My usual audience is well aware why I am qualified to review Gabriella Coleman’s book, Coding Freedom, but since I suspect this post might reach a bit beyond my usual audience I will restate the obvious. I have been operating as the hacker culture’s resident ethnographer since around 1990, consciously applying the techniques of anthropological… Continue reading Coding Freedom: a review
Month: January 2013
Charisma: a how-to
A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how he could become more charismatic. Because the term “charismatic” has unhelpful religious connotations, let’s begin by being clear what he was actually asking. A person is “charismatic” when he or she has the ability to communicate a vision to others in a way that makes… Continue reading Charisma: a how-to
How to fix cable messes
A friend of mine recently posted this image of a hideous network-cable tangle: I have invented an algorithm for fixing this kind of mess. Probably other people have developed the same technique before, but it wasn’t taught to me and I’ve never seen it written down. Here it is…
Announcing cvs-fast-export
For those of you who have been following my work on tools to muck out the swamp that is CVS, a new shovel: cvs-fast-export. Note, this is an alpha release for testing purposes; double-check the quality of any conversions you do with it carefully.
How do you bait a trap for the soul?
You bait a trap for a mouse with tasty food. How do you bait a soul-trap for people too smart to fall for conventional religion? With half-truths, of course. I bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult tonight. The cult is called Landmark Forum or Landmark Education, and is descended from… Continue reading How do you bait a trap for the soul?
Reposurgeon Killed The Radio Stars!
The 2.13 release of reposurgeon has in it maybe the coolest new feature I’ve ever implemented in five minutes of programming – graphical visualization of a repository’s commit DAG.
Solving the CVS-lifting problem
Last month I added CVS-reading support to reposurgeon. The reason I haven’t blogged in ten days is that this pulled me down a rathole out of which I am just now beginning to emerge. And now I have a a request for help – I need to collect some perverse CVS repositories, preferably relatively small… Continue reading Solving the CVS-lifting problem