Coding Freedom: a review

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

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.