I was going to blog something, what was it? Oh yes, some musings on Mr Costello. He gave an interview with Ray Martin on 60 minutes on Sunday, which didn’t really say anything new — Ray tried to make it sound like there was some chance this was all some devious plot and Costello was […]
So, either a black US president, or a female VP. Nifty. And not just because the latter nomination won me $4950 odd inkles.
Faith is an interesting concept to try to disentangle from religion. faith n 1: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny; “he lost his faith but not his morality” [syn: {religion}, {faith}, {religious belief}] 2: complete confidence in a person or plan etc; “he cherished the faith of a […]
I’ve been a fan of chaos theory and emergent order for a long time now — the idea that simple rules repeatedly applied build complex and creative results is just beautiful to me, and seeing the same principles apparently apply in different areas — from evolutionary theory to the Wisdom of Crowds — for equally […]
(Alternative title: I aten’t dead) My name’s Anthony and, like a lot of other people, I suffer from depression. It’s not something I like to talk about — my normal philosophy is just to filter out that part of my life and just talk and think about the interesting and fun parts of life. The […]
There’s been a few major issues lately where inflation and central banks have been key elements: Zimbabwe’s collapse under Mugabe, the recent Australian Federal election, and the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. What I find fascinating is that it all seems to be treated as an absolute black art by almost everyone, in spite of economics […]
One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don’t you know), reality these days seems to be otherwise. […]
Last month we had a brief discussion on debian-devel about what images would be good to have for lenny — we’re apparently up to about 30 CDs or 4 DVDs per architecture, which over 12 architectures adds to about 430GB in total. That’s a lot, given it’s only one release, and meanwhile the entire Debian […]
In a couple of days, DPL-elect Steve McIntyre takes over as DPL, after being elected by around four hundred of his peers… Because I can’t help myself, I thought I might poke at election numbers and see if anything interesting fell out. First the basics: I get the same results as the official ones when […]
One of the loveliest things about Unix is the select() function (or its replacement, poll()), and the way it lets a single thread handle a host of concurrent tasks efficiently by just using file descriptors as work queues. Unfortunately, it can be a nuisance to use — you end up having to structure your program […]
One of the challenges maintaining the Debian archive kit (dak) is dealing with Debian-specific requirements: fundamentally because there are a lot of them, and they can get quite hairy — yet at the same time, you want to keep them as separate as possible both so dak can be used elsewhere, and just so you […]
Continuing from where we left off… The lower bound for me becoming a DD was 8th Feb ’98 when I applied; for comparison, the upper bound as best I can make out was 23rd Feb, when I would have received this mail through the debian-private list: Resent-Date: 23 Feb 1998 18:18:57 -0000 From: Martin Schulze […]
So, sometime over the past few weeks I clocked up ten years as a Debian developer: From: Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> Subject: Wannabe maintainer. Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 18:35:28 +1000 (EST) To: new-maintainer@debian.org Hello world, I’d like to become a debian maintainer. I’d like an account on master, and for it to be subscribed to […]
Oh yay, another argument about sexism. I thought we were over this. Aigars writes: Trying to restrict what words people can or can not use (by labeling them sexist, racist or obscene) is the bread and butter of modern day media censorship. It is censorship and not “just political correctness”. While I would not want […]
Wow. Pretty.