I created a Patreon page just before leaving for vacation on 2 Aug. The background to this is that while I’m now getting some regular bucks for working on NTPsec, it’s not a lot. Royalties from my books have been dwindling and my wife Cathy isn’t making all that much from legal contract gigs that… Continue reading I have a Patreon page
The Great Beast has met its match
When I built the Great Beast of Malvern, it was intended for surgery on large repositories. The specific aim in view was to support converting the NetBSD CVS to git, but that project is stalled because the political process around NetBSD’s decision about when to move seems to have seized up. I’ve got the hardware… Continue reading The Great Beast has met its match
On having good form
Sometimes, the best encouragement you can get in a martial-arts class is silence. Once a month my school, which normally teaches a combination of wing chun kung fu and Philippine blade/stick fighting, gets a visit from Sifu Jerry Devone, who teaches pure traditional Wing Chun at a level a bit higher than our Sifu Dale… Continue reading On having good form
Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved
A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I… Continue reading Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved
Productive yak shaving
So here’s how my day went…. I started off trying to convert a legacy manual page to asciidoc. Found that pandoc (which could be the target of a whole separate rant, because it totally sucks at translating anything with tables in it) won’t do that. @PUSH… But it will convert DocBook to asciidoc. OK, so… Continue reading Productive yak shaving
debubble – a tool for popping pointless merge bubbles
If you hate pointless merge bubbles as much as I do, you’ll kick yourself because you didn’t think of this. But don’t feel bad. I should have, a lot sooner, myself. Voila! git-debubble.
How to submit a drive-by patch and get it accepted
I think it’s weird that I have to write this post in 2015, but earlier today I had to explain to someone with the technical skills to submit a good patch that he was doing the process wrong in some basic and extremely annoying ways. Googling revealed that most explanations of patch etiquette are rather… Continue reading How to submit a drive-by patch and get it accepted
git-weave, a tool for synthesizing repositories from fossil tarballs
Welcome to my first new-project release of the year, git-weave. It’s a polished and documented version of the script I used to reconstruct the early history of INTERCAL five years ago – see Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree for the details on that one. git-weave can be used to explode a git repository… Continue reading git-weave, a tool for synthesizing repositories from fossil tarballs
How to spot a high-quality repository conversion
In my last post, I inveighed against using git-svn to do whole-repository conversions from Subversion to git (as opposed to its intended use, which is working a Subversion repository live through a git remote). Now comes the word that hundreds of projects a week seem to be fleeing SourceForge because of their evil we’ll-hijack-your-repo-and-crapwarify-your installer… Continue reading How to spot a high-quality repository conversion
Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!
This is a public-service warning. It has come to my attention that some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. Reminder: I am speaking as an expert, having done numerous… Continue reading Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!
Zeno tarpits
There’s a deeply annoying class of phenomena which, if you write code for any length of time, you will inevitably encounter. I have found it to be particularly prevalent in transformations to clean up or canonicalize large, complex data sets; repository export tools hit variants of it all the time, and so does my doclifter… Continue reading Zeno tarpits
How to Deny a Question’s Premise in One Easy Invention
Now that the Universe Splitter is out, it might be that a lot more people are going to trip over the word “mu” and wonder about it. Or it might be the word only occurs in the G+ poll about Universe Splitter – I don’t know, I haven’t seen the app (which appears to be… Continue reading How to Deny a Question’s Premise in One Easy Invention
Sometimes progress diminishes
It’s not news to long-time followers of this blog that I love listening to virtuoso guitarists. Once, long ago in the 1980s I went to see a guitarist named Michael Hedges who astonished the crap out of me. The guy made sounds come out of a wooden flattop that were like nothing else on Earth.… Continue reading Sometimes progress diminishes
Friends of Armed & Dangerous party
It’s Penguicon 2015 at the Westin in Southfield, Michigan, and time for the 2015 Friends of Armed & Dangerous party. 9PM tonight, room 314. Nuclear ghost-pepper brownies will be featured.
A belated response to “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar “
Back in 2012, Poul-Henning-Kamp wrote a disgruntled article in ACM Queue, A Generation Lost in the Bazaar. javporn It did not occur to me to respond in public at the time, but someone else’s comment on a G+ thread about the article revived the thread. Rereading my reaction, I think it is still worth sharing… Continue reading A belated response to “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar “
Penguicon 2015!
I’ve been sent my panel schedule for Penguicon 2015. Building the “Great Beast of Malvern” – Saturday 5:00 pm One of us needed a new computer. One of us kicked off the campaign to fund it. One of us assembled the massive system. One of us installed the software. We were never all in the… Continue reading Penguicon 2015!
shipper 1.7 is released
I’ve released shipper 1.7. The main new feature in this release id that it now knows how to play nice with repository collections managed by gitolite and browseable through gitweb, like this one.
I have been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award
Last Sunday I was informed by email that I have been nominated for the 2015 John W. Campbell award for best new science-fiction writer. I was also asked not to reveal this in public until 4 April. This is a shame.. I had a really elaborate April Fool’s joke planned where I was going to… Continue reading I have been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award
My Gitorious projects have moved.
Gitorious – which I preferred to GitHub for being totally open-source – is shutting down sometime in May. I had no fewer than 26 projects on there, including reposurgeon, cvs-fast-import, doclifter, and INTERCAL. Now they’ve moved. This won’t affect most of my users, as the web pages and distribution tarballs are still in their accustomed… Continue reading My Gitorious projects have moved.
On the duties of a geek-cred certification authority
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