Release query bash function
As in in many other cases the suggestion is to use external processes like awk. Because starting a new process is expensive, that makes the system to do unnesessary heavy lifting - and removes that “snappy” feeling from running your scripts.
The fight over offensive terms
Nearly a year after the Internet Engineering Task Force took up a plan to replace words that could be considered racist, the debate is still raging.
Scheduling duplicacy backups
I really like the combination of Backblaze B2 and Duplicacy for an off-site backup. It is easy to setup and Duplicacy provides a very reasonable Quick Start guide as well as specific back-end details.
The Mysterious Life of Developers
Kantega AS funny advertisement
Imagine - Pentatonix
Blue-gold dress
Context is everything
Russia must be open
Russia must be open
Leadership Styles
24 Charts Of Leadership Styles Around The World
The Slow Winter
Hardware architecture pamphlet
On hatred
When your hatred defines you, any attempt to make you stop hating becomes an existential threat. – İyad el-Baghdadi
What kind of Asian are you?
Meta-creation, anyone?
Why some religions are so anti-evolution? Would not God which created (programmed) such simple and cool evolution rules be cool? Kinda, meta-creation-cool? I mean, that may move dogma a bit, but it may actually win some extra friends, would not it?
Pain Ray from Raytheon
The NPR story on the Raytheon device followed today the ongoing ACLU reporting and the specific coverage of the terrible invention.
Locking daemons in bash
The problem with pid file approach is that after a process or system crash the lock is stale and the new copy of the daemon will not start without manual cleanup. Another approach, documented in the flock(1) man page and used by system programmers all along, is to use a process file descriptor locked exclusively on a “pid” file.
If Code Is Law...
Square display
When it comes to convenient display hardware I have always been perplexed by the absence of square displays.
Practical math education
Essentially he argues that proficiency in statistics, probability, and meaning of data(sets) should be the pinnacle of high school math education.
Tacit collusion (a.k.a. uncommunicative cartel)
The Kingdom of Bhutan
Found unprocessed video fragments from the Bhutan trip and pieced them together. Got the 6m30s video as the result. Shared on YouTube.
Distribution aggregation
The following Ruby script is to prepare the csv data to plot distribution of numeric values.
Living Together
We have been discussing the values and patterns of a happy family living for a while. It turned out that we can use a house planning tool as a great conversation enabler. A few things bond better than dreaming together.
Recent Files
Here is the utility (ruby script) to show just a few recent files (click to download). After downloading the recent script, run chmod to set executable permission and put it on search path.
Thank you to PragProg
That is what taking care of the customer supposed to be!
Orphan Works - back to basics
The «Orphan Works» issue is clearly linked to the notion of copyright, so I have been thinking about the orphan works in the context of that link and it’s original purpose.
"Industry standard" baggage
“Industry standards” are those extra features, or additional functionality, which was at some time popular, but then went out of favor and never made it to a formal standard specification. Obvious examples are miscellaneous Internet Explorer 6 behaviors.
Logging multi-process app memory footprint
I needed to figure out a firefox memory footprint and it is inconvenient given it is one parent and many child processes.
The join() case for a better select()
Today’s bug in JavaScript code: was using the Array’s join() function and getting results which did not match the expectations. Turns out, that in a case of sparse array (with missing data at certain indexes) join inserts an empty string.
Orphan Works Bill opinion from FSF Compliance Engineer
In October this I have forwarded my opinion (see this post) on the Orphan Works Bill as a question to Free Software Foundation licensing team. Brett Smith from FSF sent me an interesting and detailed answer, which I post here verbatim with his permission
Autodiscover new pages using the server's directory index
Needed to have website pages listed in a side bar of the main page, when they are created in a certain directory. Wanted to do it without any additional server-side software. jQuery is to the rescue.
The Accordion Experience
While at the TAE in Boston, I have tried to use the accordion widget «on the spot» to organize my conference notes. I have looked up the Accordion documentation and put the code together. It did not work. After a brief conversation with Richard Worth (thank you, Richard!) it turned out that I did not read well enough into the Accordion’s assumptions on the DOM structure.
An Opinion on «Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008» - open source application
The “orphan works” bill is based on good intentions going terribly wrong.
Orphan Works Bill
The “orphan works” bill is based on good intentions going terribly wrong.
Thoughts on «free» photography
The impact of wide-spread amateur photography on the professionals is something I was often wondering about. Being an amateur, I have by never grasped fully. When participated at a photo trip I once asked the group leader about the issue and got the polite “it-is-not-a-big-problem-keep-shooting” kind of answer. What else would I expect, being a customer at the moment?
Value of peer involvement
The Bug Count Also Rises
In 1996, Microsoft’s internal newsletter, MicroNews, sponsored a contest for an original Hemingway parody. Workpump’s John Browne won that contest with the following entry