Is SCO Waiting for Godot?

Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross remarked in his recent ruling that ongoing SCO Group litigation attempts were like a bad version of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. The almost decade-long legal saga gained publicity in the FOSS community for targeting Linux as illegally containing licensed AT&T UNIX System V source code.

Treemap Visualization of Disk Volumes

GrandPerspective is a FOSS tool for Mac OS X that provides a treemap visualization of file layout on a disk. I created the treemap below from an 80 GB disk on my G4 towermac, which has both Mac OS X files (left) and WinXP files (right); the latter being a copy from the disk of my recently deceased Sony laptop). It certainly gives new meaning to the term disk blocks.


It's quite striking to see the greater number of larger aggregations of files on the Mac side vs. the many smaller files on the XP side. I guess that's why we don't need to do "defragging" on macs. :-)

Is BitTorrent Being Blocked on Your Block?

Ever since Comcast was sprung by the AP, last fall, for surreptitiously blocking or retarding BT traffic with forged packets, other ISPs, e.g., Road Runner, Charter, Bell Canada and Cox TOS, have also started to block P2P traffic, despite public criticism of their rationale. There are a number of anti-blocking tools (least gyrating web-ads page) and services available to help you determine if your packets and ISP service is being tweaked. Two FOSS tools that are readily available are: Glasnost from Germany, and Pcapdiff from EFF.

Don Knuth on Open Source, Multicores and Literate Programming

Donald Knuth, the father of TeX and author of the long unfinished multi-volume set of books entitled "The Art of Computer Programming", sounds off in this interesting interview.

His comment on unit testing (or an overzealous reliance on it) seems a bit obscured here. I am certainly more inclined to concur with his other quote: "early optimization is the root of all evil," because unit testing tends to promote that bad strategy with respect to system performance. Some personal war stories describing exactly that will be delivered this week in my Guerrilla Boot Camp class.

However, do read and heed what he says about multicores and multithreaded programming. It should sound familiar. BTW, where he apparently says "Titanium", he means Itanium.

His riff on "literate programming" is a bit of a yawn for me because we had that capability at Xerox PARC, 25 years ago. Effectively, you wrote computer code (Mesa/Cedar in that case) using the same WYSIWYG editor that you used for writing standard, fully-formatted documentation. The compiler didn't care. This encouraged very readable commentary within programs. In fact, you often had to look twice to decide if you were looking at a static document or dynamic program source. As I understand it, Knuth's worthy objective is to have this capability available for other languages. The best example that I am aware of today, that comes closest to what we had at Xerox, is the Mathematica notebook. You can also use Mathematica Player to view any example Mathematica notebooks without purchasing the Mathematica product.