Earlier today I was in an email exchange with a Tier 1 tech support guy at a hardware vendor who makes multiport serial boards. I had had a question in as to whether a particular board supported the Linux TIOCMIWAIT ioctl. Tier 1 guy referred the question to an engineer in their Linux development group,… Continue reading On the duties of a geek-cred certification authority
Month: March 2015
Remembering Terry Pratchett
I think Terry Pratchett’s death finally hit home for me today. I’ve been kind of numb about it before now, but today I learned abut this proposal for GNU Terry Pratchett. And as I was commenting about it on G+ I found myself crying. Here’s a very slightly improved version of what I said on… Continue reading Remembering Terry Pratchett
The Great Beast is armored!
All my readers should be aware of the Rowhammer attack by now. It gives me great pleasure to report that thanks to our foresight in specifying ECC memory for the design, the Great Beast of Malvern has armor of proof against this attack. The proof being over a thousand runs of the Rowhammer test. Thank… Continue reading The Great Beast is armored!
Newly published: Introduction to Time Service
I’ve published a background paper on precise clocks, time service, and NTP. It is Introduction to Time Service and is meant to be read as a companion to (or before) the GPSD Time Service HOWTO. Comments, critiques, and suggestions for additions will be welcome.
Why I won’t mourn Mozilla
An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status, says Computerworld, and reports their user market share at 10% and dropping. It doesn’t look good for the Mozilla Foundation – especially not with so much of their funding coming from Google which of course has its own browser to push. I wish I could feel sadder… Continue reading Why I won’t mourn Mozilla
How not to botch an interview
I just dealt with an attempt to interview me by email that checked off pretty nearly every possible mistake in the form. As a public service, I now reproduce the advice I gave after bailing out halfway through the list of questions.