Nobody stepped up to design a Loadsharers logo, so I did it myself. Here it is: Yeah, I’m not much of a graphic artist, but I can do a semi-competent job of whacking together a simple logo when I need to. If you’re an actual pro and think you can fix this or do better,… Continue reading Loadsharers has a logo
Month: June 2019
A libertarian rethinks immigration
Instapundit recently linked to an article at the libertarian Reason magazine with a premise I found – considering the authors and the magazine – surprisingly dimwitted. No, a border wall is not necessarily morally equivalent to the Berlin Wall, or anywhere near it. Consider Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China. Sometimes there are… Continue reading A libertarian rethinks immigration
Segfaults and Twitter monkeys: a tale of pointlessness
For a few years in the 1990s, when PNG was just getting established as a Web image format, I was a developer on the libpng team. One reason I got involved is that the compression patent on GIFs was a big deal at the time. I had been the maintainer of GIFLIB since 1989; it… Continue reading Segfaults and Twitter monkeys: a tale of pointlessness
While I was making other plans, teil vier
I can walk again. Wearing a joint-immobilizing boot brace, so I lurch around with a gait even more graceless than my usual palsied semi-stumble, but I can walk. And shower. And make my own breakfast. Hallelujah! Better news: my prognosis is good. The joint had osteoarthritic damage that may be trouble down the road, but… Continue reading While I was making other plans, teil vier
Sharing the load effectively
At the end of my last post I said I was wandering off to think about scalable, low-overhead recommendation systems. It’s funny how preconceptions work. I know, I think better than most people, how often decentralizing systems to avoid single points of failure is good engineering. Yet I had to really struggle with myself to… Continue reading Sharing the load effectively
Load-Bearing Internet People
I just finished giving a talk – by remote video – at South East Linux Fest, about the Load-Bearing Internet Person problem. An LBIP is a person who maintains the software for a critical Internet service or library, and has to do it without organizational support or a budget backing him up. That second part… Continue reading Load-Bearing Internet People
In a blatant attempt to attract more Institutional supporters…
Anybody who has visited my Patreon page should know that I have two special support tiers. At Bronze ($20 per month) level, you get included in the credits of the project pages for all my solo stuff. Here’s a recent example. Today I’m announcing two new perks for Institutional ($100 permonth) supporters. This tier is… Continue reading In a blatant attempt to attract more Institutional supporters…
Fear of COMITment
I shipped the first release of another retro-language revival today: COMIT. Dating from 1957 (coincidentally the year I was born) this was the first string-processing language, ancestral to SNOBOL and sed and ed and Unix shell. One of the notational conventions invented in COMIT, the use of $0, $1…etc. as substitution variables, survives in all… Continue reading Fear of COMITment
While I was making other plans, pars tres
A day or so after the not-so-thrilling last installment of my medical troubles (previous post), I get my hands on a knee scooter. Rented from a local pharmacy. This is a big improvement over the wheelchair. I’m more mobile on it, and can pee standing up. If you think that last bit doesn’t matter, pray… Continue reading While I was making other plans, pars tres
While I was making other plans, part deux
Thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon feed or upped their contributions. I’m still worried, but a little less so now. Some good news. The post-op pain has stabilized at a level where the occasional Tylenol will handle it nicely. If Dr. Wilson the anesthesiologist is listening, damn! You are good at your job. The… Continue reading While I was making other plans, part deux
While I was making other plans
Today I had to – literally – crawl from my wife’s car to my house. Because I couldn’t walk. Life is what happens while you were making other plans. About six months ago I sprained my right ankle in kung fu class. It gave me occasional pain, mostly in cold weather, but I thought it… Continue reading While I was making other plans
The dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”
Comes the word that Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling “military-style rifles”. The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides “software as a service”; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. If the provider decides it doesn’t want your… Continue reading The dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”