This morning I found a copy of the chart the Foreign Services Institute uses to grade the comparative difficulty of world languages for acquisition by an adult monoglot English speaker. I have an unusual perspective on this list for an American. I’m a low-grade polyglot; I have spoken three languages other than my birth English… Continue reading Comparative language difficulty for English speakers
A short course in counter-terror theory
In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings, more Americans than before are trying to grapple with questions about the nature of terrorism, terror activity versus rampage killings, and what can be done to prevent these bloodlettings. I have been studying these questions for years as part of my self-training. I learned some of the… Continue reading A short course in counter-terror theory
On the shooting of Laquan McDonald
One of my regulars, mindful of the forensic analysis I did on the Michael Brown autopsy photos last year, has asked me to comment on the Laquan McDonald shooting from my point of view as a pistol and self-defense instructor.javporn The fast version: I would have said this was what cops call a “good shoot”… Continue reading On the shooting of Laquan McDonald
NTPsec’s beta is released
You’ve heard me uttering teasers about it for months. Now it’s here. The repository is available for cloning; we’re shipping the 0.9.0 beta of NTPsec. You can browse the web pages or clone the git repository by one of several methods. You can “wget https://github.com/NTPsec/ntpsec/archive/NTPsec_0_9_0.tar.gz” to get a tarball. This is an initial beta and… Continue reading NTPsec’s beta is released
Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs
The hacker culture, and STEM in general, are under ideological attack. Recently I blogged a safety warning that according to a source I consider reliable, a “women in tech” pressure group has made multiple efforts to set Linus Torvalds up for a sexual assault accusation. I interpreted this as an attempt to beat the hacker… Continue reading Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs
Status signaling and cruelty to betas
I find myself in the embarrassing position of having generated a theoretical insight for a movement I don’t respect very much. My feelings about the “Red Pill” movement are a lot like my feelings about feminism. Both started out asking important questions about why men and women treat each other badly. Early on, both began… Continue reading Status signaling and cruelty to betas
From kafkatrap to honeytrap
I received a disturbing warning today from a source I trust. The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a… Continue reading From kafkatrap to honeytrap
Hieratic documentation
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
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
ifdex: a tool for code archeologists
I’ve written a tool to assist intrepid code archeologists trying to comprehend the structure of ancient codebases. It’s called ifdex, and it comes with a backstory. Grab your fedora and your bullwhip, we’re going in…
Major progress on the NTPsec front
I’ve been pretty quiet on what’s going on with NTPsec since posting Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved just about a month ago. But it’s what I’m spending most of my time on, and I have some truly astonishing success to report. The fast version: in three and a half months of intensive… Continue reading Major progress on the NTPsec front
Word of the day: shimulate
shimulate, vt.: To insert a shim into code so it simulates a desired standardized ANSI/POSIX facility under a deficient operating system. First used of implementing clock_gettime(2) under Mac OS X, in the commit log of ntpsec. I checked first use by Googling.
Who are the famous programmers?
Who are the programmers who are famous for doing programmer things? I’m wondering about this because my wife Cathy asked me a simple question last night, and I realized I didn’t have an answer to it. “Are you” she asked “the most famous programmer in the world?”
On open-source pharma
(This copies a comment I left on Derek Lowe’s blog at Science Magazine.) I was the foundational theorist of open-source software development back in the 1990s, and have received a request to respond to your post on open-source pharma. Is there misplaced idealism and a certain amount of wishful thinking in the open-source pharma movement?… Continue reading On open-source pharma