Congratulations, Quinn!

Slight technical correction — see the bottom of this entry

My friend Quinn Norton has given birth to a lovely young girl named Ada T. Norton, who weighed in at a very healthy 8.8 pounds. I believe the baby was named after Lady Ada Lovelace, who — depending on which historical analysis you believe — was either the world’s first programmer or world’s first software and hardware documenter.

Being a house full of geeks deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, they blogged the birth. The best line in that mini-blog goes to Gilbert:

On a completly unrelated note, I’d like to point out to my workplace that this birth was significantly shorter than most internal OSS [Open Source Software] code releases. Perhaps you guys should take a hint or two.

Gilbert fails to appreciate these crucial differences between parents and Open Source programmers:

• With parents, the guy-girl ratio’s pretty even.
• Unlike Open Source projects, with parenting it’s considered bad form to abandon, fork or hand the project over to someone else.
• The maintenance phase of a parenting project is at least 18 years.
• Parents, by definition, have had sex at least once in their lives.

And now, the technical correction

Gilbert writes:

No, foo, not Open Source Software; I’m talking about Operational Systems Software, something that every good telco or ILEC has. It’s most definately NOT open source.

Oops. I haven’t made an acronym boo-boo like that since the one I made with “MILF”: I thought he was talking about those peckerheads, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and he was using it in the American Pie sense: “Mom I’d Like to Fuck”.

I still think the differences between parents and Operational Systems Software programmers still apply, though.