Archive for the ‘author’ Category

Kudos to RMS and Torvalds

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

I have just given ohloh.net kudos to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds.

Hehe, and I didn’t do it because I expect to be given back with a kudo from RMS or Torvalds. I did it because I appreciated the bloody good software development works they do: my favourite C/C++ compiler from GCC, one of my favourite text editors GNU Emacs and my favourite operating system – Unix for Masses and my favourite version control system Git.

Disabling Google Buzz

Friday, February 12th, 2010

The Google Buzz is a privacy nightmare, but to many, Google’s new social-networking tool Buzz is at its root an unwanted, unasked for pest and I have not asked for it at all. Google, buzz off!

My first question to StackOverflow

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Recently, I’ve got a bit sucked in by the StackOverflow and related communities. Even if I don’t completely understand how it is supposed to be different to my favourite old-school-but-still-the-best communication channels to share knowledge, meaning Usenet and mailing lists. Web X.Y generally sucks! I never liked the idea of Web discussion boards – doesn’t feel user-friendly for me at all and it’s way more time consuming to participate in discussions on such boards than in mailing lists. The idea of StackOverflow works for me, somehow. A couple of times I got sucked quite deeply and stole two or three ours of my sleep to take the challenge, to benchmark my brain a bit.

After lurking and kicking my own axons, it’s time to nudge stackoverflowers with my first question. Here we go:

Which macro to wrap Mac OS X specific code in C/C++

Firefox-based attacks on irc.freenode.net

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Activity of the OSGeo Community quite heavily relies on the Freenode IRC network, so this may be an interesting news:

hackers are exploiting a weakness in the Mozilla Firefox browser to wreak havoc on Freenode and other networks that cater to users of internet relay chat.

Here is the whole story Firefox-based attack wreaks havoc on IRC users posted to The Register

hacker emblemMr Dan Goodin, I would wish you don’t cultivate the mainstream media alignment regarding the use of word hacker. Don’t call a hacker someone who has unlawful intentions, please.

Chinese cuisine in XXI century

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

(…) when the animal’s fur is not needed (mostly with cats), the animals are put in a sack, and are then cooked alive in a barrel of boiling water (…)

Sign the petition, please

How much of shark is in shark soup? Just the two fins, the rest is a waste…

Mouse vs keyboard quotes of the day

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

My two favourite quotes I’ve remembered from today’s thread about programming using a proportional font and other stuff that happened on, as busy as always, ACCU mailing list:

For me, when coding I think fast and I type just as fast, and every time I have to touch that stupid mouse I curse the idiot who failed to add or, worse, removed (which seems to happen as software “evolves”) the menus/shortcuts/tabbing-logic that would allow me never to lose my thread, or efficiency.

— Matthew

and

I’ve watched people using IDEs (mainly on Windows) and usually I wonder if I’m going to die of old age before they finish carrying out various simple editing tasks by searching through menu trees, navigate through dialogue boxes, clicking on this option and that option (…) I often wonder if I should only have to work 20 hour weeks as I can get my typing-in work done twice as quickly as some other people :)

— Stewart

Signed, with both hands.

It is snowing

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

in London!

I’ve just looked through window in my office near Covent Garden and I can see it’s snowing at 10:44:28 (local time).

It is constantly landing snow!

The best of snow!

in London!

Are we going to get snowed out?