fcheblog

critical acclaim

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:19:00 -0400

During half an hour of goofing around on our synthesizer (though that’s interesting too), I managed to eke out enjoyable (or at least recognizable) enough noises that Eric awarded me with a proposed name for my act: “Airship Disasters Music Band”. Someday, I’ll leave the computer business for music, and I’ll use that name. You heard it here first.

hacker documentaries

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:43:00 -0400

For those of us who started their hacker careers in the 1980s, documentaries like Jason Scott’s Get Lamp and BBS are a pure sentimental pleasure. They cover technologies we grew up with, participated in, which gave us our impetus in the field. Their authenticity separates them from a routine TV show: the interviews are given by the real people who built and championed all that great early home computer stuff. However, Jason is a talented enough to weave them into stories that are interesting to non-specialists too. My dear lady wife has enjoyed whole chunks of the BBS documentary.

The documentaries are CC-licensed, so you can watch/try them for free. If you like them, toss some bucks Jason’s way and get the disks.

in other words XI

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:58:00 -0400

claim: When convinced he’s right — which is often — he turns his head at the podium to the right and left, gazing above his audience into the near distance…
in fewer words: “Obama’s teleprompters make him look haughty”

overheard

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:21:00 -0400

Upstairs, just after bath time for the brats, after some hallway chatter about protons and density, then:
`Enough talking about the periodic table, put on some clothes!’.

systemtap is not a "rejected kernel patch"

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:08:00 -0400

If this article quotes Ted Ts’o correctly, we have a problem.

The quote:

Ted Ts’o, a Linux kernel maintainer who joined Google in January 2010, said both Novell and Red Hat ship patches that were rejected by the Linux kernel but no one describes their distributions as Linux forks.
It’s nothing new,” he said. “Novell has a number of patches and SUSE ships with code somebody rejected but no one says Novell forked the Linux code. Red Hat ships SystemTap and no one says Red Hat forked the kernel.”

Ted ought to know that systemtap is not a kernel patch. It has never been a kernel patch. It has never been posted to LKML as if it were a kernel patch. This makes his anecdote a lousy simile to Android, whose kernel does contain controversial patches. Portraying systemtap as if it were “rejected” or had any similarity to a kernel fork gives a completely false impression of the nature and history of the project.

I hope there was further context given at the conference, or else he was misquoted. Otherwise, the conference attendees were mislead, and our project was needlessly slighted.

fedora upgrade

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 19:49:00 -0400

I’m flabbergasted at the ease of upgrading a live fedora system between versions. This is not supposed to work, especially with lots of customized public/service processes. Yet, a ‘yum update’ from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, live, worked almost with out a hitch.

Well, there is always postgresql, breaking updates since (before) 2007.

in other words X

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:15:00 -0400

Headline: Obama’s new mission for NASA: Reach out to Muslim world
In other words: Charles Bolden pulls a great practical joke on al-Jazeera. I think…

contraband

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:14:00 -0400

Find this wonderful little track on youtube and play it while reading the following.

What do you see in the picture below?

A tasty treat? A reminder of fun Halloween nights? In the Queen’s Ontario, no. This here is a crime scene.

Apparently, on statutory holidays such as today, it is unlawful for those few stores who are open to actually sell groceries. Our neighbourhood drug store taped off those portions of the store where food basics like milk & eggs were refrigerated, and sheepishly explained that provincial (?) law forces them to do so. One could still go and buy stuff like the latest pink lipstick, roasted almonds, potato chips, sixteen kinds of soft drinks, chocolate bars, toothpaste. Just not stuff actually good for you.

At another open retail outlet – a little variety store attached to a gas station – no such nonsense was observed. Their few groceries were actually on sale. If they are exempt from that law, the law is stupid. If they just flaunt the law, they are smart and the law is still stupid. I subversively but proudly purchased the above-pictured item, along with some other basic groceries. You know, for the family-feeding that’s in it. And I’ll do it again any other holiday, coppers.

The (provincial ?) government is not just in our bedrooms. It is in our refrigerators. Get out of there, you bastards.