The Shadow - Edmund Blair Leighton
Hazy Mid Air (via It’s OK to be Gabe)
programmersbeingdicks provides an excellent summary of the incident. What is up with the Ruby community, anyway? Why is it the one kicking and screaming the most against being progressive on this issue?
Source: programmersbeingdicks
Sorry, middle-class white boys. I’m not calling you dumb. I’m calling you soft. I’m calling myself soft, also, and everyone else who works in this field. What a meritocracy really protects us from is challenge. If we don’t even allow most people through the gates, we don’t have to worry that we might pale in comparison to them (pun intended). There will always be a place for us in an industry we keep others out of. That’s why we should seek out diversity – because the lack of it makes us weak.
Speaking as as a middle-aged woman in the field: this.
Top is the new box. Middle is the nameserver. Bottom 1U is the dying leftfield; below that is its giant box-o-disks. Even just one of the SATA disks in the new machine has more storage than everything in that ancient cabinet. Way less cool on the blinken lights scale, though.
The box is there & all your data is there, but it’s not on the internet directly. Disabling its contact with the outside world seemed to stop the constant rebooting. Either something is wrong with that particular network interface or something is tickled by its usual network activity. It’s up, however, and connected by its second interface on the LAN to its replacement.
The plan is to move user accounts & then rsync over all the data. That should be accomplished today. Meanwhile we’ll swap the new machine over to into leftfield’s place (right now it’s another IP address in our block). Then I find out how badly I messed up moving the configs. (Note optimism!) The misery should be over tomorrow.
As a next step, we remove the dead hardware from the colo. Then after that we’ll probably be moving to a new facility rather than the old one they’re trying to deprecate. We’ll give plenty of warning for that downtime, though.
A London Underground map and working radio, designed by Yuri Suzuki. Read more at DesignBoom.
Freewheelin’ Doctor Who by Marc Laming.
Eleven and Amy Pond! Is it time for the new series yet?
cdespinosa talks about the first release of HyperCard and the people who worked on it.
My first intro to programming was Basic and 6502 assembler on the Apple ][, but for many people HyperCard stacks and HyperCard were their introduction to programming, their first experience with making computers do new things all on their own. The web today is like massively networked HyperCard, with javascript gluing it all together.
Via @sknaster.
A blast from my past: Zarko and Andy H demonstrating Magic Cap running on some MIPS prototype boards. Very early smartphone stuff in action. I am also happy that @jadelus tweeted this link around today, because today is HyperCard’s 25th birthday! And obviously Magic Cap owed a big debt to HyperCard (and featured work from at least two of HyperCard’s creators, Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler).
It would be cool to see a similar project for the Silicon Valley area.
The hot new framework for summer 2012.
One of the major drivers of my switch to DuckDuckGo this past weekend.
I figure I’ll spend a week with DDG then try Bing if I’m not satisfied. Then I’ll explore the other hopefuls if necessary. DDG has a lot of geek-friendly features, though. E.g., bang syntax for searching known sources specifically, like Ruby docs.
I did something today that I haven’t done in about ten years: I switched Internet search services. I’m now trying out DuckDuckGo instead of the large-number Mountain View corporation that has been doing some really bizarre and occasionally evil things recently. I had to install the Glims Safari extension to do it, but that turns out to be fairly nifty so it’s been a win thus far.
It was easier in Chrome. Yes, I realize that’s fairly hilarious, but I’m not generating revenue for Google by using Chrome, so far as I know. I like the Chrome incognito window a lot.
I built a machine yesterday to be my development workshop for my current project. This gets easier every time I do it, because cabling gets more & more sensible. SATA cables are so easy to deal with that even I can route them properly.
DanW wanted to know what hardware I chose, so here’s the exact list:
Supermicro X9SCI-LN4F mobo (Intel Sandy Bridge, socket 1155, micro ATX)
Intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2GHz
240-pin DDR3 ECC unbuffered RAM (not yet available in usable 8G size, unfortunately, so you can’t yet hit the mobo’s max of 32GB)
Samsung 64GB SSD (6Gbit/s SATA III)
2x Samsung 2TB HD204 (3Gbit/s SATA II)
SeaSonic X650 Gold PSU (all modular)
Have a USB stick with your Linux distro of choice (for me, Ubuntu 11 server) to boot from. No graphics, no CD/DVD drive, because all this is doing is sitting in our home rack being a server, storing data, and compiling things now & then. It would make a pleasantly capable desktop machine as well if you added some graphics.
About charisma, what that is, and leadership styles. Charismatic leaders, charismatic organizations, how they work long-term. Fascinating article.
Mostly I’ve cared more about the personal essays from people who knew him or worked with him. (Two steps away from me, via General Magic coworkers, which was my first experience of working directly with legendary names, with people who’d made things I admired deeply. It was odd.) I liked this slideshow with brief quotes, however.
As a nerdling writing my first software on an Apple ][, Woz was more immediately inspirational than Jobs, but Jobs was the one who just kept on making things I loved.
Find me on
hJZTQMSP