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.

Published
Categorized as General

CC-NC considered harmful

I just left the followiing comment on a Creatice Commons blog thread debating the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives options:

This is a tease.

Yesterday I applied for allocation of a new public port number from IANA. It’s 6659. When the allocation is confirmed, I’ll publish the source code for a reference implementation of the server. It’s a bit over 300 lines of Python. Let the speculation begin. :-)

Published
Categorized as General

Feline health update

This one is for the surprisingly large number of my blog readers who have sent inquiries about the health of Sugar, Cathy’s and my cat, following her near-death experience late last year. The rest of you can proceed about your business…

Saga Iceland and “thar”

In the comments on my previous post, someone linked to Steven Dutch’s essay The World’s Most Toxic Value System, in which he discusses the many evils that flow from a complex of values that he labels with the Arabic word “thar” (blood vengeance). Dutch’s essay is in many ways insightful, and a welcome corrective to… Continue reading Saga Iceland and “thar”

Published
Categorized as General

Abusing Alan Turing

The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in… Continue reading Abusing Alan Turing

Published
Categorized as General

Penguicon 2012 party location

As promised, the Penguicon 2012 Friends of Armed & Dangerous party location: room 370. Begins 9PM tonight.

Published
Categorized as General

Penguicon party 2012!

Reminder: The Armed & Dangerous party at Penguicon 2012 is now barely more than 72 hours away. Begins 9:00PM Friday night, room number to be announced on this blog and probably tweeted too. All readers of this blog will be welcome. See the real faces behind the Gravatar icons! Pursue discussion threads in person! Refrain… Continue reading Penguicon party 2012!

Published
Categorized as General

Feline health update

A brief update for those of you who were following the saga of our cat Sugar’s brush with death and remarkable rebound early last September.

Where your contributions go

This is a thank-you to my tip-jar contributors. Today I spent $88.76 directly out of the tip jar on engineering samples of GPS dongles specially modified to carry the 1PPS signal out to USB. I will test them, and if the modification succeeds it is quite likely that the company I am cooperating with will… Continue reading Where your contributions go

Published
Categorized as General

Eggs a la ESR

For no particular reason, my recipe for scrambled eggs.

Published
Categorized as General

John Carter: the movie

I was pretty dubious about John Carter. It was one of those movies which, as a serious SF fan and historian, I have to see even given a quite high likelihood that it was going to offend me with aggressively stupid handling of its source material. Therefore I am surprised and pleased to report that… Continue reading John Carter: the movie

Published
Categorized as General

Generative science

I’m thinking about writing another book. I won’t disclose the title or topic yet, but there’s a bit of research for it I think can be usefully crowdsourced, and may also give a clue about the book for those of you interested. I’ve written before about the difference between descriptive and generative theories. To recap… Continue reading Generative science

Sugar is in ultrasound health

This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.

A Christmas cat

The best Yule present my wife and I are getting this year is that our beloved cat Sugar is not dying.

Bad at languages?

I had a very international childhood – lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona). The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen.

Published
Categorized as General

Breaking into writing

I just tried to post this as a comment on Sarah Hoyt’s post about breaking into writing. Dunno if it went into moderation or just got eaten Sarah, who I esteem very highly and is full of pungent and sensible advice on writing and other matters, left out two rules:

Published
Categorized as General