When the photographer from People magazine showed up to do a spread on me in 1996 (yes, 1996 – pre-open-source, it’s from my first 15 minutes of fame as a lexicographer), he taught me a useful term – “face people”. Face people are people who are famous for being famous, the vacant icons of celebrity… Continue reading Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek
INTERCAL justifies its existence
(This is a repost. The original went of on 2010-11-14, a few hours before the spambot rape.) Last night I made a classic n00b mistake. I was in a rush to get a test finished because my wife had just gotten home and it was time for us to haul off for the weekly Friday… Continue reading INTERCAL justifies its existence
The Rape of the Blog
(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.) Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote: My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an… Continue reading The Rape of the Blog
After the spamraping, there has been some loss
This blog was badly raped by a spambot on Saturday. Recovery from the problem required restoring from a backup made early that morning. Lost in the restore were two posts and about a dozen comments. It is possible I may be able to rescue some content by looking directly at an SQL dump, but I… Continue reading After the spamraping, there has been some loss
Lessons learned from reposurgeon
OK, I’m officially coming out of my cave now, after what amounted to a two-week coding orgy. I’ve shipped reposurgeon 0.5; the code looks and feels pretty solid, the documentation is written, the test suite is in place, and I’ve got working repo-rebuild support for two systems, one of which is not git. The rest… Continue reading Lessons learned from reposurgeon
Announcing reposurgeon – a tool for the good new days
I’ve been mostly blog-silent for the last week because I’ve been working my tail off on a new project. It’s reposurgeon, a tool for performing surgery on repository histories, and there are several interesting things to note about it.
Children of a Lesser Good
Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like. If those are the best, what about the rest? Here’s a tour of some of the lesser-known stuff I’ve written or had… Continue reading Children of a Lesser Good
Tetris, Torture, and the Gorilla-Arm Problem
Every time computing technology changes, we learn something new about the affordances of being human. I got my most recent lesson when I discovered DroidTris, a clone of the popular falling-blocks game for Android. As it turns out, a touchscreen version of Tetris works really, really well – and in doing so, it sheds new… Continue reading Tetris, Torture, and the Gorilla-Arm Problem
Krythar: a world that almost was
One of the experiences that made me swear off proprietary software was doing some designing of a fantasy-world map with a proprietary program I have long forgotten; this would have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Of course the program became obsolescent and nothing else could read the map….I recently stumbled across a… Continue reading Krythar: a world that almost was
Retired, Extremely Dangerous
It’s not giving much away to tell you that the title of the new action comedy “RED”, stands for “Retired – Extremely Dangerous”. My wife uttered the most succinct possible praise of this movie when she said, as we were leaving the theater, “This was the movie The Expendables should have been.” Indeed it was.… Continue reading Retired, Extremely Dangerous
Don’t let them give you to the women
I taught my wife Cathy how to play Conflict of Heroes this evening, and learned something of which all men (or at least all men who are wargamers) should beware.
Kill the Buddha
There’s a Zen maxim that commands this: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” There are several closely related interpretations of this maxim in Buddhist tradition. The most obvious one is that worship of the Buddha interferes with comprehending what he actually said – that religious fetishization is the enemy of enlightenment.… Continue reading Kill the Buddha
Indistinguishable from malice
I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10. Watch it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.… Continue reading Indistinguishable from malice
Democratic decline, interrupted
Veerrry interresting. Michael Barone, editor of The Almanac of American Politics for many years, writes an in-depth article on the psephology of the 2010 midterms titled Dems retreat to coasts as GOP rules vast interior. I read this and had a feeling of deja vu.
Was Stuxnet a work of hackers?
My friend Jay Maynard has successfully incited me to blog by asking me the following question: “Would you call the perpetrators of the Stuxnet worm `hackers’, rather than crackers”? He’s actually raised an interesting question of definition, culture, and ethics, and I’m going to tackle it.
The smartphone wars: Android thunders on
My prediction months ago that Android would pass Apple iOS in total share in the fourth quarter of 2010 is looking more prescient all the time. this ComputerWorld reports IDC’s conservative prediction that global (not U.S. share) will reach 16% for Android, 15% for iOS at the end of 2010. More interesting is the report… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Android thunders on
The Golden Age of Wargaming is Now
I’m what people in the strategy-gaming hobby call a grognard. The word is literally French for “grumbler”, historically used for Napoleonist diehards who never reconciled themselves to the fall of L’Empereur even after 1815, and nowadays refers to guys who cut their teeth on the classic, old-school hex-grid wargames of the 1970s. As a grognard,… Continue reading The Golden Age of Wargaming is Now
Mystical Poetry and Mental Postures
Over the years I’ve written at least three expositions of the hacker mindset that use the form of mystical poetry or teaching riddles. Probably the best known of these nowadays is The Unix Koans of Master Foo (2003), but there has also been The Loginataka (1992, 2010) and the short Zen poem I included in… Continue reading Mystical Poetry and Mental Postures
A Digital Video Primer for Geeks – Three Thumbs Up!
About an hour ago I watched A Digital Video Primer for Geeks. This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I’ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.
No apology needed
A few moments ago I received email from the Iranian who first asked me to try to help the dissidents fourteen month ago. I reproduce his email and my response in its entirety, except that I omit information that might identify him.