Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

I’ve written before about scientific error cascades and the pernicious things that happen when junk science becomes the focus or rationale of a political crusade. The worst example of this sort of thing in my lifetime, and arguably in the entire history of science, has been the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) panic. Now that the… Continue reading Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

Breaking into writing

I just tried to post this as a comment on Sarah Hoyt’s post about breaking into writing. Dunno if it went into moderation or just got eaten Sarah, who I esteem very highly and is full of pungent and sensible advice on writing and other matters, left out two rules:

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A relative achievement

Spencer Lehman. At age 75, a U.S. national champion pole-vaulter. My favorite uncle. Mother’s brother, for you Norwegian-speakers (update: I misremembered, it turns out to be Swedish that distinguishes ‘morbror’ from ‘farbror’). And you know that archetype of the Malibu-dwelling hippie stockbroker that shows up in comic novels about California? That would be him.

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Sneaking up on the forge problem

I’ve written before about the problems with today’s software-forge sites – how they’re craptacular piles of PHP driving direct SQL queries with almost zero scriptability that become data jails for open-source projects. I’ve hinted that I think there’s a potential solution based on Roundup, a brilliantly simple and powerful message queue manager disguised as a… Continue reading Sneaking up on the forge problem

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Reposturgeon from the Black Lagoon!

reposurgeon 1.8 is out, and with this release it has all the conversion features I’ve been able to think up while doing the last couple of conversions. This version creates real tags from the lightweight tags generated by git-svn, and also consolidates matched D/A pairs from Subversion into renames. An “edit multiline” variant of the… Continue reading Reposturgeon from the Black Lagoon!

Night of the living reposturgeon!

reposurgeon 1.7 is out. Fewer obvious changes this time; the big feature is that it knows how to read and use the CVS revision maps generated by the -R option of git-cvsimport. This means that it can patch CVS revision references into an action-stamp form that makes sense in a VCS-independent way. Fear the reposturgeon!

The Smartphone Wars: Signs and Portents

The September comScore numbers are out, and the market transition hinted at by the June numbers seems to be under way. Growth in the U.S. smartphone market is slowing, and the flavor of the competitive game is about to change.

Names and consequences

freshmeat.net abruptly changed its name to freecode.com a couple of days ago. As a consequence, the little program I wrote to submit release announcements to it is now renamed freecode-submit. People who ship releases frequently enough to find freecode-submit essential might also want to look at shipper, which I wrote to automate other aspects of… Continue reading Names and consequences