A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass (1999) | Hacker News Reader

A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass (1999)

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79 pointsthealphanerd13 comments

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Reading that again made me wonder who Brett Glass was. Apparently, I wasn't the only one:

http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-as-n...

Brett Glass himself shows up to answer.

He makes a pretty good case for not bothering to read his messages.

Evidently he's against net neutrality also. Cringely writes about him.

http://www.cringely.com/tag/brett-glass/

At one stage there was some uncertainty as to whether he was a bug or a feature. Apparently because FreeBSD used to have a page about him, it was decided he was a feature.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2003-March/0...

Fixed link: http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-as-n...

Brett Glass's statement of rebuttal here is an amusing addition to the story and worth reading (even if you probably won't be on his side).

After re-reading both accounts, it's clear to me that Brett misunderstood Poul-Henning's argument. Poul-Henning said to "just build the damn bikeshed, I don't care what color it is," whereas Brett said, "Poul-Henning's assertion that all such ideas should be dismissed as "bikeshedding" reflects this dismissive attitude"

I read Poul-Henning's argument, which did not say that ideas should be dismissed, but rather 'just built', as attempting to contribute to a constructive spirit, and Glass's argument as defending the broken management process.

Brett Glass is, of course, the patron saint of bike shedding.

This is one of the rare emails that got its own website. It is also one of the rare websites where changing the color on reload is okay.

http://bikeshed.org/

Or, for whatever you prefer: http://yellow.bikeshed.org/

(The same site also seems to be on bikeshed.com, which is where I remembered it)

I'm really curious what the issues were with the proposal to make FreeBSD sleep accept non-integer arguments.

It depends on how sleep(3) is implemented really. Usually sleep means approximately one second resolution. If you start adding fractional second sleeps, say 1.5ms is required, you start moving into real time space at which point the kernel API, userland C runtime and all sorts have to change.

Plus there are good reasons not to arbitrarily sleep for sub-second times for the sake of the scheduler. You probably should be using select or other event driven programming models rather than relying on delays.

Fwiw, on recent FreeBSDs nanosleep(2) is the system call, which is what both sleep(3) and sleep(1) use, the former with whole numbers of seconds, and the latter with fractional seconds.

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