Penguicon 2012 party location

As promised, the Penguicon 2012 Friends of Armed & Dangerous party location: room 370. Begins 9PM tonight.

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Categorized as General

The long past of C

Hacking on the C code of giflib after an absence of nearly two decades has been an interesting experience, a little like doing an archeological dig. And not one that could readily be had elsewhere; nowhere other than under Unix is code that old still genuinely useful under any but carefully sandboxed conditions. Our reward… Continue reading The long past of C

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Categorized as Software

Penguicon party 2012!

Reminder: The Armed & Dangerous party at Penguicon 2012 is now barely more than 72 hours away. Begins 9:00PM Friday night, room number to be announced on this blog and probably tweeted too. All readers of this blog will be welcome. See the real faces behind the Gravatar icons! Pursue discussion threads in person! Refrain… Continue reading Penguicon party 2012!

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Categorized as General

Open source warfare != open source software

One of my commenters brought up John Robb, a former SpecOps pilot who has made a name for himself as a counter-terror theorist by writing about “open-source warfare”. Mutual acquaintances confirm what Robb’s own writings suggest, which is that his notions of open-source warfare are heavily influenced by what I have called the bazaar model… Continue reading Open source warfare != open source software

Making simple connections

About six weeks ago I asked How would you like to help fix the Internet? It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. The discussion thread on that post was lively, but eventually… Continue reading Making simple connections

On not ceding the truth to racists

One of the most important reasons not to tell ourselves pretty lies about unpleasant realities is so that we do not hand evil people the power of being the only ones who are willing to speak the truth.

An intelligence test

Heads up, gentle reader. I’m about to give you an intelligence test. To begin the test, read “The Talk: Nonblack version“.

Feline health update

A brief update for those of you who were following the saga of our cat Sugar’s brush with death and remarkable rebound early last September.

The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%

The newest comScore figures, for February 2012, are out. Android has finally achieved majority market share in the U.S.. This is three months later than a linear fit to most of 2010 and 20111 predicted, but whatever happened in 4Q2011 to throw everybody off their previous long-term trend curves seems to be over. Android, in… Continue reading The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%