$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 – by which time it will be worth nothing.

—Lazarus Long


Archive for the 'Software' Category

How Not To Tackle the Mess around Forges

Monday, October 12th, 2009

In my previous two posts I have diagnosed a significant weakness in the open-source infrastructure. The architecture of the code behind the major SourceForge-descended hosting sites is rotten, with all kinds of nasty consequences — data seriously jailed, poor or completely absent capabilities near scripting and project migration. I said I was going [...]

Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I’ve been off the air for several days due to a hosting-site failure last Friday. After several months of deteriorating performance and various services being sporadically inaccessible, Berlios’s webspace went 404 and the Subversion repositories stopped working…taking my GPSD project down with them. I had every reason to fear this might be permanent, [...]

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

I’m the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it’s decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining [...]

Linux-Hater’s Blog, considered

Friday, November 14th, 2008

One of the advantages of having helped found the open-source movement that I cherish most is that nobody can criticize me when I criticize it. I’m a gadfly by nature, disgusted by cant even (actually, especially!) when it’s my own insights being reflected back at me as dogma. Anyone who actually does that is [...]

Why “open source” is not mere marketese

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

Every once in a while I hear it alleged that “open source” is just a marketing device for a practice that would be just as well off without it. This is seriously wrong, but it’s a confusion I’m partly to blame for because I have emphasized the marketing utility of the term in the past.

In the Belly of the Beast

Monday, April 17th, 2006

In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name
and copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of
a Microsoft product. A vector-graphics editor called “Microsoft
Expressions”, apparently — thanks to Martin Dawson for the
tip.

The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for
hacking GIF images — the direct ancestor of libungif, [...]

Open Letter to Steve Lohr & John Markoff

Monday, March 27th, 2006

You’ve described only symptoms in Windows Is So Slow, but Why?, not the underlying problem. Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy?

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

This is my response to If
this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? by Andrew Brown of
The Guardian.

Take the WRT54G challenge!

Thursday, December 1st, 2005

So, LinkSys (formerly independent, now a tentacle of Cisco) has
brought the Linux version of their WRT54GL wireless router back to
life. We’d previously heard that Version 5 of the box would run
proprietary VxWorks firmware. But according to this
story over at LinuxDevices.com,

LinkSys is shipping a Linux-based WRT54GL model that it says it
created specially for Linux hobbyists, [...]

LISP — The Language That Will Not Die

Thursday, November 24th, 2005

I’ve spent large parts of the last week editing maps for a game
system I’m working on. I’ve been using the GIMP graphics editor, and I’m pretty
impressed with it. I haven’t found anything I can’t easily make it do
— except, oddly enough, draw straight lines between defined
endpoints. (I suspect there’s actually a way [...]