Upstream First

Upstream First - Mentality

Aspects

• Code
• Testing
• Packaging

How this applies

• If you have a patch there is almost no reason that a patch should not be submitted upstream(master/backport)
• If you find a bug and a fix for a downstream issue. 
• If you have a packaging change there is almost no reason that a patch should not be submitted upstream

Examples:

• If you have a patch that you are backporting downstream.  The patch should be at least proposed and merged to master.  If master is merge, it should be proposed to stable branches (even if it won't be accepted to upstream, then add that a comment or in the commit message as a concern) .  It may be abandoned but that is fine.
• If there are packaging differences or bugs between downstream and upstream, you should propose patch to upstream packaging to reduce differences in packaging.
• If you have a new feature the test code should be in the upstream code, packaging should have any new requirements, and CI should be exercising the new feature before it can be considered complete.
• If you find a bug, make sure the bug is valid, check to see if it has been reported upstream? File it upstream, work it upstream, fix it upstream.  But if you are needing to fix something for a customer for an escalation, do what you need to but also follow up with upstream and make sure it's patched.

NASA MMO on KickStarter

Was browsing through kickstarter this morning and found this project and decided I wanted to post a note about it. Astronaut Moon Mars and Beyond NASA MMO seems like a great project and if it gets full funding (which it should) I will have to try it out and maybe play it some.

Mobile Text Alerts

Just tested out a text messaging system for keeping a group connected by Text Messages.
http://mobile-text-alerts.com/

Their system is easy to use to signup a group of people who want to get alerts by sms text message. Their pricing was very reasonable for providing group text messaging support.

Gencon Indy 2010

Gencon Indy 2010 was very very cool.  The dealer room had enough in it to occupy a full days worth of browsing.  Played some Dominion, Ticket to Ride and pathfinder while there and will be getting a 4 day pass for next year instead of the Saturday only pass like I did this year.

Penguicon

Was at Penguicon this weekend and enjoyed it greatly!

Got to listen to a couple of book readings by authors and I'm going to have to read more by "Karl Schroeder" and his VIRGA stories.

Also will have to pick up Dominion the card game. That is an addictive game!

Blogger Transition

Blogger announced that they are no longer supporting ftp hosted blogs, and you have to switch to a blogger hosted. I'm now using the custom domain option and have my blog as a subdomain http://blog.yazug.com/ but now I'm wondering how to update my feedburner feed since I set that up before pointing to my ftp deployed blog and there is still an atom.xml on my other site...

Finally got it by recreating my feedburner page as well as resetting up my layout for the blog.

LED Firefly Idea

I'm currently digging to find out how to make a cool little PIC micro controlled LED Firefly. Which can detect if it's light or dark and blink when it's dark only.

This came from an Instructables link for LED Fireflies Prototype. They are the natural extension of the "LED throwies" which are always on and are cool.

So starting out I've been digging for where to start and though I should keep track of the thing's I've found so far on here.

PIC Micro:
Found a cool development kit for only $36 which should provide a decent starting point for playing around with PIC Micros.
microchip.com the PIC12F683 or it's little brother PIC12F675
After a bit of digging I'll be ordering the PICkit 1 starter kit for $36 probably along with a couple of additional PIC12F683/PIC12F675 chips.

Next part of this experiment is to figure out how you can use an LED as both input and output. A quick Google search provided parts of the answer but to figure out how I'm going to do this will probably require some tinkering.

* Make blog: LED touch sensor
* Bi-directional LEDs

More later