The Apple Macintosh turns twenty-five today. I still remember how amazing it was when Dad brought one home, and how much cooler the Mac, and Mac software, and Mac people, were than any other computer of the time. We boys spent hour upon hour playing Deja Vu and Dark Castle, making pictures in SuperPaint, writing papers and so on.
I’m a Linux geek now, but I’ll always have a certain soft spot in my heart for the classic black-and-white all-in-one Macs.
Read more →
The Apple Macintosh turns twenty-five today. I still remember how amazing it was when Dad brought one home, and how much cooler the Mac, and Mac software, and Mac people, were than any other computer of the time. We boys spent hour upon hour playing Deja Vu and Dark Castle, making pictures in SuperPaint, writing papers and so on.
I’m a Linux geek now, but I’ll always have a certain soft spot in my heart for the classic black-and-white all-in-one Macs.
Read more →
Computers generally track time as the number of units of time (e.g. second or milliseconds) since some date (called the epoch); Unix counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. Well, at 23:31:30 on 13 February 2009 it will be 1,234,567,890 since the epoch.
Yeah, I’m just a bit of a geek …
Read more →
Computers generally track time as the number of units of time (e.g. second or milliseconds) since some date (called the epoch); Unix counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. Well, at 23:31:30 on 13 February 2009 it will be 1,234,567,890 since the epoch.
Yeah, I’m just a bit of a geek …
Read more →
Tonight I upgraded to Fedora 10, which was relatively less painful than such upgrades have been in the past. One big problem, though, was getting Blosxom working. Try as I might, I kept on getting errors in /var/log/httpd/error_log stating Permission denied: exec of '/var/www/blosxom/bin/blog' failed.
After lots of playing around, I discovered the solution: just run chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /var/www/blosxom/bin/blog. It turns out the in the latest Fedora SELinux has pretty fine-grained controls and needs to be told that it’s okay to execute CGI scripts.
Read more →
Tonight I upgraded to Fedora 10, which was relatively less painful than such upgrades have been in the past. One big problem, though, was getting Blosxom working. Try as I might, I kept on getting errors in /var/log/httpd/error_log stating Permission denied: exec of '/var/www/blosxom/bin/blog' failed.
After lots of playing around, I discovered the solution: just run chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /var/www/blosxom/bin/blog. It turns out the in the latest Fedora SELinux has pretty fine-grained controls and needs to be told that it’s okay to execute CGI scripts.
Read more →
A few days ago I was driving along when a great song from my college years came on the radio (One Headlight by the Wallflowers). It occurred to me that it’d be really great to know the next time they’re in town. But then I realised that there’s no way for me to be alerted of the fact.
Sure, I could sign up for their mailing list. But then I’d get announcements of records, of shows in other cities and states, perhaps the lead singer’s thoughts on politics or art or some other subject.
Read more →
A few days ago I was driving along when a great song from my college years came on the radio (One Headlight by the Wallflowers). It occurred to me that it’d be really great to know the next time they’re in town. But then I realised that there’s no way for me to be alerted of the fact.
Sure, I could sign up for their mailing list. But then I’d get announcements of records, of shows in other cities and states, perhaps the lead singer’s thoughts on politics or art or some other subject.
Read more →
Bruce Webster has some interesting thoughts on modifying the Cravath model for the technical field. The ‘Cravath model’ is the standard big-company practise of having partners, directors, senior managers, managers, senior associates & associates who are rated annually, with the lowest performers being asked to leave and the highest performers being promoted. In many ways the model is good, but one problem is that it doesn’t really work for technology because technologists generally don’t wish to manage and generally don’t do well in management; Webster proposes a parallel track of associate engineer, engineer, senior engineer, technical officer, senior technical officer, executive technical officer and chief technical officer.
Read more →
Bruce Webster has some interesting thoughts on modifying the Cravath model for the technical field. The ‘Cravath model’ is the standard big-company practise of having partners, directors, senior managers, managers, senior associates & associates who are rated annually, with the lowest performers being asked to leave and the highest performers being promoted. In many ways the model is good, but one problem is that it doesn’t really work for technology because technologists generally don’t wish to manage and generally don’t do well in management; Webster proposes a parallel track of associate engineer, engineer, senior engineer, technical officer, senior technical officer, executive technical officer and chief technical officer.
Read more →
Arto Bendiken notes that Lively Kernel is a reinvention of the Lisp Machine concept. For those who’ve not heard of them, Lisp Machines were really great pieces of work: at a time when command-lines and static software which crashed were the norm, they provided full GUIs, dynamic software and elegant error recovery. Perhaps Lively Kernel can bring some of that coolness into the 21st century.
Computing really is about continually reinventing the wheel.
Read more →
Arto Bendiken notes that Lively Kernel is a reinvention of the Lisp Machine concept. For those who’ve not heard of them, Lisp Machines were really great pieces of work: at a time when command-lines and static software which crashed were the norm, they provided full GUIs, dynamic software and elegant error recovery. Perhaps Lively Kernel can bring some of that coolness into the 21st century.
Computing really is about continually reinventing the wheel.
Read more →