Theodicius

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08/30/10--05:43: Talk Radio Comes to Open Source (chan 3164321)

I’ve been noticing a depressing trend among some contributors to OS projects. More and more I’m seeing people deliberately saying and doing outrageous things, and then excusing their behavior under the guise “I had to to that to make a point,” or some similar trash. The idea itself isn’t new, talking heads on TV and [...]


09/14/10--22:00: Just Not Git-ing It (chan 3164321)

Phil Taylor recently tried to get up close and personal with git. He ran into difficulties, in no small part because he treated git like subversion, which it decidedly isn’t. So in the interests of helping out anyone else out there with the same idea, that of wanting to try out something new in hopes [...]


02/05/11--08:18: Postel’s Law and Human Interaction (chan 3164321)

Back in the day, the unutterably brilliant Jon Postel framed what will forever be known as “Postel’s Law:” Be conservative in what you emit, and liberal in what you accept. It stems from RFC 761, and it was originally intended to guide the creation of computer-computer interactions. In a nutshell, the law describes the nature [...]


08/29/11--09:28: A Matter of Will (chan 3164321)

Just finished working in Program Operations for the latest WorldCon (Renovation) and started planning for the next one, in Chicago, when I’m running the department. Not because I’m going to do it so much differently (let’s face it, when you learn from the best, there’s not a lot of ways to improve on it) but [...]


09/15/11--10:53: Terra Incognita (chan 3164321)

OK, let’s get the disclaimers out of the way right up front. Klout.com tossed me a free Fox VIP hoodie to take a sneak peek at the pilot for Fox’s new series Terra Nova. Like I needed to be paid to peek at a new science fiction TV show. And they encouraged (but did not [...]


10/12/11--15:06: Lemme Get This Straight (chan 3164321)

More and more I hear the refrain that as a developer you can “circumvent” Apple’s AppStore and “walled garden” by developing web apps for iOS devices. I even hear Apple and Steve Jobs positioned as wanting to “destroy the web” with their focus on “native apps.” That their “focus on native apps” is “splintering the [...]


10/18/11--08:04: The Secret to Reality Distortion (chan 3164321)

I know the secret to the (in)famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I’ve even used it myself, though I make no claim to equal his mastery of it. But the point is, it’s available to all of us. And now, in the wake of his passing, the time has come to talk about it. It [...]


10/21/11--13:12: Getting Rails 3.0.3/Nginx/Passenger Up On Dreamhost VPS (chan 3164321)

(Edited 2001/10/24 to add apache notes at end.) Rails isn’t always an easy proposition on Dreamhost, and this was no exception. BTW, this is *not* the rvm version. I wanted to get the Dreamhost default setup working before I started playing with rvm. I’ll probably post an rvm-related set of instructions later. In this case, [...]


11/01/11--18:10: Ruby 1.9 and Nginx on FreeBSD (chan 3164321)

Noticed some, um, interesting, gotchas when setting up ruby 1.9 and the nginx web server on FreeBSD. The issue with the ruby install is subtle, and doesn’t really show up until long after you have installed it. The issue is it points the gem repository to the wrong place. It points the gem repository to [...]


11/14/11--10:01: Choose Your Own Coding Adventure? (chan 3164321)

You remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? You’d read a paragraph or two, then be presented with a question, the answer determining which of several pages you’d turn to in order to continue the story. I may be giving too much credit to Mike Stackpole, Rick Loomis and the rest of the crew at [...]