The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance

Author: Jordi

  • ARPACK situation

    An open letter to all ARPACK users and developers I’m writing this email to discuss the future of ARPACK. The problem is this: it’s a widely-used library, but it seems abandoned upstream (and upstream, to whom this is addressed, can confirm or deny). This has resulted in the problem of many mini-forks as each organisation…

  • Number Theory 2 available soon!

    This is pretty exciting. I first read the first one of these about 10 years ago. The second one has finally been translated, and looks like publication is imminent. I hope the 3rd one doesn’t take as long! What I like about these books is how poetic they are. They really expose the poetry of…

  • We do what we can because we must

    A recent conversation with a friend about Twitter vs identi.ca prompted the following response, slightly edited for formatting and anonymity: <my friend> man.. that’s my primary annoyance with the open source movement <me> What is? <my friend> the belief that everything has to be duplicated especially for open source, or it’s invalid <my friend> and…

  • Knitting for geeks

    Margarita Manterola from Debian Women asks: So, after the whole Wikip. thing, I ended up following lots of links about knitting, and as everytime I come in contact with this, I feel like I should learn to knit (or maybe I should say, re-learn, I was taught during primary school, but forgot all about it…

  • How to write a patch for Octave

    Often people will find ways to improve Octave’s source and provide a patch, but in a way that is slightly inconvenient to analyse and apply. I will now present instructions for creating a patch for Octave in a manner that is easiest for core Octave developers to apply. In what follows, I assume that you…

  • Making posting easier

    Dear lazyweb, How can I make blogging as painless as possible? I’m an Emacs + WordPress user. I wish I could just easily post from Emacs. Right now, I still use the WordPress admin website for posting, and although of course it’s not hard to do it this way, it’s awkward to have to log…

  • Earning my wings

    I forgot when it happened, but it was sometime in late January or February that I was finally given push access to the Octave repositories, plus being a manager for Octave items at the Savannah website where it’s hosted. This means I have the privilege to commit my changes to Octave code on my own…

  • I don’t hate git as much anymore…

    So a partial retraction to my previous post… It turns out that git has something called a reflog, which seems to be purely documented in the git-reflog(1) manpage, and to my taste, rather tersely. It appears that git does keep at least a partial log of recent operations so it’s possible, with varying degrees of…

  • I hate git

    … or at least I hate it for now. I’m a Mercurial kinda guy (hereafter hg). Mercurial is the version control system (VCS) that Octave uses, so that’s mostly the reason why I started using it too. I started reading about it, and learning it, and liking it a lot. It makes a lot of…

  • La Red Social

    I just watched the Facebook movie, The Social Network, or whatever, La Red Social en español. I started brewing in my head a post about it, but I think I will omit most of it except to mention that it’s nice to finally see realistic depictions of computers in mainstream media. I will reserve the…