Dan Jones

Netflix is finally releasing The Other Side of the Wind, a film by Orson Welles that has been unfinished since filming was completed in the mid-70s. Here’s how Netflix describes the movie:

Surrounded by fans and skeptics, grizzled director J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (a revelatory John Huston) returns from years abroad in Europe to a changed Hollywood, where he attempts to make his comeback: a career summation that can only be the work of cinema’s most adventurous filmmaker, Orson Welles.

And here’s Wikipedia’s take:

Starring John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and Oja Kodar, it is a satire of both the passing of Classic Hollywood and the avant-garde filmmakers of the New Hollywood of the 1970s. The film was shot in an unconventional mockumentary style in both color and black-and-white, and it incorporated a film-within-a-film that spoofed the work of Michelangelo Antonioni.

You can also read about the many trials and tribulations of the film’s production on Wikipedia.

Stephen Colbert is a *huge* J.R.R. Tolkien nerd. When Rolling Stone asked the late night host to break a song down, he chose “Favorite Song” by Chance the Rapper (feat. Childish Gambino) and connected a verse in it to both Gilbert & Sullivan and Lord of the Rings.

Whether or not you know it, Chance and Childish, you wrote a song that includes in it this really kind of rare rhyme and rhythm scheme that Tolkien used in the poem that actually influences all of the rest of Lord of the Rings.

I wonder about the “rare” bit though…rappers packing songs with internal rhymes is not a new thing nor is referencing Gilbert & Sullivan in hip-hop. Still, this is superbly nerdy. (via craig)

Just because a tool is available doesn't mean people will use it correctly. People have abused booleans, dates, enums, databases, Go-To's, PHP, reinventing the wheel and even Excel to the point that this forum will never run out of material!

Bug and issue trackers are Good Things™. They let you keep track of multiple projects, feature requests, and open and closed problems. They let you classify the issues by severity/urgency. They let you specify which items are going into which release. They even let you track who did the work, as well as all sorts of additional information.

Every project, no matter how big or small, should make use of them.

Ideally, they would be used correctly.

Ideally.

Matt had just released the project that he'd been working on for the past few years. As always happens, some "issues" cropped up. Some were genuine defects. Some were sort-of-enhancements based on the fact that a particular input screen was unwieldy and needed to be improved. At least one was a major restructuring of a part of the project that did not flow too well. In all, Matt had seven issues that needed to be addressed. Before he could deliver them, he needed defect tickets in the bug tracking system. He wasn't authorized to raise such tickets; only the Test team could do that.

It took a while, but he finally received a ticket to do the work to... but everything had been bundled up into one ticket. This made it very difficult to work with, because now he couldn't just clear each issue as he went. Instead, he had to package them up in abeyance, so to speak, and only release them when they were all complete. This also meant that the test documentation, providing instructions to the Test team as to how to ensure that the fix was working as required, all had to be bundled up into one big messy document, making it more difficult for Testers to do their job as well.

So he questioned them: If we can raise a single defect ticket, then what stops us from raising all 7 needed tickets so that the issues can be addressed separately? The answer was: Because these defects appear post-release, it is clear that they weren't caught at the pre-release stage, which means that Somebody Wasn't Doing Their Job Properly in the Test team, which makes them Look Bad; it brings their failure to catch the issues to the attention of Management.

In other words, in order to keep the Test team from looking bad, they would only ever raise a single ticket (encompassing all detected issues) for any given release.

Imagine if all of the bugs from your last major release were assigned to you personally, in a single ticket. Good luck estimating, scheduling, coding, debugging and documenting how to test the single logical bug!

Matt raised this bad practice with management, and explained that while the reason for why they do this is to hide their inadequacy, it also prevents any meaningful way to control work distribution, changes and subsequent testing. It also obscures the actual number of issues (Why is it taking you seven weeks to fix one issue?).

Management was not amused at having been misled.

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For the beginning of school, second-grade teacher Aeriale Johnson had each of her students mix up a container of paint that matched their skin color so they could use it in paintings of themselves during the rest of the school year.

We started with a base of brown or peach tempera for each child then, in small groups, added white, yellow, red, dark brown and/or green to get to just the right hue. They looked like they were at Ulta trying to find foundation. :) The conversations were great!

In a piece called The Algorithmic Trap, David Perell writes about the difficulty of finding serendipity, diversity, and “real” experiences while traveling. In short, Google, Yelp, Instagram, and the like have made travel destinations and experiences increasingly predictable and homogeneous.

Call me old-fashioned, but the more I travel, the less I depend on algorithms. In a world obsessed with efficiency, I find myself adding friction to my travel experience. I’ve shifted away from digital recommendations, and towards human ones.

For all the buzz about landmarks and sightseeing, I find that immersive, local experiences reveal the surprising, culturally-specific ways of living and thinking that make travel educational. We over-rate the importance of visiting the best-places and under-rate the importance of connecting with the best people. If you want to learn about a culture, nothing beats personalized time with a passionate local who can share the magic of their culture with you.

There’s one problem with this strategy: this kind of travel doesn’t scale. It’s in efficiency and doesn’t conform to the 80/20 rule. It’s unpredictable and things could go wrong.

Travel — when done right — is challenging. Like all face-to-face interaction, it’s inefficient. The fact that an experience can’t be found in a guidebook is precisely what makes it so special. Sure, a little tip helps — go here, go there; eat here, eat there; stay here, stay there — but at the end of the day, the great pleasures of travel are precisely what you can’t find on Yelp.

Algorithms are great at giving you something you like, but terrible at giving you something you love. Worse, by promoting familiarity, algorithms punish culture.

While reading parts of this, I was reminded of both premium mediocre and the randomness of this approach to travel.

I took the photo above in the Beartooth Mountains on my recent roadtrip. This was one of the surprise highlights of my trip…I wouldn’t have known to take the road through those mountains had it not been recommended to me by some enthusiastic locals.

Keyboard Waffle Maker! – CTRL+ALT+DELicious!

The post Keyboard Waffle Maker appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.

Android 9.0 Pie has brought a lot of great new features for the few who are lucky enough to experience it. Many of these features are major changes to Android, but there are a few smaller ones that have gone a bit unnoticed.

The Xbox One S Bluetooth-enabled controller has long worked with Android, but game support has been spotty. Android Pie now features a key layout for the Xbox One S controller, meaning games should hopefully be supported by default.

If you own one of these controller, fire up a previously unsupported game and give it a shot!

Texts From Superheroes

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Make America Smell Great Again!

The post Trump Scented Candle! appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.

Beto O’Rourke is running against Ted Cruz for one of Texas’ two Senate seats. At a recent event, he was asked if he thought that NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against black people was disrespectful.

I kind of wanted to know how you personally felt about how disrespectful it is — like, you have the NFL players kneeling during the national anthems. I wanted to know if you found that disrespectful to our country, to our veterans, and anybody related to that.

O’Rourke’s answer, which connects this protest to past non-violent protests undertaken by black Americans, is pitch-perfect — honest, respectful of the questioner & the audience, and inclusive.

I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights anytime, anywhere, any place.

That’s how you politic.

P.S. In his campaign against Cruz, O’Rourke is relying solely on individual donors, no PAC money. If you’d like to help him out, you can donate to his campaign here.

Wow! Genetic analysis of a human bone fragment found in Siberia reveals that her parents belonged to two different groups of humans: her father was Denisovan and her mother Neanderthal.

A female who died around 90,000 years ago was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, according to genome analysis of a bone discovered in a Siberian cave. This is the first time scientists have identified an ancient individual whose parents belonged to distinct human groups. The findings were published on 22 August in Nature1.

“To find a first-generation person of mixed ancestry from these groups is absolutely extraordinary,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It’s really great science coupled with a little bit of luck.”

Luck is right…what a needle in a haystack.

Using traditional materials and techniques to achieve a digital effect, Japanese artist Toshiya Masuda makes this cool ceramic pixel art. (thx, karen)

In October of 2015, Samsung announced a tablet with an 18.5-inch display called the Galaxy View. Now, almost three years later, it sounds like the company is working on a successor.

According to sources speaking with Android Police, Samsung is planning a Galaxy View 2 tablet, and it may launch on AT&T. The report doesn’t have a lot of details to go on (there’s no word on pricing or an exact launch date, for instance), but it does give us some bits and pieces to work with.

First and foremost, the Galaxy View 2 may drop the screen size when compared to the original model down to around 17.5 inches. There isn’t any word on how heavy the new Galaxy View 2 will be, though, so it may be just as heavy as the original model, which measured in at six pounds.

The Galaxy View 2 is said to be running Android Oreo out of the (big) box, and it won’t have support for Samsung’s DeX, so it sounds like the new giant tablet is just another means to consume content rather than be a workstation of any kind. The Samsung software on board will allegedly feature multi-screen support, though. It’ll also have a microSD card slot, but only 3GB of RAM.

That display will be 1080p HD according to the report and there will be a Samsung Exynos processor under the hood. There will also be a hinge/stand combo on the back that can’t be removed. In one position, it will be propped up at a 30-degree angle, while in the open position it will be held up like a proper screen for when owners want to watch a movie on it.

So, that’s a big tablet. The original Galaxy View didn’t seem to gain much traction, but maybe the second version will have a better shot. Will you buy the Galaxy View 2 when it launches, depending on price?

My example games are a new God of War and the great but still unfinished-by-me Horizon: Zero Dawn.

But I’m almost there for Zero Dawn!

Texts From Superheroes

Texts From Superheroes

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Hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash grew up in the Bronx and attended a public vocational high school. There he learned how to fix electronics. He was also into music — his father had a huge record collection. In this video, Flash talks about how he combined those two interests and built his first mixer using parts he bought at Radio Shack.

Grandmaster Flash was tinkerer and a hacker. There were commercially available mixers at the time; he built his own. He absorbed the nascent music culture developing around him and twisted it to his own ends, developing new mixing techniques like beat juggling. He perfected scratching and brought it to a wider audience.

Any scientist, engineer, or artist would recognize the process at work here, how tightly coupled the development of new technology and fresh ideas is. Club DJs wanted a way to transition from one record to another without missing a beat, so the mixer was invented. Once that technology existed, people started using mixers to do things other than their initial purpose. New tech begat new ideas begat new tech, the adjacent possible expanding all the while, until a curious kid who dabbled in electronics and was obsessed with music came along and helped invent hip hop, the most culturally significant movement of the past 40 years. (via kelli anderson)

Sorry to keep banging on about it, but we get pretty excited when open source projects tell us they’re #movingtogitlab. There’s always more room at our inn. So we’re very happy to welcome freedesktop.org into the fold! We chatted to Daniel Stone, project administrator, about what the project does and why they’re joining us.

Q & A

• What is freedesktop.org?
• How is freedesktop.org used?
• What's the connection between freedesktop.org, X Window System, and Linux?
• How many contributors work on the project?
• Why would someone use freedesktop.org instead of macOS or Microsoft Windows?
• Why are you migrating to GitLab?
• How are you anticipating the move to be beneficial?

What is freedesktop.org?

Created in 2000 by Havoc Pennington (a GNOME developer), freedesktop.org (or fd.o) is a forge-type hosting site. The idea was to create a neutral collaboration space between GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment, and other open source desktops. Unlike integrated systems, like Windows and macOS, the open source desktop lacks a lot of shared foundations: what should you open files with, how should you manage windows, and so forth.

Originally fd.o was a home for these desktop developers to collaborate on common standards, so programs could run portably with the same functionality across different desktops. In 2004, xwin.org was formed by a group of open source graphics developers unhappy with the closed-shop state of the XFree86 project. The two projects of fd.o and xwin.org merged shortly after xwin.org’s founding, with fd.o playing host to the X.Org Foundation, which supervises and facilitates the ongoing development of the graphics stack.

Over the years since, our role as a neutral home for all sorts of desktop technology development has seen us add projects such as GStreamer, LibreOffice, and PulseAudio to our diverse family. Some projects such as systemd and Flatpak originally began their development on fd.o, but moved out to other hosting platforms which better suited their needs and workflow.

How is fd.o used?

Most of our projects are invisible to users: NetworkManager is probably responsible for driving your Wi-Fi under the hood, though you’re unlikely to interact with it directly. Mesa and Wayland/X.Org will provide the underlying plumbing to render your games and your whole UI, but these are mostly invisible. Your desktop probably leans heavily on the D-Bus message-passing system. Most of it is plumbing.

What's the connection between fd.o, X Window System, and Linux?

As part of the graphics stack, fd.o hosts the development of the Linux kernel’s graphics development: drivers from all vendors part of the mainstream kernel (and some which aren’t yet!) use our Git hosting, mailing lists, bug tracking, and other services to build the core kernel graphics infrastructure. All this development happens on our infrastructure, which is then fed into the core Linux kernel during its "merge window" every release.

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The X.Org Foundation tries to enable the work of a wide body of open source graphics projects. Originally X.Org itself was just the X Window System, but over the years the code evolved out of X.Org into a number of enabling projects. These include not just alternative window systems such as Wayland, the Mesa 3D graphics library for hardware-accelerated OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan, Cairo and Pixman for software rendering, libinput for input device handling, and much more. We play host to all those projects, with the Foundation providing an accountable body for administrative work, conference organization, and so on.

Other freedesktop.org projects, as said before, provide all the glue around the margins of your desktop. Providing a database of available applications and preferred MIME type handlers, network device management, inter-process communication, a PDF renderer; in general, all the things we can do well in one place, to enable people who want to write desktop environments to focus on the thing that matters to them: building the actual desktop!

As part of this, we’ve always tried to stay strenuously vendor-neutral and also project-neutral within the desktop community. Rather than "picking winners" or enforcing directions on external projects, we try to slowly and gently build consensus as a neutral forum.

How many contributors work on the project?

Hard to say! We have around 1,300 registered users who directly commit to our family of projects. Not all of them are active of course, but many developers do not have direct commit access and aren’t represented in that figure. We have around 25,000 people subscribed to our various development mailing lists.

Why would someone use fd.o instead of macOS or Microsoft Windows?

Much like GitLab, freedesktop.org is an open source, open-participation, neutral platform. Running an open source desktop through distributions such as Arch, Debian, Fedora, or Ubuntu – all of which use our enabling technology – gives the user a fully open source system. This is incredibly empowering: as a user, you have the ability to dive into any part of your system, make the changes you want to see, and participate openly in these projects to see your improvements work upstream.

As a user, you have the ability to dive into any part of your system, make the changes you want to see, and participate openly in these projects to see your improvements work upstream

Why are you migrating to GitLab?

Over the years fd.o has been running, we’ve accumulated a wide variety of services: our LDAP-based account system forked back in 2004, Bugzilla for issue tracking, Mailman for mailing lists, cgit and hand-rolled Git hosting, Patchwork for pulling patches from the mailing list when they are submitted for review, Jenkins for build infrastructure, ikiwiki for project wikis, still an FTP server somewhere; the list goes on.

In terms of workflow, we simply can’t provide some of our projects the workflow they want with this infrastructure. Over the years since we begun, the norm of software development has moved from throwing patches around via email, to fully distributed version control with integrated review and issue tracking, and so on. On paper we provide those services, but integration between them involves a lot of duct tape, and this shows to the users. We saw multiple projects either leave fd.o and move to alternate hosting platforms, or just not develop on our infrastructure to begin with, because we weren’t offering anything like the same level of functionality and convenience as those services.

Over the years, the norm of software development has moved from throwing patches around via email, to fully distributed version control with integrated review and issue tracking, and so on. On paper we provide those services, but integration between them involves a lot of duct tape, and this shows to the users.

One of the issues with freedesktop.org being such a diverse family, is that there is no central driven organization behind it. The site is currently run by three volunteers, all of whom keep the site running in our spare time. Maintaining all these services – many of them forked to add now-essential features like spam prevention, as well as our own custom local work for service integration – takes a surprising amount of time, to the point where just keeping it running is about all we can do. Actual improvements are very difficult to implement in the time we have, and even when we can do them, making sure all our projects can take full advantage of them is sometimes too much for us.

How are you anticipating the move to be beneficial?

Firstly, for the workflow, having linked repository management, issue tracking, code review, CI pipelines and feedback, container repositories, wikis, and websites, provides functionality we couldn’t before – or at least, we were providing a pale imitation of it. As all of this is provided in GitLab Core and backed by a single coherent permission model, we are able to open these services up to our member projects who can work with them autonomously, rather than waiting for the admins to deal with services for them.

From an admin point of view, having a single application which takes care of all of this will drastically reduce the time we spend treading water and dealing with the impedance mismatch between the disparate services we’ve had until now. Bringing GitLab up on Kubernetes has not been without its challenges as we attempt to bring our service administration skills up into the 21st century, but already it’s shown us that we can move drastically quicker than we have been able to in the past.

From an admin point of view, having a single application which takes care of our entire workflow will drastically reduce the time we spend treading water and dealing with the impedance mismatch between the disparate services we’ve had until now

In terms of service modernization, another huge improvement is a modern approach to identity and security. Running an open community site in 2018 is not a fun place to be: not just keeping on top of security vulnerabilities, but targeted break-in attempts and spam. A lot of our previous services aren’t designed to deal with this kind of abuse. Having a single identity service on GitLab – which can link to external identity providers such as Google and GitLab.com, and make use of two-factor authentication – is a huge leap forward for us. Similarly, a coherent approach to spam which doesn’t involve spending an evening trawling through SQL tables by hand makes dealing with spam actually practical!

How can people get involved?

Since we are an umbrella of diverse projects, there's no single answer. We keep a list of our active projects on our website: pick the one that's closest to your heart, check out their site and repo, and send your first MR.

Another week has begun, so let's get it started with some app sales. Today's list is rather small for a Monday, but it's also quite uninteresting. That's just how it goes sometimes, but still look through what's available. You never know, something here might catch your eye.

Free

Apps

1. WWW Notifier Pro - Alert on Website change $2.49 -> Free; Sale ends in 1 day
2. Blacklist Pro - Call & SMS Blocker (Ad Free) $2.49 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days
3. Lensinator - OCR, Object, Barcode Scanner $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days

Games

1. Escape Asylum $2.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 9 hours
2. Colorful dots: fun puzzle game $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 2 days
3. Evertales $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 2 days
4. [VIP] 2048 Bunny Maker - bunny city building $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 2 days
5. Empire Warriors TD Premium $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 3 days
6. Dead Bunker 4 Apocalypse $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 4 days
7. Hills Legend HD $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 4 days
8. Tiny Drones - City Flight $1.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 4 days
9. Bloons Supermonkey 2 $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days
10. Hanna & Henri - The Party $1.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days
11. Hanna & Henri - The Robot $1.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days

Icon packs & customization

1. Enceladus - Icon Pack $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 9 hours
2. Atlantis 3D Pro Live Wallpaper $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 1 day
3. Castle 3D Pro live wallpaper $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 1 day
4. Minimus for KWGT Pro $1.49 -> Free; Sale ends in 1 day
5. Space Cityscape 3D LWP $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 1 day
6. 3D/4D HyperCube B&W Wallpaper $2.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days
7. Autumn Leaves in HD Gyro 3D XL Parallax Wallpaper $2.49 -> Free; Sale ends in 5 days
8. Square Red Icon Pack Oneplus Style $0.99 -> Free; Sale ends in 6 days

Sale

Apps

1. English Italian Dictionary $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 9 hours
2. Money Manager in Excel (pro) $7.99 -> $3.99; Sale ends in 1 day
3. BEATS 2 XL Freestyle Riddims $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 3 days
4. BEATS PRO - Instrumentals $2.49 -> $1.49; Sale ends in 3 days
5. Earthquake Network Pro - Realtime alerts $3.99 -> $2.79; Sale ends in 3 days
6. English Greek Dictionary $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 4 days
7. Animated Photo Widget + $1.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
8. Smart Notify Unlocker $2.99 -> $1.99; Sale ends in 5 days
9. Hockey Manager $3.49 -> $1.99; Sale ends in 6 days
10. InternetGuard Data Saver Firewall Pro $3.99 -> $2.49; Sale ends in 6 days
11. Juke Pro - The SMS Powered Jukebox $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 6 days
12. Nostalgia.NES Pro (NES Emulator) $4.99 -> $1.99; Sale ends in 6 days
13. Pulsar Music Player Pro $2.99 -> $1.99; Sale ends in 6 days
14. Relaxing Music Pro $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 6 days
15. Computer and IT Quiz (Pro) $3.49 -> $1.49; Sale ends in 7 days

Games

1. Anhui Mahjong Solitaire Saga $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 2 days
2. Mahjong Solitaire Blast $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 2 days
3. Solitaire Dungeon Escape $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 2 days
4. Solitaire Dungeon Escape 2 $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 2 days
5. SKY STEEL - Ultimate Edition $2.99 -> $1.49; Sale ends in 3 days
6. Wing Zero 2 - Ultimate Edition $2.99 -> $1.49; Sale ends in 3 days
7. Wing Zero X $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 3 days
8. AsterMiner $2.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 4 days
9. ICEY $2.99 -> $1.99; Sale ends in 4 days
10. Adding Fractions Math Trainer $2.49 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
11. Clue $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
12. FreeCell Prime $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
13. Hasbro's BATTLESHIP $3.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
14. Potato Thriller $2.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
15. Solitaire Prime $1.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
16. The Game of Life $2.99 -> $0.99; Sale ends in 5 days
17. Swordbreaker The Game.

22 temporarily free and 45 on-sale apps to start the week was written by the awesome team at Android Police.