Ryan Maple and Peter O'Hara, take a bow!

Open Note to Peter O'Hara and Ryan W Maple of Guardian Digital:

Dear Mr O'Hara and Mr Maple,

Your work on fakeroot.src.rpm was simply amazing: your scripting is clean, well-documented and, yes, pleasing to the eye. It has been a pleasure to quickly review your package for use on my server.
Thank you for showing me how a proper Spec file can look.

I attribute today's bout of fanboyishness to a recent project requiring me to review, and ultimately re-write, a horrendously large series of packages. It's a project involving Bugzilla, and the most prevalent packages are from a distro I like to call Anal Tempest, a collection of such fine, strong, fertile packages in nice hairy cubes that unfortunately I'd be a rampant fool to attempt to use without rebuilding and, apparently, a fool to attempt to rebuild.

While against such a foil Messrs Maple and O'Hara's product could only shine, I'm reasonably confident that anyone else in a similar position as I am but without the Anal Tempest packages for comparison would also agree. Their work is that clean. And Clean is Good.

Your Article Barely Sucks

I squatted over Your Band Name Sucks: 50 of the Inexcusably Worst for far too long without anything coming to mind. Then it hit me -- or hit something. Or something.

Dear Mike;

Your article cannot be accepted to a magazine, and it's important that you understand that inevitability as much as I do; I all but decided that straight-away, however.

Your command of the English Language is amazing for an American: you navigated the tricky waters of 'your' and 'you're', a treacherous strait which claims the hopes of so many ignorant empire-quitters before they even realize they're no longer making sense in any language. You toss about language terminology like you know what you're saying, and to many of your friends and family you are.

The problem is you still write like a secondary-school drop-out instead of a primary school drop-out. You need to learn to write like a real adult; and then you need to make it interesting.

I'm sorry you had to hear the news from me, in addition to that portion of the Internet's population which lives outside of America.

Sincerely,

I should also disclaim things further: I know I can't write, and I know my writing is shit when I do scrawl aimlessly on walls, children and weblogs. The difference is that I don't need my writing to be anything other than shit, and the writing in this article seems to be directed at some editor specifically, in the hopes of landing a job.

I do hope that, once the dust has settled, I can still biggie-size my happy meal. Or something. You see what I'm doing there? I'm suggesting you work at McDonalds and Burger King, because those are the only thing more common than Starbucks in your country. And I'm drawing attention to my weak joke because that's another form of humour. I'm taking the piss on myself, which I'm sure means something entirely different in your country.

Would You Buy A Program from This Developer?

In my continuing shock at the sheer masses of uneducated at all positions in society, I've come across a bit of a shock at "mozdev.org - autocopy: index". The developer of this program - really just an additional component for Seamonkey and its narcissist cousin Firefox - describes his little product and shows a command of the English language we'd expect of a child of nine.

Either the developer really is nine years old, has absolutely no command of the English language to speak of, is too inattentive to detail or simply too stupid to write English.

And I sure as hell am not 'buying' (for even free software isn't free) something as complicated as a Seamonkey extension from people who cannot even find the 'spell check' button on their browser. Writing a description of your product in all but broken English is not a way to inspire confidence!