The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to — stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to — stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately.
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Gunnar Ritter, maintainer of the commonly-used mailx program, explains why it’s not available on Windows. It’s an interesting tale of how the kluges deep within that semi-operating psuedo-system mean that even in 2010 design decisions made in the Seventies afflict Windows.
They afflict Unix too, of course, but generally our design mistakes were smarter than Windows’s design mistakes. Even in error we’re better.
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Gunnar Ritter, maintainer of the commonly-used mailx program, explains why it’s not available on Windows. It’s an interesting tale of how the kluges deep within that semi-operating psuedo-system mean that even in 2010 design decisions made in the Seventies afflict Windows.
They afflict Unix too, of course, but generally our design mistakes were smarter than Windows’s design mistakes. Even in error we’re better.
Read more →
Here’s a nifty list of 100 interview questions for developers. I can’t say that I can answer them all, but I know most … and will learn the rest.
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Here’s a nifty list of 100 interview questions for developers. I can’t say that I can answer them all, but I know most … and will learn the rest.
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You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.
Not that Linux — or even Unix — is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS.
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You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.
Not that Linux — or even Unix — is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS.
Read more →
A fundamental principle of the Internet is that all hosts are peers, that is, there is nothing fundamentally different about your laptop or Time magazine’s web serving computers: each is a computer; each can run the same software and communicate in the same way; neither is privileged over the other.
Net neutrality is an important implication of this principle. Basically, all hosts on the Internet have the same access to resources as any other host.
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A fundamental principle of the Internet is that all hosts are peers, that is, there is nothing fundamentally different about your laptop or Time magazine’s web serving computers: each is a computer; each can run the same software and communicate in the same way; neither is privileged over the other.
Net neutrality is an important implication of this principle. Basically, all hosts on the Internet have the same access to resources as any other host.
Read more →
One of the truly wonderful things about programming in Common Lisp is that the system is complete interactive: the programmer can manipulate anything at run time, including the language itself. This is a really powerful technique — but how does one preserve the state of the system between reboots? And how does one get an image-based Lisp system to play nice with Linux’s system service model?
Well, John Wiegley published a great technique a few years ago which I’ve adapted for Tasting Notes.
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One of the truly wonderful things about programming in Common Lisp is that the system is complete interactive: the programmer can manipulate anything at run time, including the language itself. This is a really powerful technique — but how does one preserve the state of the system between reboots? And how does one get an image-based Lisp system to play nice with Linux’s system service model?
Well, John Wiegley published a great technique a few years ago which I’ve adapted for Tasting Notes.
Read more →