sourcefrog

Made my day...

It's nice when you come in and see this mail:

Wanted to thank you for taking the time to write distcc. It is a model of elegant simplicity from a user's perspective.
I've been making infrastructure changes in our software which have roughly the same effect as "make clean" so my build times were consistently outrageous. I was able to reduce the build time by 76% without spending a penny on hardware. 'course management loves that kind of thing ...
The funny thing is nobody else seemed to mind how slow builds were until they saw how bad they were in comparison (I'm a recent hire). Now, when developers have to compile older versions of our code base that don't contain my parallel-safe makefile changes, they moan and groan about how long it takes. These are the same ones that didn't see a problem before I started. You gotta love human nature ...

posted Fri 29 Sep 2006 in /projects/distcc | link

yes it's the way of the future

posted Thu 21 Sep 2006 in /photo | link

SLAs, Chile Style

> I disabled cl.archive.ubuntu.com pointing to 200.89.74.17 around 24
> hours ago because 200.89.74.17 was unreachable for a long period of
> time.  In fact I could not reach any nameservers for calel.org so I
> could not send you an email explaining what we have done.
>
> Could you let me know what happened and if you are ready for me to point
> cl.archive.ubuntu.com back at your mirrors IP address 200.89.74.17?
In September 11 1973 General Pinochet lead a bloody military coupe in Chile, which overthrew democratically elected President Allende. Every september 11 there are demonstrations, or celebrations, depending on which band you belong to. There are riots, barricades, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, power outages and most of Santiago is in a war state. This year was no exception. The power to the university campus came back around noon september 12, after being out for more that 24 hrs. An average situation.
This will probably happen every september 11 until the generation that survived the Pinochet dictatorship is dead.

posted Wed 20 Sep 2006 in /random | link

Utterly obvious recruitment tips, #1

To get hired for a good job you should think of things from your would-be employer's point of view — to start with, that means the recruiter or hiring manager.

Here I have dozens of file attachments called cv.pdf or cv_canonical.pdf, and a couple called cv__jane_doe__software_engineer.pdf. In a just-barely-significant way it does show who is trying to understand the other person's situation.

posted Thu 7 Sep 2006 in /business/hiring | link

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Death)

(From jwz)

posted Wed 6 Sep 2006 in /random | link

Safety Trivia

According to a journal article cited today by Crikey,

Ignition of furnishings by smoking materials in houses is by far the most common cause of death by fire.

I've seen dozens or hundreds of public safety advertisements about fire safety, smoke detectors, etc, and never seen this mentioned. Or, from the other direction, why not print it on cigarette packages?

Laugesen et. al. continue

For the last 25 years at least, manufacturers have resisted introducing fire retardent (...) cigarettes. The tobacco industry made payments to scores of fire organisations in the 1990s to dampen calls for a fire safe product.