Category: Code
This blog used to run on Greymatter, a collection of Perl scripts that its creator stopped supporting about ten minutes after I chose it. Greymatter served me well for years, but modern features that I need, like RSS feeds and comment spam control, are alien to it, and my Perl isn’t good enough to add [...]
They’re advertising Colby Cosh’s blog on ESPN now. “What’s Cosh writing about?” “Hockey.” “What’s he writing about next?” “Hockey.” I’m getting the same way about programming. We will release the honest-to-god production version of our software Monday, and the experience has been, shall we say, instructive. The lessons include: The trouble with most programmers isn’t [...]
Immersed, by necessity, in technical matters lately, I began to wonder what my vocation, software, and my avocation, poetry, have in common. (Meanwhile my readers, if any remain, began to wonder if I was ever going to post again.) The literary lawyers go on about the intimacy between poetry and the law and compile an [...]
29 CommentsDear 66.65.2.105: d00d. Do not run kiddie scripts that generate buffer overflows against my web server. They will avail you nothing but a 414. This is especially unwise if you happen to subscribe to the same cable company, in the same area, as I do, because then I will inform them, and they will find [...]
You don’t want to know. Or maybe you do. I’ve spent 14 to 16 hours a day programming — rearchitecting, in the argot, a project I’m working on. The application tracks resources, for construction companies, in real time, and there were quite a few things to fix. (Note to Cosh: this is what I do [...]
This place has gone to seed, in large part, because I’ve been doing some actual work, trying to get a software release out — late, inadequate, but out — and as a consequence have followed Floyd McWilliams’s and Evan Kirchhoff’s theorizing about the future of software with more than academic interest. Evan starts here, Floyd [...]
13 CommentsComputers may or may not be changing the nature of art; I leave this question to the eminent Blowhards. But at the very least they could be the handmaidens of literary scholarship. Shouldn’t the Internet be full of concordances by now? You remember concordances. Those thick books your English professors had on their shelves, where [...]
I have previously discussed my facility with hardware. Yesterday’s outage proves that my UNIX system administration skills are up to the same exacting standard. I upgraded from RedHat 7.1 to the latest, 9.0, because I absolutely had to have a journaled file system, and various catastrophes ensued whose consequences I am still sorting out. Have [...]
A null, in computer programming, is not a thing but its absence. Suppose you have a list, a handy object that programmers use all the time. You can do many things to a list object — add an item to it (list.add(item)), count the number of items (list.count()), iterate through the items one by one. [...]
Cryptographic revolutionary Alan Bruzzi writes: I was wondering where my reading level program would fit into cryptography. It takes a sentence out of a book, and computes its reading age. For example, John 3:16, spoken by Jesus Christ, would give a reading age of 33, because that’s when He died. Also, my program computes the [...]