When looking through the comments on Slashdot stories like this, and seeing the kind of ignorant garbage that gets moderated up, it really helps to keep repeating to myself: “They're only kids. They've probably never developed anything longer than a 100 line Perl-script in their lives.” But it's so disheartening to see so much ignorance concentrated in such a small place, labeled as the “voice of nerd culture”. →

I was looking for something I wrote a while back about C++, and came across these two quotes in my blog archives. →

ime after time on projects, though, a set of requirements end up written on cards that do not fit. They are the round peg to the User Story's square hole. These requirements are: security, usability, performance, and logging (especially audit logs). These are generally shoved in the catch-all category of Non-Functional Requirements. →

The paper looks at both the internal structure of the diegetic universe of BUFFY, and considers the T.V. as a 'symptomatic' product of the current later capitalist culturo-political conjuncture. In particular, as the subtitle indicates, the paper uses a consideration of BUFFY to raise questions concerning where we might stand today vis-a-vis the enlightenment project of opposing all things spectral and vampyric in the name of rendering social and political life transparent to reason →

"You've got to understand that most of the input into Gartner is from briefings arranged by the marketing departments of companies that are paying them to listen to their briefings. Basically, Garter sits at the apex of the hype food-chain; they consume pure hype and produce little sh&t-pellets of hype that is[sic] as dense as neutronium." - Marcus J. Ranum, on firewall-wizards. →

Mark Pilgrim has upgraded his site to valid XHTML 1.1, and in the process provides several examples of why that's really quite a bad idea. I shall stick with my grossly invalid approximation of HTML4. →

Weblogs are fun, and interesting, and a very neat way of exchanging timely information in a decentralised environment. But they have some significant weaknesses that make them unsuitable for the task of providing a repository of academic research. →

Our intelligence services are getting exactly the same amount of information, they've just lowered their clipping levels below the point of usefulness as a result of the blame we placed on them for not warning us before the attacks in New York or Kuta. We should consider these warnings to be a failure condition, proof that our alarm is still unable to discriminate between a rumoured attack and a real plan. →

Is DCE the only standard safe to use on other planets? →

iPulse is pretty cool. It's a system monitor for OS X that can display CPU, disk, memory and network usage (and the time) all in a compact radial layout. →

When I go to the ‘Official Site’ for a computer game, there's a good chance that I already have the game, and am looking to see if there are any patches available. Put that information, or a link to it, on the front page. Even if there are no patches, link to a page that says there are no patches. →

And tonight Linux showed me how much it deserved my respect. I damaged its root filesystem beyond recognition and it didn't crash. It still hasn't crashed. I looked in directories with corrupt descriptors, files that made absolutely no sense, and Linux didn't panic on me, it just reported what it could see to the best of its ability. →

I have utterly destroyed the partition table on my primary hard drive. I have no backups. Don't drink and su. →

Egress filtering is a good idea, and every router should implement it as a matter of course. Sadly, a lot of them don't, and it's one of those things where even if you have egress filtering working fine across your border, you're not safe unless everyone else is doing it too. →

The Internet is in serious need of an upgrade in a number of areas. Some of these problems already have fixes, they're just not being rolled out because it's considered too hard, or there are large vested interests in maintaining the status quo. (This was originally going to be a top ten, but I ran out of writing time during my lunch hour. I may amend the list later.) →

The game is called Porrasturvat, a word the author vaguely translates to English as ‘Stair Dismount’. It's a physics simulation, the physics in question being just how much damage you can do to somebody when you push them down a flight of stairs. It's more than a little scary how much enjoyment one can get out of the simplest cruelties. →

The day a CD comes out that I want, but that only exists in a copy-protected form, is the day I return to the p2p networks. I bet you any money I'll find the whole album there. If an industry believes that its oligopoly is an excuse to treat customers like criminals, then I will quite happily satisfy their presumption. →