Category Archives: General

Today’s Reading

General, Society

I think I’ve enjoyed every Paul Graham essay I’ve ever read. He’s got a new one: What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a speech he was going to give at a high school. He persuasively undercuts most graduation speeches and provides an interesting outlook on life. I found his comments on procrastination and curiosity interesting. I, and a number of people I know, have both those qualities. Graham argues that they’re almost innate once you’ve found something you’re interesting in.

In true American fashion, after the school learned that Graham was going to say something interesting, they withdrew their invitation.

Someone in pointed me to Lambda the Ultimate, a great programming languages blog. While there, I read an interesting critique of OOP in general.

And finally, IBM has a great article on HaXml, advocating its use instead of DOM or SAX for processing XML and HTML documents. They have some quite effective examples to boost their point, too. I tried HaXml and I like it.

Today’s Reading

General, Hardware

Apple: iPod Domination Or Just Another Fad? at The Register.

Various SELinux material from Gentoo. Also, Getting Started with SELinux and Writing SELinux Policy. SELinux looks very complex. I think I’ll just use vserver instead.

The System Rescue CD and Partimage pages. The system rescue C looks like it can pretty much eliminate the need for spending money on Partition Magic or Ghost because of its inclusion of qparted and partimage. Nice!

Today’s Reading

General

Ethics for the Robot Age at Wired. Less interesting than the author thinks, perhaps, but some questions of robots competing with humans for resources are interesting.

Novell’s Major Filesystems in Linux appendix for Suse. Surprisingly lucid, and with solid explanations of why JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS are all less reliable than ext3fs in data=ordered mode. I wasn’t certain about XFS, but by now knew the answer for JFS and Reiser3. It appears that Reiser4 may equal or exceed ext3 data=ordered semantics in terms of reliability. ext3 is just not practical for me; it gets very slow for large files or directories, especially compared to JFS or ReiserFS. At the same time, it looks like JFS may gain these semantics.

Today’s Reading

General, Technology

Here’s what I’ve been reading today:

Hackers, Slackers, and Shackels by Matt Barton, a fascinating article about trends in game development. The author calls Martin Luther “the Richard Stallman of his time.” That’s one analogy I hadn’t heard of before. (seen on Slashdot) Also a bit of insight into the history of Unix I hadn’t heard of before, either.

Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body by Gerald Weinberg, (via Slashdot). Seems like sound enough conclusions, with some rather mushy in-between stuff.

Review of Author Unknown by Foster. Foster attempts to identify the authors of various bits of text. Seen on a comment from Jon on an earlier story here.

Our Power Is Back

General

Our power finally came back on yesterday morning at about 2AM (judging by the time shown on our clocks.)

Now, we have to:

  • Make sure our pipes haven’t frozen
  • Clean all the brush out of our yard
  • Buy more batteries
  • Reset clocks all over the house
  • Replace backup batteries in alarm clocks and the answering machine

Over 43,000 households are still without power.