Recent content on go c800:5
There’s a thing I find amazing about music that you can demonstrate with a pair
of musicians who are about equally popular but have completely different sets
of fans. 
 For example, let’s pick a solo violinist in a prestigious orchestra, and a
singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar. Poll the fans of each of them to find
out why they think their idol is great. It…
I’ve been reading a lot about fascism lately, some of the notable titles I recommend: 
 
 Anne Applebaum Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc 
 Ruth Ben-Ghiat Strongmen 
 Heather Cox-Richardson How the South Won the Civil War 
 Cass R. Sunstein and Kaleo Griffith Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America 
 Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here 
…
Asking for help is unavoidable as a software engineer. It is easy to become
completely stuck, especially when you are working on a new piece of software or
with new tools. Much of your professional growth will entail gaining the
knowledge required to answer questions posed to you by developers with less
experience, and those skills are difficult to acquire without having…
The apparent leap in the capabilities of large language models has been made
possible by venture capitalists, persuaded by earnest but misguided
entrepreneurs like Sam Altman, that given sufficient resources, the models
could be evolved into generalized artificial intelligence. In other words, with
enough money, OpenAI could build you a machine capable of the same…
I was chatting with Dan Lorenc from Chainguard (who I adore as a company) on
Twitter about the trevails of patching open source software last week, and
immediately thought of many stories-from-the-trenches I’ve accumulated during the
past 25 years or so of working at Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, MA. 
 We are heavy users of open source software and in many situations will…
Now that I work remotely full time a large part of my day is spent, like most
remote workers, in video calls. For a number of reasons, I prefer using a
headset rather than a mic and speakers. For an even longer list of reasons, I
prefer using an analog broadcast-style headset. I’ve had several of these but
splurged last year on a Sennheiser HME
27 ,
which is an…
Some time back in the ‘80s, I decided I needed a new fishing reel. I spent a couple days of summer vacation fishing with my older cousin, and he’d introduced me to his Shimano Bantam bait-casting reel. It was shiny and black, with small silkscreened text identifying the various capabilities of the machine; claims regarding the number of ball bearings it contained and which parts were…
Policy for Language Evaluation and Selection 
 In 2014, two languages qualify as industry standard Systems
Programming Languages, C/C++ and Java. I define Systems
Programming languages as the category of languages that have
applicability outside web development or desktop applications
development. C# and Objective C are a little unclear, but because
they tend to be closely…
I originally posted this article 01/15/2011 at my old blog, but owing
to Matt Asay’s
 post 
I am compelled to post it again here 
 Linux taking over “the desktop” 
 In the past 10 years I must have seen a hundred articles titled along
the lines of “Will/Has/Could/Can Linux take over the desktop?”. This
evening I saw another one somewhere,…
I recently took a position at a new company. This was a big deal for
me since I’d only changed jobs a couple of times before. A good chunk
of the last job was spent amassing institutional knowledge and (I
hoped) maturing as a programmer. I was always dubious on the
latter. The new job was exciting because I knew I’d be working in a
new language, and there was a good…
I hadn’t seen this post before, but it sums up my own feelings on a
subject so well that I feel relieved knowing somebody has already done
a better job of writing it than I could have done, and I don’t have to do anything. 
 http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-magpie-developer.html 
 This reference is also superb: 
…
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a handful of “Why Golang
Sucks” articles. A couple were reasoned, the rest were copy-cat, none
of them make any sense to me. 
 It would be easy to get the impression from pop-software news that the
last line of C was written about 5 or 6 years back, and the last small
band of C++ programmers are holed up in a cave…
Julia Evan’s
 article on becoming a kernel hacker 
reminds me of the the early 90s, when earnest young hackers dutifully
ftp’d down the latest Linux kernel patch file and excitedly ran make
config to see what new stuff had been added, the rebooted immediately
to check out the new uname sweetness. 
 Rarely was there any real reason for this other than bragging…
I’m a little unusual in the software development profession in that
I have a “serious” side hobby. I play an instrument in what you’d
probably call a semi-professional capacity. On a good year I probably
play 20-30 gigs, play on a record or two, and make a couple thousand
bucks (then squander all of it on instruments). 
 I’m not in it for the…
I enjoyed reading an
article from a fellow named Ben
Northrop. About 90% of the posts I find by way Hacker News, et al, are
crap; in a roundabout way that’s actually the topic of this post. 
 I am vastly more cynical than Mr. Northrop. I stormed through his
essay and was annoyed that the programmer motivation I’d been
spending the past few months thinking about…
In the past, passing –without-x-toolkit to the configure script for
emacs was sufficient to get it to omit window system support from the
build. Maybe this still works elsewhere but on my new work box running
Wheezy, I still get a build with X. This works though: 
 ./configure --prefix=$HOME \
 --with-xpm=no \
 --with-jpeg=no \
 --with-png=no \
 --with-tiff=no…
I used to keep a blog where I would write a combination of stories I
thought were funny, along with occasional long rambling pieces about
politics or technology. After doing this for a few years I realized
I’m ok at writing funny stories, but that when I wrote about politics
or technology it was boring as ass to read, mostly because I tried to
make it sound like I was…