My blogging will be light or nonexistent over the next week. I’m on the road in Michigan, at Penguicon; the Friends of Armed and Dangerous party will be here at 9:00 tonight. It really is the 21st century. Yesterday I merged a bunch of patches, ran acceptance tests, and then polished and shipped a reposurgeon… Continue reading Penguicon party 2013!
Month: April 2013
Iranian connection in the Boston bombing
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page. Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled “The Black Flags of Khorasan”. Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation’s newsrooms, I’ve actually… Continue reading Iranian connection in the Boston bombing
Building a better IRC client
I’ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently. The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently. In most ways it’s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks. Thinking they’d be easy to fix, I dug into the codebase and discovered that it’s a nasty hairball. We’ve… Continue reading Building a better IRC client
Destroying the middle ground
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine yourself in an alternate United States where the First Amendment is not as a matter of settled law considered to bar Federal and State governments from almost all interference in free speech. This is less unlikely than it might sound; the modern, rather absolutist interpretation of free-speech liberties… Continue reading Destroying the middle ground
Thanks again to those of you who hit the tip jar
This is a postscript to my saga of the graphics-card disaster. Thank you. everybody who occasionally drops money in my PayPal account. In the past it has bought test hardware for GPSD. This week I had enough in it to pay for the Radeon card, the one that actually works. Your donations help me maintain… Continue reading Thanks again to those of you who hit the tip jar
The Agony, the Ectasy, the Dual Monitors
I am composing this blog entry on the right-hand screen of a brand shiny new dual-monitor rig. That took me the best part of a week to get working. I am going to describe what I went through to get here because I think it contains some useful tips and cautions for the unwary.
National styles in hacking
Last night, in an IRC conversation with one of my regulars, we were discussing a project we’re both users of and I’m thinking about contributing to, and I found myself saying of the project lead “And he’s German. You know what that means?” In fact, my regular understood instantly, and this deflected us into a… Continue reading National styles in hacking
What if it really was like that?
If you read any amount of history, you will discover that people of various times and places have matter-of-factly believed things that today we find incredible (in the original sense of “not credible”). I have found, however, that one of the most interesting questions one can ask is “What if it really was like that?”… Continue reading What if it really was like that?
Out on the tiles
I’ve been experimenting with tiling window managers recently. I tried out awesome and xmonad, and read documentation on several others including dwm and wmii. The prompt cause is that I’ve been doing a lot of surgery on large repositories recently, and when you get up to 50K commits that’s enough to create serious memory pressure… Continue reading Out on the tiles
No, GPSD is not the battery-killer on your Android!
Today, while doing research to answer some bug mail, I learned that all versions of Android since 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) have used gpsd to read the take from the onboard GPS. Sadly, gpsd is getting blamed in some quarters for excessive battery drain. But it’s not gpsd’s fault! Here is what’s actually going on.
Natural rights and wrongs?
One of my commenters recently speculated in an accusing tone that I might be a natural-rights libertarian. He was wrong, but explaining why is a good excuse for writing an essay I’ve been tooling up to do for a long time. For those of you who aren’t libertarians, this is not a parochial internal dispute… Continue reading Natural rights and wrongs?
AGW panic ending with a whimper
This is how the AGW panic ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper. The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have been rising rapidly, (b) surface… Continue reading AGW panic ending with a whimper