change for kernel code: there’s about double the number of patches being contributed to 2.6 compared to 2.5 and a similar increase again between 2.4 and 2.5. Like all trends I guess this one will have to even out at some time, but I guess that’s a good thing as there is obviously a limit to the number of patches the core developers can process. On a completely unrelated note, I was suprised to learn that Alan Cox runs Fedora (at least on his laptop) – in Welsh as it happens. I always expect hardcore kernel developers to to run a hardcore distro like Debian, but I guess even developers like an easy life. Oh well, that’s it for now as my fingers are aching. Thank God for predictive text.
So next year we can expect a general election, our chance to tell the government exactly what we think of them – well, those of us who bother to vote, anyway.
I was really quite worried by what happened in the US presidential elections. It was a clear and disturbing example of what happens when voters are uninformed and drawn into a childish popularity content between a few major candidates. This must absolutely not happen in Britain.
Those of us who care about our country’s future must get out there, support our chosen parties and educate the public about what the real election issues are: Iraq, the Euro, the mess we call public transport, software patents and ID cards. Of course there are many others too.
There was a very interesting article on The Guardian Online today talking about how the public is being softened up to the idea of a police state. The writer goes on to say “Meanwhile David Blunkett, a blind man obsessed with seeing everything, worries about his own privacy while reserving the right to intrude upon ours”. He certainly has a point.
Matt Revell also blogged about the slow but steady errosion of our freedom by this government under the guise of “terrorism prevention”. As Matt states, we have been under a much greater threat from terrorism in the past and I would go as far as to say that the threat to our country is now at its lowest for about 20-30 years.
I’d also like to point out that Blog:Vote is coming back for the general election. Blog:Vote is a blog that started up during the run-up to the European elections which seeks to promote informed voting and raise awareness of election issues. It also provides links to political discussion in blogs in a balanced manner.
Expect a lot more politically-themed posts from me in the run up to the election.
I was just skimming through my referrer log today (clearing out the spam mainly) and discovered that I’ve got some very good rankings for a few search terms.
Searching for “future of Samba” will give my site as the first result of 475,000.
Now this is really impressive: search for “linux movie” and my site is the 3rd result (after MPlayer and Cinelerra) of 12,500,000!!!
I always laugh at the morons who fill their sites with META tags and random words in the belief that it actually has some bearing on their rankings, and now I’ve got even more reason to do so. I’ve never made any effort whatsoever to influence my rankings: I just chuck (hopefully) useful information onto the site. I don’t really care whether anyone reads it or not, but if they do then that’s great.
So here, gentle reader, is the key to “search engine optimisation”: provide something people want to read.
