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
Month: November 2011
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:
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.
“All [our] models are wrong”
It’s Climategate II, with another email dump from the CRU team, and Phil Jones writing that “All [our] models are wrong”
The Smartphone Wars: Samsung Busts a Move?
Well, now, this is interesting. Cyanogen hints via Twitter that we may get a 4.0 Cyanogen ROM in two months. The news coverage I’ve seen so far misses what I think is the most important bit of context – that Cyanogen’s eponymous founder and lead developer got hired by Samsung a few months back. Samsung… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Samsung Busts a Move?
Against decentralized bugtracking
I’ve spent a lot of time and bandwidth on this blog thinking out loud about version-control systems and software forges. In my last post, I announced that I was going to try to sneak up on the problem of designing a better software forge by enhancing Roundup. Over the last three years I’ve gotten a… Continue reading Against decentralized bugtracking
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
Attack of the 50-foot reposturgeon
Well, I thought I was done hacking on this for a while. Then one of the projects I did a conversion for disclosed the existence of a second repo for their website, which I had to merge into the code repo. As a subdirectory. Which meant pushing all the file paths into a subdirectory. Which… Continue reading Attack of the 50-foot reposturgeon
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.
Son of the reposturgeon!
Somebody said “Release early, release often.” once…and, just a day after reposurgeon 1.5, reposurgeon 1.6 is out, with a bug fix and a tasty new feature.
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
Revenge of the reposturgeon!
Reposurgeon 1.5 is out. This is a major release based on experience gained converting the roundup repository.