It was just three days ago that I shipped irker 1.0, but the project is already a huge hit out there in hackerland. It’s clear from traffic on the freenode #commits channel that irker installations are springing up everywhere. There’s already one symbiote, a proxy that takes XML-RPC requests in the CIA format and passes… Continue reading irker takes off like a rocket
Month: September 2012
CIA and the perils of overengineering
The CIA commit-notification service abruptly died two days ago, a development that surprised nobody who has been paying attention to the recent history of the codebase and its one public server site. A screwup at the cloud service hosting the CIA virtual machine irretrievably destroyed the instance data; please don’t ask me for details, I… Continue reading CIA and the perils of overengineering
irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
OK, I’ve been hacking intensely for most of the last 24 hours and here’s the payoff: irker-1.0 is shipped. Code and documentation are at http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/. Out of the starting box we have a hook script with tested support for git and (rather clumsily) Subversion; hg should be a piece of cake for anyone who wants… Continue reading irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
An emergency replacement for the CIA service is coming.
A few hours ago I learned that, due to a virtual-server mishap, the cia.vc notification service is dead. And not coming back. This was not entirely unexpected. The CIA codebase was a shambles, the service has been flaky and subject to outages, and the server-site operator who inherited it has for some time been muttering… Continue reading An emergency replacement for the CIA service is coming.
Practical prophecy
Inspired by Dave Logan’s keynote on tribal leadership at AgileCultureCon, I did a breakout session and then an open-space followup on “Practical Prophecy 101”. Recall that in Logan’s terms a “prophet” is a person who moves the behavior of his tribe towards greater cooperation and creativity by (his words) “preaching the inevitability of values-based change”.… Continue reading Practical prophecy
Who were the prophets of the early hackers?
I learned a new way of thinking about social behavior at Agile CultureCon last week – Dave Logan’s taxonomy of tribal stages and his interestingly specialized notion of what a “prophet” is. For review, see Logan’s TED talk. Logan explains the distribution of tribal stages as follows: Stage 1, “Life Sucks”, is the violent and… Continue reading Who were the prophets of the early hackers?
Culture hacking, reloaded
My last four days, at the Agile CultureCon split between Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown more new ideas and techniques at me than I’m used to encountering in a normal four months. Or more. It was very challenging and exciting, the more so because I was immersed in a culture at some distance from those… Continue reading Culture hacking, reloaded
From Dave in my basement, redux
Dave Taht is crashing in my basement again. While he’s here Dave is planning to cut another release of CeroWRT (the third one to issue from this basement, actually), and he has decided it needs a name. And, well, “the release from ESR’s basement” just lacks a certain…zing.
CC-NC considered harmful
I just left the followiing comment on a Creatice Commons blog thread debating the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives options:
A shout to the world’s technical journals
So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E’s submission procedures and was reminded… Continue reading A shout to the world’s technical journals
coverity-submit 1.2 is released
Coverity simplified their remote-submission procedure. Because of this, I have been able to remove the ugliest bits of configuration cruft from coverity-submit; you no longer have to specify either a public drop directory for your results tarball or a URL that advertises it. Get your remote-static-checking goodness here.
This is a tease.
Yesterday I applied for allocation of a new public port number from IANA. It’s 6659. When the allocation is confirmed, I’ll publish the source code for a reference implementation of the server. It’s a bit over 300 lines of Python. Let the speculation begin. :-)