Here’s where I attempt to revive and popularize a fine old word in a new context. hieratic, adj. Of or concerning priests; priestly. Often used of the ancient Egyptian writing system of abridged hieroglyphics used by priests. Earlier today I was criticizing the waf build system in email. I wanted to say that its documentation… Continue reading Hieratic documentation
Month: October 2015
I’m not going to ‘take everyone’s guns away’
An expectation of casual, cynical lying has taken over American political culture. Seldom has this been more obviously displayed than Barack Obama’s address to police chiefs in Chicago two days ago. Here is what everyone in the United States of America except possibly a handful of mental defectives heard:
NTPsec is not quite a full rewrite
In the wake of the Ars Technica article on NTP vulnerabilities, and Slashdot coverage, there has been sharply increased public interest in the work NTPsec is doing. A lot of people have gotten the idea that I’m engaged in a full rewrite of the code, however, and that’s not accurate. What’s actually going on is… Continue reading NTPsec is not quite a full rewrite
Are tarballs obsolete?
NTPsec is preparing for a release, which brought a question to the forefront of my mind. Are tarballs obsolete?
SPDX: boosting the signal
High on my list of Things That Annoy Me When I Hack is sourcefiles that contain huge blobs of license text at the top. That is valuable territory which should be occupied by a header comment explaining the code, not a boatload of boilerplate that I’ve seen hundreds of times before. Hackers have a lot… Continue reading SPDX: boosting the signal
I improved time last night
Sometimes you find performance improvements in the simplest places. Last night I improved the time-stepping precision of NTP by a factor of up to a thousand. With a change of less than 20 lines. The reason I was able to do this is because the NTP code had not caught up to a change in… Continue reading I improved time last night
The FCC must not lock down device firmware!
The following is a comment I just filed on FCC Docket 15-170, “Amendment of Parts 0, 1, 2, 15, and 18 of the Commission’s Rules et al.” Thirty years ago I had a small hand in the design of the Internet. Since then I’ve become a senior member of the informal collegium that maintains key… Continue reading The FCC must not lock down device firmware!
Vox is wrong – we don’t have too many guns, we have too many criminals
One of my followers on G+ asked me to comment on a Vox article, What no politician wants to admit about gun control. I’ve studied the evidence, and I don’t believe the effect of the Australian confiscation on homicides was significant. You can play games with statistics to make it look that way, but they… Continue reading Vox is wrong – we don’t have too many guns, we have too many criminals