This is a followup to The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers. That post ended “This problem is a Chinese finger-trap for careful and conscientious programmers. The better you are, the worse this problem is likely to hurt your brain. Embrace the suck.” That last phrase is a take on a military objurgation… Continue reading Embracing the suck
Category: Software
The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
GPS, the Global positioning System, was designed in the 1970s under hardware-cost constraints that would seem ridiculous today. This makes interpreting the data it sends into a black art, and produces some really painful edge cases. There’s one edge case in particular that I’ve come to think of as the Rollover of Doom. This morning… Continue reading The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
Plug and Pray in GPS-land
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another darkly humorous tale of the seamy side of GPS interfacing. GPSD working with USB GPS mice has, when properly installed, lovely plug-and-play self-configuring behavior. That is, you plug a USB GPS into a USB port, the hotplug system notifies the gpsd daemon that the GPS is available, the daemon… Continue reading Plug and Pray in GPS-land
NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
In discussion of the GPSD project, a commenter suggested that its role might be going away in part because the NMEA 0183 protocol historically used in GPS sensors is being replaced by NMEA2000. So far, this is not true, and the reasons it’s not true are worth a look because they illustrate a sort of… Continue reading NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
Off with their header files!
I released a new software tool today. The surprise about this one is that it turns out to be consistently more useful than I expected. And thereby hangs a tale.
If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?
I’ve written software for a lot of different reasons besides pure utility in the past. Sometimes I’ve been making an aesthetic statement, sometimes I’ve hacked to perpetuate a tribal in-joke, and at least once I have written a substantial piece of code exactly because the domain experts solemnly swore that job was impossible to automate… Continue reading If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?
It’s good to be ubiquitous
So, while trying to discover the minor version of the Android 2.2 running on my G-2, I touched the tab labeled “Open source licenses”. Scrolled down, and “Eric S. Raymond” popped out at me.
Bleg for info – Linux backup tools and services
One of the comments that got lost in the recent database restore was a pointer to a backup program I can’t offhand remember the name of. I remember that it’s a command-line tool written in Perl (alas) and meant to be done by a cron job; what it does underneath is rsync with hardlinks to… Continue reading Bleg for info – Linux backup tools and services
Lessons learned from reposurgeon
OK, I’m officially coming out of my cave now, after what amounted to a two-week coding orgy. I’ve shipped reposurgeon 0.5; the code looks and feels pretty solid, the documentation is written, the test suite is in place, and I’ve got working repo-rebuild support for two systems, one of which is not git. The rest… Continue reading Lessons learned from reposurgeon
Announcing reposurgeon – a tool for the good new days
I’ve been mostly blog-silent for the last week because I’ve been working my tail off on a new project. It’s reposurgeon, a tool for performing surgery on repository histories, and there are several interesting things to note about it.
Children of a Lesser Good
Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like. If those are the best, what about the rest? Here’s a tour of some of the lesser-known stuff I’ve written or had… Continue reading Children of a Lesser Good
Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree
This is the story of the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree, an essay in risk versus skepticism and verification in software development with a nod in the general direction of Arlo Guthrie. About three hours ago as I began to write, I delivered on a promise to probably my most distinguished customer ever – Dr. Donald Knuth.… Continue reading Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree
Killing the Founder
During the controversy I described in Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves one of the parties characterized me as “nuts and in decline.”. This failed to bother me, and not because I’m insulated against such insults by my natural arrogance. OK, I am largely insulated against such insults by my natural arrogance, but that’s not the… Continue reading Killing the Founder
Software licenses as conversation
An article published yesterday, I could license you to use this software, but then I’d have to kill you calls out some odd outliers in the open-source licensing space – odder, actually, than any I ever reviewed when I was the founding president of the Open Source Initiative. I wonder, though, if the author actually… Continue reading Software licenses as conversation
My open-source project is cooler than yours
Yes, GPSD is way cooler than your project. You know how I can tell? Because my latest feature request is from a scientist who wants to use GPSD as part of the control software for an autonomous robot submarine. That’s how I can tell. No word yet on whether the robot submarine will have a… Continue reading My open-source project is cooler than yours
Incentives to be Open
A correspondent pointed me at a paper by Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation, which builds on my papers in some interesting ways. Here’s one of the money quotes: Building on arguments of Ghosh (1998), Raymond (1999), and von Hippel and von… Continue reading Incentives to be Open
IBM: Now trying to dig out…
IBM has issued another statement on the TurboHercules imbroglio. This one is reported by the Linux Foundation, but comes from Dan Frye. Dan Frye heads IBM’s Linux Technology Center and was actually at the top of my mental shortlist of likely voices of sanity over there. (Full disclosure: Dan kept me supplied with IBM Thinkpads… Continue reading IBM: Now trying to dig out…
IBM: Digging itself in deeper
Yesterday I blogged about the escalating dispute between IBM and TurboHercules SAS. I said, and will repeat now, that the central issue for the open-source community in this matter is not the antitrust allegations, but rather the fact that IBM has raised a patent threat alleging that Hercules violates its intellectual property. And especially, that… Continue reading IBM: Digging itself in deeper
IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?
Sadly, Florian Mueller’s scream of outrage (IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community is not an April Fool’s joke. IBM has done what it swore not to in 2005 – picked up the patent weapon and aimed it to block an open-source project. I was thoroughly briefed on this about… Continue reading IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?
Abusing CIA for Fun and Profit
No, not the Central Intelligence Agency. I refer to CIA.vc, a nifty free service that monitors commits on open-source repositories in real time and echoes notifications to IRC. And not really abuse, either – rather, I just implemented a way to make it do something else useful. Others might consider doing likewise.