Advogato: Personal info for ncm

5 Apr 2013 »

I built Rust 0.6. I don't know if it's the Glorious Successor to C++, but at the very least it's the Glorious Successor to Haskell. Probably Git-annex needs to be translated to it. Learning Rust will be worth serious effort: powerful, safe, parallel, link-compatible with C, but faster.

15 Mar 2013 »

I have solved IKEA. I drive into the parking lot exit directly to the "5 minute" loading zone, park there, roll an abandoned cart into the store exit, past the registers to the "self-service" warehouse racks, load up, pay, and roll out again in five minutes.

12 Mar 2013 »

I'm going out on a limb, so to speak, to suggest that there is no way your typical sauropod could support its neck extended far from its body. The resulting torque would crush the proximal-most cervical vertebra. They could raise their head to full vertical extent (perhaps with the aid of auxiliary hearts in the throat to keep the blood rising) and lower it to drink, but only with a big, rolling inverted-"U" bend in the neck. Moving its head horizontally away from the shoulders would have been extremely painful.

5 Mar 2013 »

Why are ideas cheap?

Anybody competent always has far more worthwhile ideas than has while to work on them. Nobody else competent has time to work on them either. Good ideas protect themselves: only the best recognize the best ideas. It takes a great deal of hard work to make any idea valuable. The best ideas just evoke the most work. Mentioning a spare idea, though, might spark another one good enough to make you (or them) drop what you’re doing to pursue it.

There are reasons why more happens where information is shared freely.

22 Feb 2013 »

An apparently little-known $hack: you can borrow up to half the value of your IRA or 401K account on your own say-so, just by filing a form. You do have to commit to paying it back, on a schedule, with interest, but you pay the interest to yourself.

Upgrading from kernel 3.6.x to 3.7.x on my laptop with i915 graphics chip (Arrandale/Ironlake) resulted in a crazy console screen and reliably locked-up X. This turned out to be a bad interaction with kernel IOMMU activity, which defaults to "y" in the kernel configuration. That particular interaction will probably be fixed (at some cost in performance) in 3.7.10 and 3.8.1, but I have it on good authority that you are much better off not enabling IOMMU unless you really need it. Apparently you only really need it if you are running guest OS images that need access to physical hardware unmediated by the host OS. I.e., you don't need IOMMU. On a distribution kernel, the boot parameter to fix that appears to be "intel_iommu=igfx_off".

I've been using libssh2 at work. It turns out to be remarkably buggy in its flow control, but fixably so. I'm fixing it.

mjg59, Matthew Garrett, is very, very smart. That is a net good, but it makes him uniquely unqualified to judge the merits and failings of Gnome 3. Matthew works under the most grueling conditions, where UI infelicities are among the least of the challenges he overcomes with apparent ease. Our work challenges the rest of us quite enough without additional interference from an opinionated desktop environment.

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