Via Dan Maslowski:

3.3 Responsibilities to your Organization

[…]

3.3.1 be a technical conscience

When the “Emperor has no clothes”, it is the responsibility of the senior technical staff to stand up and say so. Sales people are driven by short term business. Marketing people work with all manner of vague and ambiguous factors. Executives work with the information that other people have given them. Managers work with the directions they have been given. Engineers are the people who responsible for figuring out how this stuff is all going to work … and if it isn't going to work they have an obligation to say so.

When somebody says “good enough for who its for”, it is the responsibility of the senior technical staff to set higher standards. The business people are primarily driven by time and cost considerations, and if the senior engineers don't stand up for technical excellence, we can be sure that nobody else will.

Senior engineers need to regularly ask the questions:

• If not now, when?
• If not us, who?

Roles and Responsibilities for Senior Technical Staff — Mark Kampe

I still try to keep an eye on Linux kernel development, after about 6 years without any active involvement. It remains an interesting community, project, and codebase to watch, for a number of reasons. One of the ways I follow what's going on is by reading the kernelplanet feed, which aggregates blogs by a number of kernel developers, including Pete Zaitcev's livejournal.

Recently he wrote a couple of entries (part 1, part 2) concerning “relative pointers” and “absolute pointers” under the Xen hypervisor. I spent a while staring at these posts, wondering what kind of magical VM techniques Xen might be using that could meaningfully expose absolute and relative addresses to a guest Linux kernel and X server. Eventually I gave up on understanding the posts themselves, and turned to Google to find out more. I expected my searches to yield pages describing implementation details of the Xen hypervisor.

Instead, I quickly realized my mistake. Pete wasn't writing about addresses, but the mouse pointer. Mark McLoughlin gives the context.

My Firefox tab situation is out of control. Recently I realized that half of my 30 tabs have been open for weeks, and some for months:

Since I started using SessionSaver, even crashes (whether at the Firefox, X server, or Linux kernel level) do not kill my tabs. The only limit is the usability problems with the tab implemention in Firefox 1.5 — a limit of about 30 tabs on my 1024x768 laptop screen.

But now I hear that Firefox 2.0 will have tab bar scrolling, and there is a 2.0 beta to try. Tabs without limits! Should I back away from the edge, or jump over it?