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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Kamala Harris reviews code

15-Aug-24

From a different Tanya Reilly talk this time, this is also my new headcanon: Fear will keep the lesser systems in line… fear of this borrow checker.

Send yourself cookies, not traps

15-Aug-24

Thanks to Laura Nolan who suggested this video from Usenix 2017: Tanya Reilly with good life advice https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17americas/program/presentation/reilly

Reverse The Polarity

13-Aug-24

Reverse psychology doesn’t work on me.

Digital Minimalism, what’s in it for me?

04-Jun-24

I have decided to try a practice called a “digital declutter.” For the rest of this month, I intend to limit my use of online/electronic/digital technology as much as possible.  This includes texting, email, listening to podcasts, TV, etc.  Likely not going to have a lot of posts between now and end of June, but […]

monkeyYaml part 2, or unexpected longevity

09-May-24

Ten years ago, I hacked out a limited parser in Python for YAML, which I named monkeyYaml. I even blogged about it. It turns out that this code is still in use. Not only as a backup, but as the *only* parser for front matter in the test262 repository. Initially, I used import yaml to […]

Don’t Know Much Philosophy…

08-May-24

I really like my idea of what philosophy is supposed to be. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to align with what philosophy is to other people. Notably, I took two philosophy courses in undergrad and earned a D in the first and a D+ in the second. But now I’m taking a sabbatical, and I am […]

Recalled To Life

08-May-24

Hello again! It’s been almost ten years since I last posted here. Back in 2014 I was working on a chemistry app for pre-medical students; my idea was to make it easier to understand and remember enough organic chemistry to do well in the required classes and on the MCAT exam. I realized that it […]

Like Poor Old Ollie

17-Oct-14

I was thinking some more about the new game “Shadow of Mordor” (read the review by Carolyn Petit here). I can’t really add anything to her review — she makes it sound like the plot of God of War was transplanted into an Assassin’s Creed game set among some of Tolkien’s ideas — not truly […]

Monkey-YAML (or: Reinventing the Wheel)

15-Oct-14

In theory, we’re never supposed to reinvent the wheel. In theory, we’re supposed to fix things correctly. Well, as Yogi Berra allegedly said, the difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference… Some time ago I got involved in the Test262 project (you should too!) and, one thing leading to […]

Installing node.js 0.10 on CentOS5

09-May-14

I have an old stable internal server that’s running CentOS 5.10 which I want to use a staging/development server for modern node.js applications. The problem is, current prebuilt versions of node.js can’t be installed on CentOS5, since CentOS5 has GNU libc 2.5 and the prebuilt node.js RPMs are only for Fedora/RedHat/CentOS 6, and are linked […]