Older blog entries for corbet (starting at number 1)

I can tell I'm not going to manage this diary thing very often. Just like every other diary I've ever had, fancy that.

Advice of the week, for those who didn't catch it in LWN: check out gnucash. I've finally transitioned my family finances over to Linux, ending one embarrassing use of non-free software. Time to reformat that other partition on my system.

If you ever get into the news site business, avoid a hard, weekly publishing schedule. My son's school play is tomorrow night, meaning I get to be up very late pushing things out.

This wasn't helped by the whole Redirect thing coming my way today. The security problem is somewhat scary in the short term, but the really unnerving thing is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of easy fix for it. It's wired too deeply into how the web works.

Of course, abolishing Javascript forevermore would help a lot, and fix a number of other problems and obnoxiousnesses at the same time...

Hmm...a diary...It's hard to imagine that anybody would really be all that interested, but one never knows. Advogato should provide clickthrough stats.

Grumble of the day: ever tried to write a device driver that's compatible with Linux 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4? It's an uphill battle, to say the least. The kernel developers feel entirely free to change the API to their hearts' content, often in ways that are difficult to handle in portable code.

The developers do this because they see it as being superior to the alternative: having the kernel slowly turn into a mass of backward compatiblity cruft that is slow, buggy, and unmaintainable. I think they're right. So I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out the new HIGHMEM stuff, and how it impacts driver developers. The documentation is, shall we say, sparse... Oh well, that's what the source is for.