inamerrata

Michael and Greg haven’t written their blogs yet, but they whine at me about updating mine! Is that fair? I don’t think so.

There’s apparently a Cornell University and University of Virginia project called Fedora, and they’re having a spat with Red Hat over their Fedora project. The universities’ press release contains the gem: The Cornell and Virginia teams have taken a number of steps to try to work with Red Hat regarding use of the name Fedora. […]

Well, what do you know? Keeping all your receipts and going through them actually pays off. I’d been thinking recently that I really should get around to getting a copy of Torch the Moon, the latest Whitlam’s CD. For “recently”, read “since September” or so, as it happens I started thinking this more or less […]

One feature I’d really like for my blog is a micro web.archive.org that just caches the pages I link to (along with any graphics, frames, embedded junk, stylesheets and whatever else they might contain that affects how they display), so that I can have blosxom automagically redirect the link to my cached copy if and […]

White Glenn linked to a Veteran’s Day story about the leadership shown by Captain Harry (Zan) Hornbuckle. It’s an impressive story: a group of soldiers are thrown together, given very little time to coalesce as a team, told to secure an area, come under heave attack (300 against 80), and end up saving the day. […]

So, I’ve actually done something vaguely productive with arch now; namely put debootstrap into it, and hacked on cross-strapping support. Cross-strapping is basically inspired by the needs of the Hurd project, and more particularly the crosshurd package. Basically, in order to install a Debian GNU/Hurd system you have to boot up Linux, do partitioning and […]

Admittedly, that’s not what he’s trying to do when he says: People mumble about arch until they go use it for a while and realize it is about 3-5 years behind BK. Here’s what he was saying about BitKeeper four years ago, in 1999: The problem with most systems is that they don’t scale. They […]

Some more thoughts on this topic. Ecash is actually something of a distraction in the description; there’s no particular need for people to be able to do anonymous transactions, or to transact without talking to a central market — so you can do this just as effectively with market accounts. In that case, it makes […]

Hrm, haven’t made a “release manager” blog post since August. Nice. Fortunately that’s not entirely representative of how slack I’ve been, but it’s not as far off as might be nice. Due to the aforementioned chaos I’ve been almost completely out of the loop for the past few weeks. On the upside, this has given […]

So, since Lessig has commented on the Allen Report, I thought I might too. They mostly have an interesting view on things, but there are two particular claims that stand out as being, well, delusional. In section 4.1, starting on page 26, the report makes the argument that the increased incentives provided by copyright extension […]

Martin notes that: One fairly silly argument sometimes advanced against Linux is that by reducing towards zero the cost of getting a good operating system, it is somehow communist or anti-capitalist. He’s right: people do make that argument, and it’s silly. It’s especially silly because people already do it for a profit, and even sillier […]

The magic smoke seems to have escaped from my laptop. Doh. God’s way of saying “hey, it’s time to review your backup policies”. UPDATE 2003/11/03: Well, I’ve had my laptop back for a while now. I’m not really convinced it’s as good as it used to be — it had a hardware crash for no […]

So, one thing which annoys me a bit about writing blog entries is the way the horrible markup for links screws up the formatting of the entries as I see it in the editor. It makes a couple of words take up a whole line, and screws up the word-wrapping, and makes things unreadable. Which […]

Hey, there’s my submission! How bizarre though, that they seem to have printed out the (126kB) PDF that I sent them, then scanned it back in as a new (906kB) PDF. Arguably it makes sense to make sure that people looking at the website are getting exactly what the review are reading, but even so. […]

Cypher was a fun movie, twisty and a little noir, with some suspense and revulsion and action and sexual tension and everything. The only problem with it was a strange mis-step in the script: a couple of scenes were about incredibly boring lectures at conferences, and while they at least weren’t so out of touch […]