sourcefrog : blogs

Hugh and Lucy have blogs

Hugh and Lucy Blemings have blogs now too.

Chris had a curious encounter with a towel pig.

posted Sat 14 Aug 2004 in /blogs | link

warped visions

There's some interesting stuff at warpedvisions.org, including the autoblock plugin I'm using to write this. I wonder if it works?

Apparently it does. Yay.

posted Tue 16 Mar 2004 in /blogs | link

taint.org

Discovered the blog of Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin. Without SA, I would probably not read email anymore.

Particularly cool bits: the truth about Lenna and the teapot, and happy software proles.

How can Forbes be so clueless these days? Weren't they once a somewhat reputable paper? Justin quotes their article on Linux's Hit Men:

The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement--a view that contrasts with the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the 'Internationale' while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor.

(Here we go again -- the old 'free software is communism' line, cf. the 'Give Communism A Try!' / Nazi Penguin posters SCO made up earlier this year.)
The article goes on to bemoan how software companies who write proprietary extensions into GPL-licensed software, have to comply with the terms of the license.
It's all a bit of an obvious dig -- but I am looking forward to the follow-up article -- that's the one where the author bemoans how commercial software companies send out their 'enforcers' to extort money from companies who don't bother paying the royalties and runtime license fees their licenses require.

I wonder if Daniel Lyons is going to accuse the the Economist of being pinkos, when they write favourably about software that is cheaper, more flexible and protects freedom?

posted Fri 19 Dec 2003 in /blogs | link

Alli Russell

Alli takes a step towards nerdliness.

posted Sat 15 Nov 2003 in /blogs | link

Bilskinir

Nathan has a pretty cool blog at bilsirnir, and in particular an interview with Malcolm Crompton, the Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner:

I spoke to Federal Privacy Commissioner, Malcolm Crompton (right), today and found him more passionate than I expected. He expressed his frustration that the owners of intellectual property (IP) were pushing digital restrictions management but not thinking of the impact that has on our rights to withhold our personal information (PI). He views the Privacy Act as a way to balance the agendas of both corporations and individuals, creating tradeable rights that level the playing field. He has told Microsoft that Palladium should balance both sides of the equation, but that at the moment he is frustrated that it does not.

We're talking about a serious privacy vs piracy debate. On the piracy debate we're talking about management of Intellectual Property (IP). I am a person with Personal Information (PI) and if that is taken away, it is an invasion of my privacy. I would like to hear these people (IP owners) making such a lot of noise about piracy of IP talk about the protections of PI -- then they would have some credibilty. There's a pretty ugly asymmetry in the debate. Both sides need to grow up a bit and be a bit more respective of both sides of the argument.

posted Thu 9 Oct 2003 in /blogs | link

Best search requests

I'm happy to hear of all the people coming to my site looking for SCO software or Ken Park downloads. I should go through and grep out some more of them.

How nice that RFC2068 should have frozen the spelling Referer (sic). Remember kids, use a spellchecker before building a multi-billion-dollar information system!

Disturbing Search Requests and more along those lines from lawnpig. Superb. Don't we all just want to see sexy glirs?

I've heard of the older iBooks referred to as 'tangerine' and 'blueberry'. I've never heard of the newer white ones referred to as 'semen' colored. I hope he was surfing my site with both hands.

posted Mon 1 Sep 2003 in /blogs | link

jay double blog

jdub, GNOME's head beekeeper, has a cool new blog.

posted Thu 14 Aug 2003 in /blogs | link

All points North

Chris Yeoh is keeping a blosxom blog about OLS and other stuff.

posted Tue 22 Jul 2003 in /blogs | link

Unnaturalness

Wandering further into the neoconblogsphere, we see Eugene Volokh considering whether homosexuality is "unnatural".

In Australia, I think the word "conservative" means *both* economically conservative (in favour of lightly regulated markets and low taxes) and socially conservative (in favour of maintaining traditional moral values). So I tend to be a bit bemused by people describing themselves as (say) gay and conservative. But I think the word has different nuances, or perhaps is less strict, in the US.

posted Wed 16 Jul 2003 in /blogs/volokh | link

Rands Reposes

rands.jerkcity.com:

I just finished reading Guns of the South (tip of the hat to JayBees for the recommendation). The gist of the book is straight forward, yet odd... what if, during the Civil War, the South became equipped with a lot of AK-47s. Long story short, they would have won.

posted Wed 16 Jul 2003 in /blogs | link

Stupid Bash Tricks

Simon Tathamn, author of putty, has a great page on magic aliases in the Bourne shell. (Spoiler omitted — go and read it!)

He also has an interesting approach to coroutines in C, which is basically what librsync (amongst other programs) needs to do. The librsync handling of that is not very good at the moment if truth be told.

posted Wed 9 Jul 2003 in /blogs | link

Blogs in Space

Greetings, Earthlings: While he's living aboard the International Space Station, Expedition Seven NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing about his experiences.

ISS007-E-06975 (11 June 2003) --- Backdropped by the blackness of space and Earth's horizon, an unmanned Progress supply vehicle approaches the Pirs Docking Compartment (out of frame) attached to the Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station (ISS), completing a three-day automated flight.

For my culinary friends:

The inside of the Progress is about the size of a small moving van. The difference here is that everything must be bolted down. Unlike most moving vans, this one goes from 0 to 18,000 MPH in 9 minutes. Literally, every bit of available space is filled, so to unload it you have to start near the hatch and begin unbolting things one at a time. After a few hours you have cleared enough space to actually go inside the Progress. It is like burrowing into a cave. Inside are containers of water, boxes of food, spare parts, letters from home, and of course, the fresh fruit. We haven't unloaded everything yet, but so far we have found apples, grapefruit, tomatoes and oranges.
Last night we celebrated by making space bruschetta. First, I cut up a fresh tomato. This is easier said than done in space - I put the tomato in a plastic bag and held my hand inside the bag with the knife. I managed to keep most of the tomato inside the bag. Then we added some garlic paste and olive oil, mixed well, and served it on tortillas. Delicious! This morning I had an actual real live apple with breakfast.

posted Mon 7 Jul 2003 in /blogs | link

Cute as...

Credit: Maciej Stachowiak

posted Fri 20 Jun 2003 in /blogs/mjs | link

Poland as LOTR setting

Waterfall
Credit: Maciej Stachowiak

posted Fri 20 Jun 2003 in /blogs/mjs | link

indolence blog

AJ has a great new blog. I've always liked his writing style.

In particular he has some nice thoughts on Blosxom.

Updating entries does seem to be a limitation of Blosxom. I think it would be nice to be able to retroactively reply to yourself and create a thread that can be updated in both directions.

Another thing that would be nice is some kind of HTML/XML sanity check on entries before they're posted, or perhaps a preview mode.

posted Fri 13 Jun 2003 in /blogs | link

Burling Blog

Wow, jasonp has a blog, and lives in NY state and is married. How time flies.

posted Fri 6 Jun 2003 in /blogs | link

Bram's Law

Bram Cohen writes:

The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice.

Why? Easy software projects can be done by almost any random person, so they are. It's possible to try to nudge your way into being the standard for an easy thing based on technical merit, but that's rather like trying to become a hollywood star based on talent and hard work. You're much better off trading it all in for a good dose of luck.
This is why HTTP is a mess while transaction engines are rock solid. Almost any programmer can do a mediocre but workable job of extending HTTP, (and boy, have they,) but most people can't write a transaction engine which even functions. The result is that very few transaction engines are written, almost all of them by very good programmers, and the few which aren't up to par tend to be really bad and hardly get used. HTTP, on the other hand, has all kinds of random people hacking on it, as a result of which Python has a 'fully http 1.1 compliant' http library which raises assertion failures during normal operation.
Remember this next time you're cursing some ubiquitous but awful third party library and thinking of writing a replacement. With enough coal, even a large diamond is unlikely to be the first thing picked up. Save your efforts for more difficult problems where you can make a difference. The simple problems will continue to be dealt with incompetently. It sucks, but we'll waste a lot less time if we learn to accept this fact.

Martin's Law is

If you never used software written by dickheads, your disk would be very empty indeed.

I'm tempted to turn some words of that into hyperlinks but I'll refrain. :-)

It's worth remembering that next time an arrogant or impatient author makes you feel like not using their software. Most of the alternatives are at least sometimes just as bad.

posted Thu 5 Jun 2003 in /blogs | link

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