The Disparity Bit

QT includes a class called QSettings, which stores a settings dictionary in a platform-transparent way. QT4 on *nix puts the settings in INI-style files under the directory ~/.config.



It so happened that I had a file called ~/.config in place, so QT couldn't create the directory. As a result, my new PyQt4 development tools lost all their settings every time I closed them. That's slightly annoying with the QT Designer; extremely annoying in the case of Eric4, which comes with more preference panels out of the box than Eclipse. In both cases, settings were lost in a completely silent way. There was no error message, not even on stderr. The only indication anything was wrong came the next time I ran the application, as it started with factory settings once more.



Luckily, since I was writing a QT4 application myself at the time, I could quickly look up the QSettings docs, find out where the settings were supposed to be saved, and diagnose the problem. An ordinary user of a QT4 application, however, would have had to resort to online support of some kind.

There's a new security advisory for the NVidia binary video driver for Linux (story also carried by KernelTrap and slashdot).

We immediately hear all the predictable arguments. On one side, that the bug is fixed in the latest (beta, unstable) version of the driver. On the other, that the bug was first reported way back in 2004.

Some people just don't seem to grasp the fundamental idea: that widely used, production-quality FOSS is, as a rule, more secure than closed software - even though the latter may be just as good on most other counts, such as stability and features.

Reposted from my old blog - the old comments are there.

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Dr. David Brin complains (first and second blog posts) that kids today can't learn the basics of programming in a way that is fun and, above, all, trivially accessible to every computer-owner. There's no lingua franca of modern programming - a language that is both ubiquitous (comes with every PC) and accessible (very simple and suitable to learning basic imperative programming).

A storm of comments was generated by the Salon article. Most respondents didn't seem to understand Brin's real points. To be fair, the article itself was rather misleading. In any event, I'm responding here to what Brin wrote in his later replies, the first of which is here, starting with the words "your letter is cogent and intelligent". (Permalinks to individual comments on Blogger don't seem to be working.)