Almost 20 years ago my father answered the phone as we ate a late family dinner. He was mightily confused because the man on the other end of the call was asking him questions he had no idea how t answer. After a few moments of confusion, my father told the man, he was pretty sure he wanted his son, Kevin, not him.
On the other end waited Ian Murdock. He’d taken the time to call me up to do my Debian maintainer identity interview. It was, and is, a big deal, from a security standpoint, to verify the identity of new Debian maintainers. But the task is tedious, calling up new maintainers and talking to them for half an hour. Imagine my surprise, when, the man doing my interview was the Ian from debian. One of the co-founders of the entire project had taken the time to call me. I was Impressed.
Years later, I got to meet Ian in person at an ExactTarget conference, and I thanked him for calling a nerdy high school kid to verify his identity. He not only confirmed my identity for security purposes, but he affirmed that I mattered, and could help. At the time, I don’t think he remembered the call, and I don’t think I was sufficiently able to convey what his call meant to me.
Last Monday, Ian Murdock was found dead in his home. The details are few, the speculation rampant. Police may or may not be involved. The proximate cause might have been Suicide. Was his Twitter account hacked? Regardless of the details, I’m reminded that all too often our culture judges people by their actions in the worst moments of their life. Those who have killed are forever murderers branded by their actions at the worst moments of their life. We don’t seem to have a cultural construct for good people who made mistakes. Not where suicide or the police are concerned. I’ve already started to see Ian eulogized not for his contributions to the world, but as a “crazy” and someone who gave up. I don’t know how Ian died, it’s likely you don’t either. It doesn’t matter; Ian was more, is more, than the unknown actions at the end of his life. He was also the kind of man who’d not only call and verify my identity, but reaffirm an insecure high school nerd’s ability to meaningfully contribute to the world at large.
I don't see a mention of "immoral", but there are certain people you don't want to give upload rights to: people who will introduce backdoors, people who will be irresponsible with their private key and leave it lying around in public places, etc.
The ability to include code in a release of widely-used software involves a large amount of trust, and for a distributed, volunteer project, you don't get the checks that either a long personal relationship or a formal employment background check would give you. This puts you at risk of, as Juniper so eloquently put it recently, "unauthorized code".
In Firefox mobile, there's usually an open book icon in the URL bar (at the right) that puts you in a sort of "reader mode", stripping away CSS and giving you text only. It's usually there for articles.
I had the same trouble with this article on the desktop. This happens a lot, designers assume everyone's running full screen, or are not on mobile, or just don't consider it. In desktop firefox I've installed addon Disable Style Button, which turns off CSS with one click. It's a shortcut for View/Page Style/No Style if you want to try it out without installing the addon.
The little book icon isn't always there, and anyway I generally like the result of turning off CSS anyway, it looks very nineties and I can just see the faintest outline of a middle finger.
> This happens a lot, designers assume everyone's running full screen, or are not on mobile, or just don't consider it
What kills me is that a basic 90's HTML 3 page can be zoomed and scrolled on mobile browser. If you don't care too much about fancy design (eg for personal sites), then just use HTML and really basic, or no, CSS. If you do care about sophisticated design, then you should ensure it works on the most common browsers and devices.
Even just a half-screen-width window on my laptop shows the same thing.
I think it's darkly hilarious: it's uncomfortable to read text which is a full screen width, so sites waste 50% of the browser window in order to give readers reasonably-wide text — but they waste that 50% of the window even when it is already reasonably-sized.
Almost 20 years ago my father answered the phone as we ate a late family dinner. He was mightily confused because the man on the other end of the call was asking him questions he had no idea how t answer. After a few moments of confusion, my father told the man, he was pretty sure he wanted his son, Kevin, not him.
On the other end waited Ian Murdock. He’d taken the time to call me up to do my Debian maintainer identity interview. It was, and is, a big deal, from a security standpoint, to verify the identity of new Debian maintainers. But the task is tedious, calling up new maintainers and talking to them for half an hour. Imagine my surprise, when, the man doing my interview was the Ian from debian. One of the co-founders of the entire project had taken the time to call me. I was Impressed.
Years later, I got to meet Ian in person at an ExactTarget conference, and I thanked him for calling a nerdy high school kid to verify his identity. He not only confirmed my identity for security purposes, but he affirmed that I mattered, and could help. At the time, I don’t think he remembered the call, and I don’t think I was sufficiently able to convey what his call meant to me.
Last Monday, Ian Murdock was found dead in his home. The details are few, the speculation rampant. Police may or may not be involved. The proximate cause might have been Suicide. Was his Twitter account hacked? Regardless of the details, I’m reminded that all too often our culture judges people by their actions in the worst moments of their life. Those who have killed are forever murderers branded by their actions at the worst moments of their life. We don’t seem to have a cultural construct for good people who made mistakes. Not where suicide or the police are concerned. I’ve already started to see Ian eulogized not for his contributions to the world, but as a “crazy” and someone who gave up. I don’t know how Ian died, it’s likely you don’t either. It doesn’t matter; Ian was more, is more, than the unknown actions at the end of his life. He was also the kind of man who’d not only call and verify my identity, but reaffirm an insecure high school nerd’s ability to meaningfully contribute to the world at large.
To Ian, Thank you for all that you were and did.