I am struggling with a decision I never imagined I would have to make. Most of those who know me would be surprised at what I am considering. The question that is weighing on my mind is whether I should buy an iMac. (All the following is NOT derived with scientific rigor. It is merely [...]
We of course had the first infamous cold war. There is a second one occurring with tech companies, also known as the patent war. I am not going to bother outlining all the details of this, mainly because you should already be aware of it. If you aren’t, read Groklaw. Suffice it to say, the [...]
ok, maybe not spreading, but at least others are having a similar reastion to this web2.0 thing. its nice to know that I am not alone
Gentoo has its major perks. Ultimate flexibility, etc… However, the recent apach2 reconfig was a huge pita. I have a couple apache servers using mod_auth_pam. I just couldn’t get it to work, period. It turns out that you have to emerge the unstable version of mod_auth_pam. So if you find this, simply add net-www/mod_auth_pam ~x86 [...]
I asked a friend who is a couple steps ahead of me in lisp about i18n support. And he pointed me to http://nolan.eakins.net/node/150 And we wonder why unicode has taken so long to catch on.
I am venturing down the lisp road. Slowly. I have decided to write an app that I have been wanting to write for a very long time, and I am calling it Disorder. It will simply be a local publish subscribe system or a message dispatcher, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps a [...]
There are quite a few people throwing the “less is more” argument around. Then there are the ones who argue that less is indeed less. You take a basic meme (sorry for using that word) like writing a howto, or documenting something for the public… i.e. sharing information. Then constrain it to a specific format, [...]
So here is some more: reddit.com kiko.com Of all these, I like reddit the best. Its the only one that provides a service that I couldn’t just slap together on my own system. Most of these new sites seem to be slicing the desktop app up into small digestable chunks and then ajaxing them. No [...]
so I have been trying to figure out this web2.0 thing. trying to separate the wheat from the chaf. When people say things like, “The engineers who built the Web believed that if they presented the ‘right’ answer, intelligent humans would be pleased.” What? Does that even mean anything? Wading through nonsensical statements like that [...]
There are things happening out there which are interesting and/or hype. Well, they are mainly interesting because they are so hype-ish. ning rollya zvents fundable eventful of course there are many more out there. ones that have started it all…. like delicious, pubsub, etc.. and I will post them as I find them. It seems [...]
Eventually I would like to automate this… but this is good enough for now: To see if you have any vulnerable packages hanging out on your system, you want to start playing with glsa-check. This is in the gentoolkit ebuild, so install that if you don’t have it already. Run: glsa-check -p all ack! what [...]
I just emerge world -u qmail had a new ebuild posted so that got upgraded, with new configs. I noticed the new conf-* files and faithfully ran etc-update to interactively merge them. The next 40min was spent figuring out why my gentoo system just puked all over itself. turns out that a bunch of hardcoded [...]
Today I ran across fuse. A very simple elegant way to put random things into the filesystem. I especially like sshfs-fuse. It lets you put any remote dir accessible via ssh into your local fs. very very handy. Looking forward experimenting with the webdav plugin once I get it working on apache.
restarting my newism with a stupid bash thing I discovered. so without further ado here is the stupid bash thing (from my earlier post) You can pipe the output of for. for i in `echo “1 4 3 5 2″`; do echo $i done | sort -n There you have it, my stupid bash newism [...]
Peter St Andre talks about living without an ID. I have a fantasy of doing exactly that. The question I have is if you do not have any form of government issued ID, how would you leave the country? And if you did, how would you get back in?
People are constantly babbling about ‘ease of use’ and ‘intuitive software’ (at least to me when I mention linux and foss). I point out to them what they really mean is either ‘more windows-like’ or ‘easy to learn’, not necessarily easy to use. There are two kinds of easy which are mutually exclusive: easy to [...]
For the first time in a looong time I looked at a bill before it was passed. This was the result of a friend asking me how he could find out who is rep. is. So I looked at S.5 which has something to do with the class action law reform. I just find it [...]
We have all dealt with the clueless user that is beyond help. They are the developer’s nemesis, an entire discipline of computer science has evolved to help us deal with them, Julian is a student. In fact we have become so frustrated with this phenomemon that we even named it, Aunt Tillie My question is; [...]
I was reading Queue’s interview of Alan Kay and ran across the word Agglutination. Of course I had to look it up. In the definition it says, ” (For example, one of the longest words in Hungarian is ‘meg˙szent˙seg˙telen˙it˙het˙etlen˙seg˙es˙ke˙des˙ei˙tek˙ert, derived from the word ‘szent’ [saint]. However, this word is never used.)” Which begs the obvious [...]
If philosophic disciplines inevitably transform into science then what is contemporary philosophy?