Minimalist Linux

I like how the Void installer gives me a minimal, tractable Linux system. Quite how minimal has been an ongoing discovery including: wondering why my locate database is getting stale and discovering that cron isn't installed, and looking for my dhclient logs and discovering I have no syslogd installed.

Android cellphone storage

An ongoing annoyance has been how often out-of-space is my still-in-contract Moto E given how very little of that space is occupied by anything I added. This week I found that if I uninstall updates, disable, and clear data for many system applications, then it still runs out of space but less frequently. Which system applications can safely be disabled I'm not sure but it's at least progress, albeit from effort I oughtn't have had to make.

Being too helpful

We at the Open Microscopy Environment provide open-source software on GitHub under ome and openmicroscopy with extensive developer documention for both Bio-Formats and OMERO. We distribute our software for free and support it mostly through mailing lists and forums.

Our users often praise our support, suggesting that it exceeds what is typical of commercial paid support. They also, despite often having software development skills themselves, rarely contribute fixes or features: they are much better at reporting issues than addressing them.

This week I was intrigued to hear the suggestion that we don't get anywhere near as many external contributions as one might expect of free open-source projects with a large userbase because we are too good at promptly answering users' questions and actually delivering code changes to address them. It's a generalization of the idea, wait for a day before investigating support requests in case people just figure out the issue themselves.

I don't believe that we have any intention to respond to this hypothesis by becoming less helpful but it is an interesting problem that I had not considered before.