Selling The Blades
Humans only use ten percent of their brains, the trope goes, and the least interesting people immediately ask the least interesting question: what if we could use 100% of our brains? Gosh, wouldn’t...
View ArticleFixed
53-15 is too much. I got greedy. One of my most vivid childhood memories is the first time I went from a tiny, single-speed Canadian Tire BMX bike to a 3-speed. I might have been eight or nine years...
View ArticleSequels And Lights
Some recentish changes in the WordPress codebase – in particular the “database abstraction” class – have had the unfortunate side effect of cementing MySQL as a hard requirement for that stack. If you...
View ArticlePolished Glass
I’m resurrecting a scrubbed Surface Book I inherited from the old gig that wants very badly to run Windows 11, and I can’t see a viable downgrade process because apparently modernity is just like that,...
View ArticleEchoes Of The I
Somehow this has been sitting in my drafts folder for two months. Two months! An eternity, in magpies-and-merry-go-rounds hype-cycle news time . Entire civilizations have risen and fallen, tectonic...
View ArticleNevermore
Some time ago found myself wide awake staring at the ceiling, wide eyed at the realization that the poem doesn’t say Lenore is dead. Maybe she (finally, sensibly) just dumped him and Edgar won’t stop...
View ArticleConsoleblank
This is mostly a copy of a Mastodon thread, but I’m leaving it here in the naive hope that search will be good again someday and that people with specific questions about specific problems will be able...
View ArticleFinding Inliers
A few years ago I got asked to investigate a claimed software-license violation – I was the principal author of our licensing runbook at the time – in which some meaningful chunk of C code had, the...
View ArticleIndependencies
Software is just other people’s decisions, and if you trust code from people who don’t think consent matters they’ll get around to you eventually. Once again, I am asking you to understand your...
View ArticleControl
Control cold-opens in principia res, in the lobby of the Federal Bureau Of Control, an SCP-adjacent agency that amounts to the Department of Managing the Unreasonably Supernatural. The building itself...
View ArticleTwelve Questions
“If you’re a manager here in 2024 wondering why your people – you know, the people worried they might not have a job next week if they can’t convince a VP that a 90 minute commute to an open plan...
View ArticleMigration And Displacement
I wrote something for the Data Transfer Initiative called “In the shadow of the New Colossus”, which I feel quite clever about.
View ArticleMagic Numbers
The Maximum Transmission Unit – MTU – of an Ethernet frame is 1500 bytes. 1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a...
View ArticleBeeps
I wish more companies really paid attention to the noises their devices make, treated it like it was a part of the experience worth caring about. I know you can save a few bucks here and there by...
View Articleit is known
There are (it is known) 36 righteous people among us, (who must remain unknown) whose kindness whose patience whose virtue (that must remain unknown) is all that holds up the sky. Were they known,...
View ArticlePlatform 8
Platform 8, a sequel to Exit 8 from the same developers, is a small delight. I learned about Exit 8 from Adrian Hon’s endorsement; it’s a modest spot-the-difference environmental horror game, and it’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Panoramaic
While I was on the train from Newark into New York, I tried to take some panoramic pictures by putting the phone flat on the window and letting it pan with the motion of the train, instead of rotating...
View ArticleFifty Years Of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the...
View ArticleFrom Stage Fright To Symphonies
I wrote up something for work, about the path from code review anxiety to masterclasses as a possible participatory future. The general thesis is that programming is both art and science, and so is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cutting Flavor
“The character of the steel is only partly set by its formula and the mill in which it was made. It’s finalized by the processes of forging and hardening, of heating the steel and pounding it, making...
View Article