Category: Software
Debconf10
August 16th, 2010, No Comments
Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I’m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes. Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a [...]
A Debconf Thanks
August 11th, 2010, No Comments
There was something at Debconf10 in NYC that I owe a huge thank-you to the entire community for. I was completely surprised at how many people made a point to say hi to me, comment that they liked reading about my blog, and encouraged me to keep posting. It was dozens for sure. I had [...]
The Best Place of Ever
August 1st, 2010, 5 Comments
Jacob and Oliver have enjoyed our recent train trip, and our stay, from Kansas to New York City for Debconf. All told, that’s a 40-hour trip, including the layover in Chicago. When we got on the train, in the middle of the night as usual, Jacob couldn’t stop chattering about how “great”, “fun”, and “exciting” [...]
Time to learn a new language
May 18th, 2010, 53 Comments
I have something of an informal goal of learning a new programming language every few years. It’s not so much a goal as it is something of a discomfort. There are so many programming languages out there, with so many niches and approaches to problems, that I get uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge of [...]
Jacob has a new computer — and a favorite shell
April 9th, 2010, 38 Comments
Earlier today, I wrote about building a computer with Jacob, our 3.5-year-old, and setting him up with a Linux shell. We did that this evening, and wow — he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for [...]
Introducing the Command Line at 3 years
April 9th, 2010, 28 Comments
Jacob is very interested in how things work. He’s 3.5 years old, and into everything. He loves to look at propane tanks, as the pressure meter, and open the lids on top to see the vent underneath. Last night, I showed him our electric meter and the spinning disc inside it. And, more importantly, last [...]
Review: Linux IM Software
February 15th, 2010, 15 Comments
I’ve been looking at instant messaging and chat software lately. Briefly stated, I connect to Jabber and IRC networks from at least three different computers. I don’t like having to sign in and out on different machines. One of the nice features about Jabber (XMPP) is that I can have clients signing in from all [...]
Review: Free Software Project Hosting
August 9th, 2009, 23 Comments
I asked for suggestions a few days ago. I got several good ones, and investigated them. You can find my original criteria at the link above. Here’s what I came up with: Google Code Its very simple interface appeals to me. It has an issue tracker, a wiki, a download area. But zero integration with [...]
How To Think About Compression, Part 2
February 17th, 2009, 11 Comments
Yesterday, I posted part 1 of how to think about compression. If you haven’t read it already, take a look now, so this post makes sense. Introduction In the part 1 test, I compressed a 6GB tar file with various tools. This is a good test if you are writing an entire tar file to [...]
How To Think About Compression
February 16th, 2009, 49 Comments
… and the case against bzip2 Compression is with us all the time. I want to talk about general-purpose lossless compression here. There is a lot of agonizing over compression ratios: the size of output for various sizes of input. For some situations, this is of course the single most important factor. For instance, if [...]
