Cognitive disinhibition: not the whole story of genius

Here’s an interesting article with a stupid and misleading title on the role of what the author calls “cognitive disinhibition” – a fancy term for “allowing oneself to notice what others miss” – in enabling creative genius. While in many ways I could be a poster child for Simonton’s thesis (and I’ll get to those)… Continue reading Cognitive disinhibition: not the whole story of genius

When hackers grow old

Lately I’ve been wrestling with various members of an ancient and venerable open-source development group which I am not going to name, though people who regularly follow my adventures will probably guess which one it is by the time I’m done venting. Why it so freaking hard to drag some people into the 21st century?… Continue reading When hackers grow old

Moving the NetBSD repository

Some people on the NetBSD tech-repository list have wondered why I’ve been working on a full NetBSD repository conversion without a formal request from NetBSD’s maintainers that I do so. It’s a fair question. An answer to it involves both historical contingency and some general issues about moving and mirroring large repositories. Because of the… Continue reading Moving the NetBSD repository

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Building the perfect beast

I’ve attempted to summarize the discussion of build options for the repository-surgery machine. You should see a link at the top of the page: if not, it’s here I invite all the commenters who have shown an interest to critique these build proposals. Naturally, I’d like to make sure we have a solid parts list… Continue reading Building the perfect beast

Black magic and the Great Beast

Something of significance to the design discussion for the Great Beast occurred today. I have finally – finally! – achieved significant insight into the core merge code, the “black magic” section of cvs-fast-export. If you look in merge.c in the repo head version you’ll see a bunch of detailed comments that weren’t there before. I… Continue reading Black magic and the Great Beast

A low-performance mystery: Sometimes you gotta simplify

This series of posts is increasingly misnamed, as there is not much mystery left about cvs-fast-export’s performance issues and it is now blazingly, screamingly, bat-out-of-hell fast. As in both threaded and unthreaded version convert the entire history of groff (15593 CVS deltas in 1549 files in 13 seconds flat. That would be about 10K CVS… Continue reading A low-performance mystery: Sometimes you gotta simplify

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A low-performance mystery

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m stumped by a software-engineering problem. This is not a thing that happens often, but I’m in waters relatively unknown to me. I’ve been assiduously avoiding multi-threaded programming for a long time, because solving deadlock, starvation, and insidious data-corruption-by-concurrency problems isn’t really my idea of fun. Other than one minor brush… Continue reading A low-performance mystery

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Time, Clock and Calendar Programming 1.0

A bit late, because I’ve been hammering on some code the last several days. But here it is: Time, Clock, and Calendar Programming In C. Suggestions for 1.1 revisions and improvements will of course be cheerfully accepted. Comments here or email will be fine.

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Press silence, black privilege, and unintended consequences

A provocative article at the conservative blog Hot Air comments on a pattern in American coverage of violent interracial crimes. When the perps are white and the victims are black, we can expect the press coverage to be explicit about it, with predictable assumption of racist motivations. On the other hand, when the perps are… Continue reading Press silence, black privilege, and unintended consequences