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The Rule of Names

This is an entirely silly post about the way I name the machines in my house, shared for the amusement of my regulars.

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Categorized as General

The midrange computer dies

About five years ago I reacted to a lot of hype about the impending death of the personal computer with an observation and a prediction. The observation was that some components of a computer have to be the size they are because they’re scaled to human dimensions – notably screens, keyboards, and pointing devices. Wander… Continue reading The midrange computer dies

I have a Patreon page

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

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!

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Designed for the job

Every once in a while I have an experience that causes me to meditate on the question of how much variation in human behavior is genetically driven. I’ve written before about my gradually increasing awareness that I am genetically designed to enjoy combat. I had another experience something like this last night in a completely… Continue reading Designed for the job

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Fear the software guy with the soldering iron

Today, for the first time ever in my life, I used a soldering iron. Remarkably, I neither conflagrated my house nor inflicted horrible burns on sensitive portions of my anatomy. Cat and wife are looking visibly relieved at this. As well they might.

Self-sacrifice as hacker-culture glue

I’ve just had an insight I find a bit disturbing. Though perhaps I shouldn’t. Occasionally I visit Scott Alexander’s excellent and thoughtful blog, Slate Star Codex. Today’s entry reminded me of Laurence Iannaccone’s research on Sacrifice and Stigma, which argues that onerous religious requirements are effective ways of building in-group trust because they are commitment… Continue reading Self-sacrifice as hacker-culture glue

Progress towards the extinction of CVS

The Great Beast, designed for converting large CVS repos, is now in full production. It hasn’t killed off any specimens in the wild yet (and I’ll explain why in a bit), but it’s doing spectacularly well on our test repositories. As a representative large example, the entire Emacs CVS history, 1985-2009, 113309 CVS commits, lifts… Continue reading Progress towards the extinction of CVS

Hacking and Refactoring

In 2001, there was a history-making conference of software-engineering thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that meeting was a remarkable document called the Agile Manifesto, a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional software development. I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn’t make it. Ever since, though, I’ve been sensing… Continue reading Hacking and Refactoring