I’ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I’ve been testing it on the entire collection of manual pages on my system again. Because doclifter does mechanical translation of troff-based markups to DocBook-XML, one of the side effects of testing it is that I find lots of broken markup. I’ll ship over 700… Continue reading doclifter 2.9 is released
Month: July 2012
The Smartphone Wars: The iPhone Design Was Inspired by Sony
Wired magazine brings us a fascinating revelation from the Apple-vs.-Samsung brouhaha.
The strategy behind the Nexus 7
The Nexus 7 I ordered for my wife last week arrived two days ago. That’s been enough time for Cathy and me to look it over closely and get a good feel for its capabilities. It’s a very interesting device not just for what it does but what it doesn’t do. There’s a strategy here,… Continue reading The strategy behind the Nexus 7
Gun-free fantasy zones
After the Aurora theater shooting, it was of course inevitable that the jackals at the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy vendor would be trying to make a political meal from the victims’ corpses before they had even had time to cool to room temperature. The usual round of inane honking about “common-sense gun control”… Continue reading Gun-free fantasy zones
Feline health update
This one is for the surprisingly large number of my blog readers who have sent inquiries about the health of Sugar, Cathy’s and my cat, following her near-death experience late last year. The rest of you can proceed about your business…
Saga Iceland and “thar”
In the comments on my previous post, someone linked to Steven Dutch’s essay The World’s Most Toxic Value System, in which he discusses the many evils that flow from a complex of values that he labels with the Arabic word “thar” (blood vengeance). Dutch’s essay is in many ways insightful, and a welcome corrective to… Continue reading Saga Iceland and “thar”
Napier’s Lesson
In the 1840s, Hindu priests complained to Charles James Napier (then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) about the prohibition of suttee by British authorities. Suttee was the custom of burning widows alive on the funeral pyre of their husbands. According to Napier’s brother William, this is how he replied: “Be it so. This burning… Continue reading Napier’s Lesson
The Smartphone Wars: Tomi Ahonen carpet-bombs Stephen Elop
The best strategic analysis of Nokia’s parlous position I’ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia. It’s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.
Cisco provides a lesson
In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom, which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom. Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open systems and… Continue reading Cisco provides a lesson
Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it is
There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians. I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising… Continue reading Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it is
The Smartphone Wars: comScore loses the plot?
I’ve come to the depressing conclusion that I can’t trust comScore’s share numbers any more.