Tuesday 30 October 2012

Introducing PasteShare

If you are a programmer, and you collaborate with a team of developers, you probably make regular use of a "paste bin" site. Paste bins are websites where you can enter some code into a text area and share the link with others. Sort of like a public notice board for code.

Sometimes the code that is pasted is useful to others; an algorithm or boilerplate code that might help someone in future. The problem with current paste bin sites is that code is still copyrighted. If someone stumbles across your paste in future, they won't be able to trace you to ask permission to use it, and they don't implicitly give you permission just because it's available to the general public.

PasteShare is different. On PasteShare whenever someone pastes some code, they explicitly release that code into the public domain with the Unlicense license. If you find some code on PasteShare, you are able to use it in whatever way you see fit - there's no need for permission.

I'll continue to improve PasteShare over time, and in particular I want to make finding useful code easier, so expect plenty of improvements on that front. If you think of anything that would be useful to you, feel free to tweet me!

Now, go share your code!

Monday 8 October 2012

Goodbye Ubuntu

I considered calling this blog post "I'm moving to Debian" but if I did, people would probably assume that I'm doing so in a trantrum, and just posting to rant.

But I'm not, I'm not angry, maybe just disappointed. I've had the love of Ubuntu beaten out of me over the years...