Comparative language difficulty for English speakers

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

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Categorized as Science

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

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Categorized as Software Tagged

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

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Categorized as Software

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:

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

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Categorized as Software Tagged

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…

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Categorized as General

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.

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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