There Are No Famous Programmers

I frequently meet a friend for lunch and we talk. Usually I'll blab on and on about music, or some weirdo project I have going on. He'll tell me about jobs he's had or trips he might take now that he's sold a company and can chill out for a while. After one such meeting he said, "It's so refreshing to meet up with a geek who doesn't talk about VCs and term sheets the whole time."
Let's try an experiment. Think of a project you use all day. Maybe it's Rails or Python or something. Now, name 4 people on the core team without looking them up. I can't do that for anything I use. Alright, let's say you can do that. You know a myriad of things about the people who make your tools, but can you honestly say you know as much about them as you do about the tools they made you? Be honest with yourself and really look at how much you know about the people behind your gear as you do about the gear itself.
The famous programmers aren't really famous for programming anymore, but instead because they created some business or non-profit. Their code can't stand on its own as awesome, it has to be paired with some non-code fame formation and then people can grok their concept.
This is why I believe that there are no famous programmers, and being famous does not help you in your programming career. I've said this before, but today I was offered a system administrator job, again. It was very humbling to say the least. It kind of knocked me out to have someone think through all the things their company needs and the only thing they could think I'd be good at was system administration.
Yep, just a system administrator. Still.

In Depth: Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy

Ubuntu has many recognisable traits, but one of the best is its reputation for working with its community.
Since Mark Shuttleworth forged the original team in 2004, the Ubuntu community has exploded in size, spawning a diverse range of teams across the globe.
Underlining this sense of community was Mark's eagerness to embrace transparency, putting in place open governance and tools, a code of conduct and an invitation for volunteers to join the ranks of the project.
Recently, however, there was some controversy surrounding this community ethos. It kicked off when Canonical, Ubuntu's primary sponsor, announced a refreshed brand for the project. A new lick of paint was applied to the logo, wallpaper and more, and new colour schemes, textures, photographic treatments and other artistic flourishes were shared with the wider community.
As part of the brand development, key members of the community were flown to London to work with the design team, and senior community governance boards were told about the brand before it was publicly announced.
Source:http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/xeF2BjFVais/story01.htm

uTorrent For Linux Is Coming, Finally

Five years after uTorrent was released for the Windows platform the development team has announced that it’s working on a Linux version of the torrent client. The massive demand from users is cited as one of the main reasons why Linux users will have a native uTorrent application this coming summer
uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application. Every month, more than 50 million people use uTorrent and this number continues to grow alongside BitTorrent’s ever-increasing user base.
Ever since uTorrent was released, Mac and Linux users have begged the developers to release a version of the client designed to work on their computers. In 2006, when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent Inc., the company announced that a Mac version was coming. In 2008, nearly two years after the announcement, it was finally released to the public.
With the the release of the Mac version, Linux users were the only ones left out in the cold, but this is about to change. The uTorrent development team has just announced that they are working on a Linux version of the client. Further details on the time line and an eventual release date are not available at the moment.
Source: www.torrentfreak.com