"Reflecting earlier today on some crappiness in a software project I'm involved in, my brain started to enumerate the ways that free software projects can fail.

The maintainer can go AWOL. The major culprits for this are babies, university thesis advisors, and Google.

This is pernicious in two ways: ..."

Plat'Home, Linux pioneers in Japan and creators of the diminutive OpenMicroServer, are running a contest called "Will Linux Work?" They are basically asking people to submit crazy/extreme environments or ideas using their Linux servers and see if they work.

Dmitry Galinsky, the original author of emacs-rails mode has decided to fork the project... You can clone it from: git clone http://dima-exe.ru/git/rails-reloaded.git --
* yasnippet: yet another snippet extension for Emacs: http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/

"Coming this October, Exploring Freedom: the book. [...] Our first product will be our book, Exploring Freedom. Based on the articles from our blogs, plus new material from Matt Lee, Rob Myers and others..." --
* [FSF] Interview with Rob Myers by Matt Lee: http://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/rob-myers/

"I was recently notified – somewhat to my suprise – that the Japanese publisher Ohmsha is publishing a Japanese translation of Practical Common Lisp which should now be avaliable in bookstores and on amazon.co.jp..." --
* Practical Common Lisp: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

I’m a relatively new GNOME user, but as a long-time KDE and Windows user, and a single panel at the bottom, with some sort of menu on the left hand corner just “makes sense” to me. I’ve often wondered why more of the popular Linux distro’s don’t adopt what most new user’s to Linux would feel as “normal” as a default layout.

"...Back in February of this year I saw Richard Stallman talk at KTH here in Stockholm and was thoroughly impressed. I plucked up the courage to go up to him after the meeting and talk to him. The resulting conversation ended with him offering to talk in my hometown of Hamilton in New Zealand..."