November 24, 2002

Off by One

Sigh. For most of the day I thought it was Saturday, only to eventually realize that tomorrow is Monday, so today must be Sunday. I hate it when that happens.

Ah, well. It'll be a short week for me, work-wise. I'm at Yahoo on Monday and then it's off to Ohio for a week starting really early on Tuesday morning. It's the normal San Jose to Chicago to Toledo route I'm so familiar with on American Airlines.

In other news, I'm weird. According to my sister, who recently said this in e-mail: "Why do you have something about your trip to the dentist on your web site?? You are weird!"

At least little has changed since I was ten years old. :-)

I guess that means she discovered my weblog. The big question is whether to bother trying to explain it over the holiday. If I do, I'll probably also end up having to explaining it to my Mom as well. And it'll mean having to answer the "who would ever want to read about that?!" questions.

Posted by jzawodn at 07:43 PM

GNU/FSF tools web pages could be more helpful!

Is it just me, or does the Free Software Foundation not get the web? I've seen amateur projects hosted on SourceForge that do better than the FSF sometimes.

Here's an example. I'm having problems building some software. I suspect that I need a newer (or older) version of GNU Bison. So I find the main page for it here. Does it tell me what the most recent version is? No. Does it tell me when it was released? No. Does it tell me what the recent changes in the last few releases were? No.

What the heck?

Okay, it does tell me that I can find alpha/beta releases at [some url] but they don't even bother to make the URL a hyperlink! That's right, I'm supposed to cut and paste it into my browser's address/url input box. All of the help related e-mail addresses on the page have been obfuscated. Really. Go look.

Yes, these are the same people who want Linux to be called GNU/Linux.

There's a reason that most project web sites have certain pieces of critical information on the main page--project news/announcements, releases, screen shots (if applicable), features, e-mail, bug tracking, etc. This isn't rocket science anymore, it's well-traveled ground.

Posted by jzawodn at 12:00 AM