The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance

Category: personal

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Это Сан Франциско, город в стиле диско

    Pretty awesome day in the Bay Area today. The Russians summarised it so a couple of decades ago: We went to the computer history museum, I discovered that I have a bit of talent for Dance Dance Revolution and loved it (how did I manage to let that game intimidate me all this time and…

  • Andrew S. Tanenbaum, where have you been all my life?

    I’m currently reading Modern Operating Systems by Mr Tanenbaum in preparation for an important interview, and I have to stop to interject, what a fantastic book. I wish I had come across it earlier. It has very lucid and detailed explanations of many workings of computers that I have long wondered about but never had…

  • We’re back in the air!

    My laptop Iris is back from the shop, and it’s totally like this: There was a bit of a mixup in that her keyboard is now the wrong layout, but they promised me that they would order the previous layout (US layout, baby, big backslash keys, no L-shaped enter key!). For now, I got a…

  • Iris in the shop

    Iris is my laptop. She’s a Dellbuntu, which may soon become a collector’s item. About two weeks ago, I spilled some tea with sugar on her. She worked for a week after that, but her keyboard died unexpectedly a week later. I know, I know, I should have foreseen it, should have cleaned her, but…

  • Linked on Reddit

    Oh, dear me. A few years ago, I wrote a strongly-worded opinion piece on just why I believe so strongly on free software. Today it was linked on Reddit. While I do want free software everywhere, and I would like to completely abolish the notion of proprietary software, I see that as a distant dream.…

  • Salve, cronica electronica!

    Hello, blog! Hopefully this post is the first of many. I plan to write about several things, both personal and more public/professional. I must say, WordPress was quite easy to set up, but I’m still not sold on PHP. I had to patch a few things here and there, in particular with this nifty $$\LaTeX$$…