Cleaning out the drafts

August 19th, 2008

Little bit of extra activity - I decided to clean out some of my drafts, one about DTrace and one about AOP (the one about Firefox’s SSL policy I wrote this evening).  I’m not sure if they are in a state of completion, so please leave comments if you see obvious omisions.  Grazie!

Firefox’s SSL policy is not bad, you idiot

August 19th, 2008

Today’s happy little rant comes courtesy of some asshat at UMass Lowell.  The article is entitled:

Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

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When licensing != messaging

August 19th, 2008

I was reading this article, on LWN, about “DTrace envy”.  The short of the article is that, despite great efforts, the DTrace “ecosystem” of tools has yet to be replicated on Linux.  Forgetting the technical considerations for a minute, it might be worth your time to read through the comments at what appears to be a partial example of what I term “political argument”.

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AOP: YARBI

August 19th, 2008

I just watched a talk about AOP given by some guy from PARC (Gregor Kiczales), and I have to say the following:

Before I watched this talk, I thought AOP was just another bad idea.  After watching this talk, I realize that AOP is Yet Another Really Bad Idea.  Either that or this guy is just a few steps away from needing a nurse to cut up his food.

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Dealers of Lightning

July 27th, 2008

First off, go buy this book.  It isn’t new or anything (published in 2000), so I’m not quite sure why the local Borders was randomnly stocking four copies of it, but holy jebus am I glad I found it.

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popular == authoritarian??

July 25th, 2008

I just read this article on Media Matters about a interview between Glenn Beck of CNN and Ben Stein.  Ben Stein has been kinda on the crazy side recently, with the whole Expelled (documentary) thing.

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(quick shortcut) pasting into a windows command prompt

July 25th, 2008

My coworker Michael uses this one, which I’ve found saves me a bit of time and a headache.  Normally, to paste into a command prompt, you have to right-click on the command prompt; this is well and good if you have your hand on the mouse already, but annoying if you have your hands on the keyboard.  Instead, try the following:

  1. Alt+spacebar (activates the window menu)
  2. E (for the “Edit” menu)
  3. P (for “Paste”)

It is a little bit awkward at first, but as it becomes muscle memory, you’ll find it much faster than moving your hand to the mouse and back.

the keyboard/mouse and “bandwidth”

July 25th, 2008

I want to clarify something of what I wrote in the last post about when the keyboard is more effective than the mouse and how it relates to bandwidth.  If you haven’t already read the post on The Productive Programmer and vim, go do so, then come back.

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The Productive Programmer and vim

July 24th, 2008

I started reading The Productive Programmer today, and I’ve already, in the first 15 pages or so (including introduction), found some interesting tidbits worth sharing.

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How to convince people you have no clue what you are talking about

June 13th, 2008

(Rules taken from an email thread I’m reading right now).

The email thread was trying to ascertain if there are effectively things equivalent to Apple Keychain on Linux.  Here’s how my favorite response went:

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