Last night I utterly trounced three opponents at the slick new Fantasy Flight reissue of a classic interstellar trade and exploration game, Merchants of Venus. My end score was nearly three times that of the runner-up, and I had acquired so many fame points (which each become 10 victory points at game end) that we… Continue reading A secret of game-fu
reposurgeon 2.0 announcement – the full-orchestra version
I shipped reposurgeon 2.0 a few days ago with the Subversion support feature-complete, and a 2.1 minor bugfix release this morning. My previous release announcement was somewhat rushed, so here is a more detailed one explaining why anybody contemplating moving up from Subversion should care. To go with this, there is a new version of… Continue reading reposurgeon 2.0 announcement – the full-orchestra version
Terror of the Reposturgeon!
I’ve just shipped reposurgeon 2.0, a power tool for editing and interconverting version-control repositories. This is a major release, adding the capability to read Subversion dump files directly.
The microzen: a unit of enlightenment
Earlier today one of my commenters caused me to realize that it would be entertaining to try to define a unit for the intensity of “aha!” experiences – moments of sudden insight.
Storm warning
By now you’ve doubtless heard about Hurricane Sandy; the record-breaking superstorm hype has been pretty hard to miss. Well, I just got a look at the latest NOAA track projection, and it looks like the storm center is going to pass directly over my house sometime Tuesday night. The center track on that map couldn’t… Continue reading Storm warning
Announcing autorevision
autorevision extracts metadata about the head version of your repository. This program is meant to be used by project build systems to extract properties that can be used in software version strings. It can create files containing variable and macro definitions suitable for C, C++, sh, Python, Perl, PHP, lua, Javascript, and header files suitable… Continue reading Announcing autorevision
I hate having to be the heavy…
I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago. Only the second time I’ve felt a need to do that and the first was in 1993, so this is not something I do casually. And I drew back from the brink. But I may have to if the maintainer I’m dealing with doesn’t clean… Continue reading I hate having to be the heavy…
End-to-end arguments in software design
My title is, of course, a reference to the 1984 paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design by Reed, Saltzer, and Clark. They enunciated what has since become understood as perhaps the single most central and successful principle of the design of the Internet. If you have not read it, do chase the link; it well… Continue reading End-to-end arguments in software design
Adventures in kuntao
My regulars will be aware that, since the Mixed Martial Arts program we were in folded up, my wife Cathy and I have been having an interesting learning adventure checking out various schools in our area as possibilities for our next style. We’ve had some more adventures since.
irker is feature-complete
I’ve just shipped irker 1.8, and I think this brings the wild ride I’ve been on for the last eleven days approximately to a close. I consider this release feature-complete; it achieves all the goals I had in mind when the CIA service died and I decided it was up to me to rescue the… Continue reading irker is feature-complete
How not to engage me
Considering the extent to which I’m still a public figure, it is perhaps surprising how seldom I get email that deserves a thorough, up-one-side-and-down-the-other flaming. I got one today which I shall reproduce here as a perfect example of how not to engage me.
irker takes off like a rocket
It was just three days ago that I shipped irker 1.0, but the project is already a huge hit out there in hackerland. It’s clear from traffic on the freenode #commits channel that irker installations are springing up everywhere. There’s already one symbiote, a proxy that takes XML-RPC requests in the CIA format and passes… Continue reading irker takes off like a rocket
CIA and the perils of overengineering
The CIA commit-notification service abruptly died two days ago, a development that surprised nobody who has been paying attention to the recent history of the codebase and its one public server site. A screwup at the cloud service hosting the CIA virtual machine irretrievably destroyed the instance data; please don’t ask me for details, I… Continue reading CIA and the perils of overengineering
irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
OK, I’ve been hacking intensely for most of the last 24 hours and here’s the payoff: irker-1.0 is shipped. Code and documentation are at http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/. Out of the starting box we have a hook script with tested support for git and (rather clumsily) Subversion; hg should be a piece of cake for anyone who wants… Continue reading irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
An emergency replacement for the CIA service is coming.
A few hours ago I learned that, due to a virtual-server mishap, the cia.vc notification service is dead. And not coming back. This was not entirely unexpected. The CIA codebase was a shambles, the service has been flaky and subject to outages, and the server-site operator who inherited it has for some time been muttering… Continue reading An emergency replacement for the CIA service is coming.
Practical prophecy
Inspired by Dave Logan’s keynote on tribal leadership at AgileCultureCon, I did a breakout session and then an open-space followup on “Practical Prophecy 101”. Recall that in Logan’s terms a “prophet” is a person who moves the behavior of his tribe towards greater cooperation and creativity by (his words) “preaching the inevitability of values-based change”.… Continue reading Practical prophecy
Who were the prophets of the early hackers?
I learned a new way of thinking about social behavior at Agile CultureCon last week – Dave Logan’s taxonomy of tribal stages and his interestingly specialized notion of what a “prophet” is. For review, see Logan’s TED talk. Logan explains the distribution of tribal stages as follows: Stage 1, “Life Sucks”, is the violent and… Continue reading Who were the prophets of the early hackers?
Culture hacking, reloaded
My last four days, at the Agile CultureCon split between Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown more new ideas and techniques at me than I’m used to encountering in a normal four months. Or more. It was very challenging and exciting, the more so because I was immersed in a culture at some distance from those… Continue reading Culture hacking, reloaded
From Dave in my basement, redux
Dave Taht is crashing in my basement again. While he’s here Dave is planning to cut another release of CeroWRT (the third one to issue from this basement, actually), and he has decided it needs a name. And, well, “the release from ESR’s basement” just lacks a certain…zing.
CC-NC considered harmful
I just left the followiing comment on a Creatice Commons blog thread debating the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives options: