vms-empire 1.10 released

There’s a genre of computer games called 4X (explore/expand/exploit/exterminate). well-known examples of which include the Civilization series and Master of Orion. Ever wonder what the ur-progenitor of this genre was, the game at the root of 4X in the way Colossal Cave Adventure created the genre of dungeon-crawl games? It was Walter Bright’s game “Empire”… Continue reading vms-empire 1.10 released

Building a better IRC client

I’ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently. The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently. In most ways it’s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks. Thinking they’d be easy to fix, I dug into the codebase and discovered that it’s a nasty hairball. We’ve… Continue reading Building a better IRC client

Published
Categorized as Software

Out on the tiles

I’ve been experimenting with tiling window managers recently. I tried out awesome and xmonad, and read documentation on several others including dwm and wmii. The prompt cause is that I’ve been doing a lot of surgery on large repositories recently, and when you get up to 50K commits that’s enough to create serious memory pressure… Continue reading Out on the tiles

Published
Categorized as Software

No, GPSD is not the battery-killer on your Android!

Today, while doing research to answer some bug mail, I learned that all versions of Android since 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) have used gpsd to read the take from the onboard GPS. Sadly, gpsd is getting blamed in some quarters for excessive battery drain. But it’s not gpsd’s fault! Here is what’s actually going on.

Mode of the Reposturgeon!

It was inevitable, I suppose; reposurgeon now has its own Emacs mode. The most laborious task in the reposurgeon conversion of a large CVS or Subversion repository is editing the comment history. You want to do this for two reasons: (1) to massage multiline comments into the summary-line + continuation form that plays well with… Continue reading Mode of the Reposturgeon!

MIXAL is dead

I terminated one of my open-source projects today. MIXAL is dead; it has been replaced by the GNU MIX Development Kit, alias MDK. Open-source projects die so seldom that the circumstances deserve a minor note.

Is closed source worth it for performance?

The following question appeared in my mailbox today: If a certain program (that you need) was proprietary, and its open-source counterpart was (currently) 40% slower. Which would you use, the open-source one or the proprietary one? The answer is: it depends. I’m going to answer this one in public because it’s a useful exercise in… Continue reading Is closed source worth it for performance?

Announcing cvs-fast-export

For those of you who have been following my work on tools to muck out the swamp that is CVS, a new shovel: cvs-fast-export. Note, this is an alpha release for testing purposes; double-check the quality of any conversions you do with it carefully.

robotfindskitten – the Mayan Apocalypse Edition!

Today’s very special non-world-ending software release, triggered if not originated from here at Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories is the amazing Zen simulation, Robot Finds Kitten. I bow in respect before Leonard Richardson and the other giants of kitten-finding history and am humbly proud to be counted among the select few who have contributed to this… Continue reading robotfindskitten – the Mayan Apocalypse Edition!

Don’t overinterpret the Sorrell Doctrine!

I have submitted an essay to the Stanford Law Review for publication. I didn’t tick the box for “exclusive”, so I think I can blog it as well. It’s a reply to Andrew Tutt’s essay on Software Speech.

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

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