Category Geek

Weblogs and Open Source Software

Will Bunch at Attytood has an
article
about the attitude that some in the mainstream media have toward weblogs. Basically, that Real Reporters™ are trained in Real Journalism™ and do things like check facts with multiple independent sources, whereas bloggers are just average bozos who use the Internet to spread rumors and discuss Desperate Housewives.

Where have I seen this attitude before? Oh, that’s right: when Open Source Software started seriously gaining acceptance.

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Little Languages and Tables

Recently, a coworker whipped up a Perl script that’ll build all of the
Perl modules we support. This is useful for when we add a new
supported OS or OS version. This script takes a config file, moduledefs, which lists the modules to build, as well as various quirks that affect how and whether the modules should be built. moduledefs is itself a `require‘d Perl script:

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Neologism: Filibuster Screen

I propose the following new term: filibuster screen. It refers to an application splash screen, such as KDE’s or OpenOffice’s, which not only takes up a big chunk of otherwise-useful screen real estate for a long time while it starts up, but also ignores window manager hints so you can’t even move the bloody thing out of the way, thus preventing you from getting any useful work done.

I realize “filibuster screen” is a bit lame. If you can think of a better term, please say so in the comments.

Music and Evo Devo

If you wanted to evolve a musical composition — or better yet, if you wanted to evolve a piece of software that could write music on demand — how would you do it?

I came up with the following approach after reading Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

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My love affair with Lisp

I don’t always agree with Paul Graham, but his writings are often thought-provoking. One of the things he’s done recently is to rekindle my interest in Lisp and Scheme.
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