See what I mean? I forget to point at the other site! Anyway, here it is: http://rpdillon.freeshell.org.
It probably seems like I've been quiet for a while now, when actually I've been up to a whole lot. What's been happening is that I've been struggling with an impedance mismatch between my mode of content creation (sporadic, often with many projects worked in parallel in varying states of completion) and a blog's mode of content distribution (linear, discrete posts that are "finished" once they are posted, more or less). This has led to me maintaining a blog for years that I don't update all that often. Alongside...
Nilay Patel, of Engadget fame, recently wrote a piece discussing why the patent system in the United States isn't broken, and touched on all the high points: software patents, patent trolls, and the recent This American Life episode that has been so widely discussed.I should start by saying that many of his points are sound. He clearly has a good grasp on lots of the patent issues that have concerned me. Even as he starts by by blasting the "conventional wisdom" that "the patent system is broken beyond repair...
There was a recent shutdown of cellular service within the BART tunnels (on August 11th, between 4 and 7PM). The story was covered widely and is worthy of note, I think, if for no other reason than the variety of opinions it engendered. I first heard of it through the discussion that sprang up on Google+. It's a good story because it has a lot of elements that provide opportunity of nuanced analysis, I think. The story is essentially that some protesters were allegedly planning to enter the paid areas of the BART...
I engaged in a conversation on Google+ recently that related to a recent episode of This American Life entitled "When Patents Attack". The episode focused on the damage that software patents and patent trolls are inflicting on the software industry. I penned a response to that episode, but as it was on Google+ in a limited circle, I thought I would reproduce it here in public. What follows is a simple cut and paste of the response I wrote on G+. Finally got around to listening to this. IV's position, along with...
Every so often, I run across a manifesto that captures something I know about programming, but couldn't quite express before I read it. That was true when I first read the Ion Window Manager Manifesto, and struck me again tonight when I read the Sepia Philosophy:A development environment should support three activities: code spelunking, interaction, and customization. Emacs as an environment for developing Emacs Lisp thoroughly supports all of them: It has commands to visit individual functions' code and documentation...
A question was posed to me recently asking what "the cloud" is (in the internet sense). I was going to pen a long response, but in the spirit of not writing emails that are too long, I will instead post this (following Rule 6 in the aforementioned article), Let's start with a working definition of the cloud. Let me start by saying that when I first was sent on a mission to understand the cloud computing concept, one of my earliest conclusions was that it was ill-defined and many people used it in a bunch of ways...
Back in 2004 I built my first AMD64 system over the summer, and I was thrilled. I had just switched from Gentoo to Debian, and I think I even took a video of the process of building the machine. I knew it would take years for the mainstream to start using 64-bit systems, and I was proud that Linux/BSD was first. Later, OS X and Windows followed up with their own 64-bit versions. But what was notable on all platforms was how hard it was to transition. OS X did rather well just because of the nature of their hermetically...
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the "best" coding style, environment, language, abstraction. One of my mentors over the years once turned to me as we were working on some code and, after I'd delivered a particularly vehement critique of the code I'd been working on, simply said "Rick, there's no such thing as 'perfect code'." And that was it. I never knew him to be a man of many words, but he knew the craft better than any I'd ever met. It struck me at the time, but the simple truth of it has resonated...
