As a guy who gets paid only because of his computer knowledge, the following paragraph is a bit of a comfort to me:
One of the many consequences of the exponential power-versus-time curve in computing, and the corresponding pace of software development, is that 50% of what one knows becomes …
First off, Robert X. Cringely wrote a recent column on the comparative strengths of Linux and Windows. Here's a neat quote from the article attributed to Linus Torvalds:
"Because the software is free, there is no pressure to release it before it is really ready just to achieve some sales …
New poem. Definitely not finished. Might take the last two paragraphs and turn them into a new poem.
Everything I see makes a sound; what does silence look like?
We have no yardstick, no block of iridium one meter long;
we know absolute zero but without vacuum there is no …
Valve Software had the source code for their newest game, Half Life 2, stolen in a security breach last month. The owner says a keystroke-logger was customized specifically to hack Valve, and was installed on their computers through a hole in Microsoft Outlook. Ouch. Game companies are notoriously secretive and …
There's a command in Linux / Unix called "sudo" which temporarily gives a normal user the power of the root user. In non-geek mixed metaphors, instead of having limited access, you have a backstage pass which lets you do absolutely anything on the system. (Of course, the command needs a password …
I got interested in a project called Linux From Scratch (LFS) about a year ago, going so far as to have a copy place print out the 4.0 version of the book. Never really did anything about it, though. This weekend I started working on the 4.1 version …
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
-- Gene (spaf) Spafford (1992)
This was before the www was widely known, when Usenet was the most common use of the …
From 2000 to 2003 I was a computer consultant in Southern California, covering a territory of Irvine to Oxnard. (If you don't know Southern California, that's a LONG stretch of road.) I coped by composing haiku and sending them to friends as text messages.
Traffic stalled.
The mind wanders to …
I haven't done a blog update in ages. I think there's an inverse relationship between how much I'm working and how often I post on my blog. When I first started this thing, business was slow. I mean really slow. I mean sending applications to Starbucks slow. For the last …
Went to the Valley Contemporary Poets reading at the Cobalt Café Tuesday night. The Cobalt, hosted by Rick Lupert, was my "home reading" when I first started out in poetry. I haven't been back in years, so it was tremendously exciting to be there. I had a great time -- I …