Embracing the suck

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

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

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.

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

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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

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

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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…

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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

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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?

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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.

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