“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.
Month: November 2010
The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand
Some drastic change of direction is about to take place in Nokia’s smartphone strategy. We can predict this because Nokia has shut down the Symbian Foundation. What we can’t tell yet is what direction they’ll jump, and there are at least four somewhat plausible scenarios. I’m going to list them in what I think are… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand
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.
First impressions of the G-2
As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware. I was seriously planning… Continue reading First impressions of the G-2
I join the not-flying list
Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than… Continue reading I join the not-flying list
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
Why spamrape happens
One of my regulars writes, re the recent spam-raping of the blog >I’m still trying to figure out what the attack was. All the comments were replaced by spam? No. What happened was that on Sunday night I caught a bot in the act of replacing real comments with spam, oldest first. It was working… Continue reading Why spamrape happens
Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek
When the photographer from People magazine showed up to do a spread on me in 1996 (yes, 1996 – pre-open-source, it’s from my first 15 minutes of fame as a lexicographer), he taught me a useful term – “face people”. Face people are people who are famous for being famous, the vacant icons of celebrity… Continue reading Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek
INTERCAL justifies its existence
(This is a repost. The original went of on 2010-11-14, a few hours before the spambot rape.) Last night I made a classic n00b mistake. I was in a rush to get a test finished because my wife had just gotten home and it was time for us to haul off for the weekly Friday… Continue reading INTERCAL justifies its existence
The Rape of the Blog
(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.) Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote: My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an… Continue reading The Rape of the Blog
After the spamraping, there has been some loss
This blog was badly raped by a spambot on Saturday. Recovery from the problem required restoring from a backup made early that morning. Lost in the restore were two posts and about a dozen comments. It is possible I may be able to rescue some content by looking directly at an SQL dump, but I… Continue reading After the spamraping, there has been some loss
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.