http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Bruce Schneier has an interesting essay on security and the ways to achieve it or not:

Beyond Security Theater

-- hendrik

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090920

Distributed version control systems are more-or-less incompatible with word processors, at least with the current crop of file formats. A DVCS's main job is merging sets of changes that were made independently, possibly at opposite ends of the Earth. They tend to analyze changes in terms of insertion, deletion, and replacement of lines ( Read more... )

Going through old junk, I just found something I've been looking for for decades. It's another verse to Suzanne, allegedly sung by Leonard Cohen at a Mariposa Folk Festival long ago and transcribed by someone who was there. It's labeled "3/", so presumably it goes after the second verse and before the usual third verse. For all I know my copy ( Read more... )

Tonight I got to attend a film -- no, a concert -- no, that's not right either, a presentation of Melissa auf der Maur's new multimedia offering, OOOM, Out Of Our Minds. Not the whole thing, just pieces. I got to see the film, which was first presented at Sundance. During breaks in the film (it seems the Palais de Congress has a hard time ( Read more... )

hendrik@lovesong:~$ ls -l /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 92312 2008-04-04 10:22 /bin/ls
hendrik@lovesong:~$

92K.

I remember the day when I could use ls on a 48K PDP-11 ( Read more... )

I've just started reading The City & The City by China Miéville. Let me recommend it, based only on the four chapters I've already read ( Read more... )

It looks very much that I'll be going to Readercon. The only thing left is to arrange transportation. I'm leaning toward driving, but am concerned about the possibility of highway hypnosis.

When you discover a plot hole in your novel, be sure to look through and see what's on the other side.