Feb 24

Norovirus alert – how to avoid spreading it

For about 24 hours beginning last Wednesday evening I had what I thought at the time was a bout of food poisoning. It wasn’t, because my wife Cathy and then our houseguest Dave Täht got it. It was a form of extremely infectious gastroenteritis, almost certainly a new strain of norovirus that is running through the U.S. like wildfire right now. Here’s what you need to know to avoid getting it and giving it to others:

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Feb 14

Penguicon Party Preannouncement

No details yet, but this is a heads-up: I will be at Penguicon 2013, 26-28 April in Pontiac Michigan…and there will be a second annual paty for friends of Armed & Dangerous (or FOAD – now where have I seen that before?)

Convention info at http://2013.penguicon.org/

Feb 03

Sugar turns twenty

This is a bulletin for Sugar’s distributed fan club, the hackers and sword geeks and other assorted riff-raff who have guested in our commodious basement. The rest of you can go about your business.

According to the vet’s paperwork, our cat Sugar turned 20 yesterday. (Actually, the vet thinks she may be 19, but that would have required her to be only 6 months old when we got her which we strongly doubt – she would have had to have been exceptionally large and physically mature for a kitten that age, which seems especially unlikely because her growth didn’t top out until a couple of years later.)

Even 19 would be an achievement for any cat – average lifespan for a neutered female is about 15, and five years longer is like a human hitting the century mark. It’s especially remarkable since this cat was supposed to be dead of acute nephritis sixteen months ago. Instead, she’s so healthy that we’ve been letting the interval between subcutaneous hydrations slip a little without seeing any recurrence of the symptoms we learned to associate with her kidney troubles (night yowling, disorientation, poor appetite).

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Feb 02

Is closed source worth it for performance?

The following question appeared in my mailbox today:

If a certain program (that you need) was proprietary, and its open-source counterpart was (currently) 40% slower. Which would you use, the open-source one or the proprietary one?

The answer is: it depends. I’m going to answer this one in public because it’s a useful exercise in thinking about larger tradeoffs.

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Jan 28

Coding Freedom: a review

My usual audience is well aware why I am qualified to review Gabriella Coleman’s book, Coding Freedom, but since I suspect this post might reach a bit beyond my usual audience I will restate the obvious. I have been operating as the hacker culture’s resident ethnographer since around 1990, consciously applying the techniques of anthropological fieldwork (at least as I understood them) to analyze the operation of that culture and explain it to others. Those explanations have been tested in the real world with large consequences, including helping the hacker culture break out of its ghetto and infect everything that software touches with subversive ideas about open processes, transparency, peer review, and the power of networked collaboration.

Ever since I began doing my own ethnographic work on the hacker culture from the inside as a participant, I have keenly felt the lack of any comparable observation being done by outsiders formally trained in the techniques of anthropological fieldwork. I’m an amateur, self-trained by reading classic anthropological studies and a few semesters of college courses; I know relatively little theory, and have had to construct my own interpretative frameworks in the absence of much knowledge about how a professional would do it.

Sadly, the main thing I learned from reading Gabriella Coleman’s new book, Coding Freedom, is that my ignorance may actually have been a good thing for the quality of my results. The insight in this book is nearly smothered beneath a crushing weight of jargon and theoretical elaboration, almost all of which appears to be completely useless except as a sort of point-scoring academic ritual that does less than nothing to illuminate its ostensible subject.

This is doubly unfortunate because Coleman very obviously means well and feels a lot of respect and sympathy for the people and the culture she was studying – on the few occasions that she stops overplaying the game of academic erudition she has interesting things to say about them. It is clear that she is natively a shrewd observer whose instincts have been only numbed – not entirely destroyed – by the load of baggage she is carrying around.

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Jan 24

Charisma: a how-to

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how he could become more charismatic.

Because the term “charismatic” has unhelpful religious connotations, let’s begin by being clear what he was actually asking. A person is “charismatic” when he or she has the ability to communicate a vision to others in a way that makes them sign up for making it real. Sometimes the vision is large (“Change the world!”) sometimes it is relatively small (“Become as cool as me!”).

My friend asked me how he could become more charismatic because he has seen me do the charisma thing a lot. This relates to my previous blogging on practical prophecy. A prophet has to be charismatic, it’s a requirement to get people to actually move.

Before he asked me about it, I would not have thought charisma was something that could be explained in detail. But questions properly posed sometimes elicit knowledge the person answering was not consciously aware of holding. That happened in this case; I found myself explaining four modes of charisma.

Here is what I told him.

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Jan 21

How to fix cable messes

A friend of mine recently posted this image of a hideous network-cable tangle:

A hideous tangle of network cable

A hideous tangle of network cable.

I have invented an algorithm for fixing this kind of mess. Probably other people have developed the same technique before, but it wasn’t taught to me and I’ve never seen it written down. Here it is…

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Jan 08

How do you bait a trap for the soul?

You bait a trap for a mouse with tasty food. How do you bait a soul-trap for people too smart to fall for conventional religion? With half-truths, of course.

I bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult tonight. The cult is called Landmark Forum or Landmark Education, and is descended from est, the Erhard Seminars Training. The induction attempt was mediated by a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. He has attended several Landmark events, praises the program to the skies, and probably does not realize even now that he has begun to exhibit classic cult-follower symptoms (albeit so far only in a quite a mild form – trying as hard as he did to to recruit me is the main one so far).

“But Eric. How did you know it was a cult?”

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it was all the shiny happy Stepford people with the huge smiles and the nameplates and the identical slightly glassy-eyed affect greeting us several times on the way to the auditorium. Maybe it was the folksy presenter with the vaguely Southern accent spewing pseudo-profundities about “living into your future” and “you will get Nothing from this training” (yes, you could hear the capital N). Maybe it was the parade of people telling stories about how broken they were until they found Landmark.

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Dec 21

robotfindskitten – the Mayan Apocalypse Edition!

Today’s very special non-world-ending software release, triggered if not originated from here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories is the amazing Zen simulation, Robot Finds Kitten. I bow in respect before Leonard Richardson and the other giants of kitten-finding history and am humbly proud to be counted among the select few who have contributed to this monumental, er, monument.

Get yer hot fresh tarball right here. It will improve your sex life, clear up your financial problems, cure your acne, and make you as a god among men. Would I lie?

Dec 20

Reposturgeon Attacks Tokyo!

Well, er, no. Actually, it attacks CVS.

Yes, that’s right, the just-shipped reposurgeon 2.11 can now read – though not write – CVS repositories. To get it to do this, I got my lunch-hooks on a relatively old program called cvsps that assembles changesets out of CVS repositories for human inspection. I gave it a –fast-export reporting mode that emits a fast-import stream instead, so now CVS has a universal exporter that will talk to any version-control system that speaks import streams. Oh, yes, and I’m maintaining cvsps now too – applause to David Mansfield, who both did a very good job on that code and sees clearly that its original use case is obsolete and –fast-export is a better way forward.

Two substantial releases of different projects in a day is a fast pace even for me. cvsps-3.0 and reposurgeon-2.11; two great tastes that taste great together.

Fear the reposturgeon!

Dec 16

The Reposturgeon That Ate Sheboygan!

Well-designed software suites should not only be correct, they should be able to demonstrate their own correctness. This is why the new 2.10 release of reposurgeon features a new tool called ‘repodiffer’. And yes, that is what it sounds like – a diff tool that operates not on files but entire repository histories. You get a report on which revisions are identical, which are different, and in the latter case where the differences are, down to which files don’t match. Commits to be paired are matched by committer and commit date. Like reposurgeon, it will work on any version-control system that can emit a fast-import stream.

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Dec 11

Heavy weapons

I should have known it. I really should have expected what happened.

So it’s about week 7 at kuntao training, the tasty exotic mix of south Chinese kung fu and Philippine weapons techniques my wife and I are now studying, and we’re doing fine. The drills are challenging, but we’re up to the challenge. Our one episode of sparring so far went very well, with Cathy and I both defeating our opponents decisively in knife duels. The other students and the instructors have accepted us and show a gratifying degree of confidence in our abilities. Our first test approaches and we are confident of passing.

The only fly in the ointment, the one silly damn thing I’ve had persistent trouble with, is spinning my escrima sticks. Last night I found out why…

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Dec 02

Beware! The Reposturgeon!

I had said I wasn’t going to do it, but…I experimented, and it turned out to be easier than I thought. Release 2.7 of reposurgeon writes (as well as reading) Subversion repositories. With the untested support for darcs, which should work exactly as well as darcs fast-export and fast-import do, this now brings the set of fully-supported version-control systems to git, hg, bzr, svn, and darcs; reposurgeon can be used for repository surgery and interconversion on any of these.

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