Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
- Stevey’s Blog Rants: (Not) Managing Software Developers — “This is where those management tips come in handy. Because if you’re a bad manager, you’ve got serious problems ahead of you. The tech industry is still growing fast enough that good engineers won’t stick with you if they’re unhappy. Bad engineers might, but then you’ve got another set of problems.” Tags: howto management tech work.
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Updated on Wednesday, 2006-05-31.
Posted at 21:34,
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- The Straight Dope Archive — A goldmine of information. Tags: history humour reference science social trivia.
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- GCALSYNC - synhronize your phone with Google Calendar — sounds interesting, I need to investigate GCal. Via MattC. Tags: calendar google mobile sync.
- Article not found - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia — will try to add this article. Tags: article song warren-zevon wikipedia.
- Poor Poor Pitiful Me - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia — model for song articles. Tags: song warren-zevon wikipedia.
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I finished three books this long weekend, capsule reviews follow.
- The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe.
Apparently 2 novels, The Knight and The Wizard, I read this tome
in trade paperback and got a sore back for my pains. Only thing wrong
with this book, which is vintage Wolfe. Echoes of the Torturer
series, this is in a classic fairytale setting with knights and
princesses and elfs, but with a few twists. Our hero grows to be a man
in a night, battles giants and dragons, dies and goes to Valhalla,
returns to claim his queen. Great stuff.
- The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks.
What it says on the tin. Worried about the plague of undead coming to
eat your flesh? This book tells you what to do before, during, and
after an outbreak of zombies in your neighborhood. Also contains tips
for surviving the apocalypse of an Earth dominated by the living dead.
- Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett.
Pratchett takes on the military and adds a twist to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” meme.
Posted at 22:25,
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- Hack Attack: Automatically sync iTunes to any folder(s) - Lifehacker — looks interesting. Tags: apple audio ipod itunes sync.
- Protecting yourself against the BitTorrent bandits! — IP blacklisting is a crude tool, but it’s better than nothing. Tags: bittorrent filter p2p software tools.
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Ellis Sharp:
The US military and political establishment has, of course, a long record of conspiracies and mass murder, but these all involve operations in foreign lands. These actual historical conspiracies — in Indonesia, Chile, Iraq etc etc — were exposed years ago. But they attract no media coverage. The media would far rather concentrate on ludicrous death-of-Diana conspiracy theories than coups in foreign countries. American civilians or military personnel abroad are certainly expendable and the corporate media can be relied on to screen such events through a neutralising filter. But I simply don’t believe that these elites would countenance the mass killing of civilians on American soil, especially when so many of the victims were their kind of people — white, middle class professionals.
¶
Posted at 22:26,
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- 5ives » Five terrible fake Spears family parenting lapses — hehe. Tags: britney crap humour white-trash.
- Coding Horror: Code Smells — I don’t do much OO programming, but this is interesting nonetheless. Tags: programming refactoring software work.
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Scary:
PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud ‘pay per click’ systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).
The bots are controlled remotely through several Web servers. This allows the perpetrators to define, for example, the web pages on which the adverts are hosted or the maximum number of clicks from any one IP address in order not to arouse suspicions. Similarly, the number of clicks from the bot can be monitored as well as the computers online at any one time. The system used can evade fraud detection systems by sending click requests from different, unrelated IP addresses.
(Source: Help Net Security).
¶
Posted at 20:22,
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I wanted a quicker way to transfer files between two laptops than via wifi. One’s is running Ubuntu Linux, the other Windows XP.
Both machines have a 4-pin FireWire port (labeled 1394, apparently
someone owns the rights to the “FireWire” name and someone else
doesn’t want to pay royalties). I borrowed a 4-pin to 4-pin cable
from my brother-in-law and set out to try to connect the machines.
I knew that Windows has built-in IP-over-1394 support, the clincher
was enabling it under Linux. Ubuntu has the required modules installed
and the kernel I use can use them. There is a project page for
Linux1394 if you need to get the modules and install them
by hand.
I loaded the network module eth1394 by running
$ sudo modprobe eth1394
(Maybe this isn’t strictly necessary, but I didn’t find any reference to the module in the dmesg output.) Checking /var/log/messages, I saw that the interface got the name eth2.
Then I connected the computers with the cable (after enabling the
interface in Windows). I heard a “cable connected” sound in Windows. Running
C:\> ipconfig /all
showed me that the interface was up. After a while I got a private address (169.254.203.16, netmask 255.255.0.0). I configured a static address on the Linux side:
$ sudo ifconfig eth2 up 169.254.203.17 netmask 255.255.0.0
I then started an FTP client in Windows, pointed it to the address
defined in Linux, and started transferring files. I’m getting about
2.5 MB/s which isn’t too shabby.
Update: some quick perusal of the transfer logs gave me a average
transfer rate of 1.45 MB/s.
Posted at 19:53,
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- dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator — this is now piped directly into emacs. Tags: corporate games geek humour management marketing parody quotes work.
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Bruce Schneier:
Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
¶
Rui Carmo updates the two cows
meme:
Corporate Support:
Someone sold your customer two pigs with horns stapled to their foreheads and you have to milk them.
Sarbanes-Oxley:
You can’t even think of having a single cow without having its impact on the company’s bottom line assessed by a team of expert chicken breeders.
These are so true, it’s not even funny.
¶
Posted at 16:10,
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This is a test entry, I made some changes to the functionality and
want to test that everything’s OK.
¶
Posted at 20:03,
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- James Lilek: The Diner podcast Tags: podcast retro subscribe.
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Nick Carr:
So how do we ensure that good, well-paying jobs will be around in the future? Schrage says that our educational institutions need to focus on “creative differentiation.” If that sounds vague, it’s because it is. Where Schrage’s diagnosis of the problem is incisive, his prescription for solving it is sketchy. He talks about using business ingenuity and the prestige of our top universities to harness the power of the cheap technical talent residing elsewhere in the world. But while that may help the bottom lines of multinational corporations, it leaves unanswered the bigger question: Where are the good jobs required to support a healthy middle class going to come from? I admit that I don’t have an answer for that question, either. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: We can’t all make a living writing blogs and shooting silly videos. ¶
Mark Dominus:
People sometimes say “well, I like to put [parentheses] in anyway, just to be sure.” This is pure superstition, and we should not tolerate it in people who purport to be engineers. Engineers should be capable of making informed choices, based on technical realities, not on some creepy feeling in their guts that perhaps a failure to sprinkle enough parentheses over their program will invite the wrath the Moon God. ¶
Rui Carmo on the black MacBook:
… it’s a scratch magnet several orders of magnitude larger than the nano… ¶
Posted at 14:04,
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- Space Colony Artwork 1970 — trippy wallpaper fodder. Tags: future illustration nasa retro science sf space tech.
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Posted at 21:26,
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- Crypt::RandPasswd - random password generator based on FIPS-181 - search.cpan.org Tags: crypto passwords perl work.
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Jeff Atwood:
Thank goodness for my old friend, CTRL+Z, but editing a Word document is a nerve wracking experience not unlike walking through a field of formatting land mines.
¶
Posted at 12:38,
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I usually try my hardest to finish all the books I start, but I had to cry Uncle! at Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’m sure fans of early English fantasy and stories about fairies will find this pastiche delightful. It doesn’t cut it for me.
Instead I started on Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight. Much better so far.
Posted at 21:42,
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- Jifty — web application framework in Perl. Tags: application framework perl programming web.
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Posted at 21:34,
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Posted at 21:29,
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Subtitled “A Codemaker’s War, 1941—1945”, a memoir of work in the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. Well worth the read.
The title refers to the author’s offer to his superiors: either code
pages printed on hard-to-obtain silk were issued to agents, or they
would have to use their cyanide tablets.
Posted at 14:47,
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I went home with a waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians too?
<TangerineJeemH> Have a fun journey gustaf
<TangerineJeemH> don't do anything you'll regret..
No fear, Jim, I didn’t end up
[…] hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan.
— Warren Zevon
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Nick Carr:
If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals - to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search - it should open up its home page to other search engines.
What ideals are these? I believe Google has the same ideals as any public company: maximising shareholder value. Doing what Carr suggests would mean that Google is an exceptional company, instead of just another product of the capitalist system. My bet is on the latter. ¶
Posted at 17:32,
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A book about the political background of the Restoration. Mostly
interesting for the origin of the Whig and Tory parties in British
politics.
Posted at 07:21,
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