Adobe have posted a blog “explaining” why Flash can not be made open source:

When I wrote about the PsiXpda I made a snarky reference to the long time it was taking for Nokia to release Symbian as open source. Well, what do you know? As soon as I write about it they go open source. Apparently ahead of schedule - though that seems a bit arbitrary since (if I recall correctly) when they started there was no schedule. And the Symbian Source page says… “Not all of the code is yet available under open source licences.” Odd that.

Linux kernel swear counts is a graph of swear words in the Linux kernel. There are step changes in the total number of swear words in the kernel around every major release - presumably because of a large increase in code. Also graphed is the swear words per line which tends to 2e-5 per line i.e. 0.00002 per line. Could this be used as a new measure of software maturity?

Programming is to engineering as poetry is to writing.

InfoQ is a great site for the practicing programmer and has some very interesting presentations available for free. Here are my current faves.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion... When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

The debugging process explained in the Chronillogical Comic This is what it’s like. Oh, the rage. Don’t you wish you were a programmer?