Category: all

  • Can’t beat em? join em! Brick and mortar and online

    Can’t beat em? join em! Brick and mortar and online

    One of my favourite ‘brick and mortar’ stores is Canada Computers. But you knew that 🙂 Its great, they have decent prices, decent selection, and don’t hassle you with a lot of questions. Its for someone who knows what they are buying. They do allow ordering online, but why, they are right down the street.…

  • systemd versus chrome: fight!

    systemd versus chrome: fight!

    Over the years many technologies have taken a ‘kitchen-sink’ strategy, pulling in all adjacencies until they are the world. Java tried to become an operating system. Windows moved the graphics drivers into the kernel. The smartphone. In the desktop space, I present two contenders. My perennial favourite, systemd. It has subsumed grub and will soon…

  • The port of the devil: the nanny state browser protects me!

    The port of the devil: the nanny state browser protects me!

    So I’m trying out ‘zoekt‘, which is a search engine for code, sort of like opengrok etc. I crank it up zoekt-webserver -listen :6666. And then I open a browser to it and, ERR_UNSAFE_PORT? So I google it, its a thing. Chrome indeed protects you from bad neighbourhoods. Seems you can add –explicitly-allowed-ports=6666, or, uh,…

  • My early co-op career comes back again

    My early co-op career comes back again

    Today, a pull-request I had made to an upstream software, the maintainer asked me to improve the test coverage, showing the (gcov) coverage report. OK, so as I start working on this, deja-vu comes over me (again). I’ve seen this type of report before. And then it hit me. Many years ago (~1991) I was…

  • Outdoor cats and air conditioners: just say no

    Outdoor cats and air conditioners: just say no

    You remember outdoor kitty? The mooch? The one we installed a heated outdoor house and remote temperature sensing for? The same one that is much less friendly when its warm? Well, as we can see, he does not make much use of the house in this weather (~32C here today in sunny waterloo). And no,…