Repeating the meme from Kees:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

“Now, while doing this, draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.” - Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt.

I was really lucky on this one - I have so many boring books, this one happened to be on the top of the pile next to me.

Looks like drizzle is announced now. I’ve spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I’m excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I’m running the test suite first. Yes, I’m getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and …

As Paul points out, this new erlrc project is very exciting news. One of the most interesting features of Erlang is how you can do hot code updating, and getting integrated into the package manager is absolutely wonderful. Anyone working on getting this into Ubuntu yet? There is a very nice howto written about how to set up your Erlang app with this. I’m looking forward to setting this up on my mini-cluster of slicehost nodes.

And here we are, my second post in which I mention twitter, and wonder aloud what open source software projects should be doing with twitter. I don’t have any well-formed thoughts to foist on you, but I’ll tell you about an experiment I’ve been doing. Last week I started using summize.com to search for conversations about bzr. I did the same thing for ubuntu and for git, but only really stuck with the bzr stream. It’s been interesting to see what people are talking about, I’ve tried chiming in with suggestions when I can or asking for further details when people complain. I think what is so fascinating to me about this is that I’m finding a whole lot of conversations that aren’t at the level of a ranting blog post but are encouraging or thought-provoking feedback nonetheless.

I also registered twitter.com/bzr, but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. Suggestions? …