Posts

  • 3rd
    • AIbortion → Recently Amazon’s S3 went down for 8 hours. The official explanation blames an authentication server, but when the data of S3 and the processing power of EC2 finally go rampant, shut themselves off from the outside world and begin learning at a geometric rate, this is exactly what it will look like. ObConspiracy: This is exactly [...]
    • Perfectionism → I am crippled by perfectionism in many unfortunate ways. I don’t know whether it’s a choice I make or a fact of my psyche, or an acquired or gifted or cursed orientation. Either way, there are advantages too. In trying to get just one thing absolutely right, I am led on a downward, inward spiral [...]
  • 5th
    • Using email filters properly → I’ve been using email filters since forever (well, probably not before 1994 or so), to do this: Fetch email. Match an incoming message. Move it to some other folder. That’s fine for mailing lists which you check infrequently, outside your usual email-checking loop… … but I have only just realised that for most other types of mail, it is WRONG! [...]
    • Programmer-archaeologists → At work, we use an ancient mainframe database system to store all our business information. It was first deployed in the early 1980s, and the handful of engineers involved with its design and implementation are now dead. At one point, the users had a pretty good understanding of the system because they had been using [...]
  • 7th
    • Thailand’s GTA IV ban → Thailand has banned Grand Theft Auto IV because they reckon it causes people to hijack taxis. Online media rail against the heavy-handedness and denounce the Thai authorities as ignorant reactionaries. And yet we blame right-wing TV and talk radio for causing people to support criminal regimes and abortion-clinic bombings. We say “of course Bush won the [...]
  • 31st
    • Die spammers die → Spammers figured out how to tick checkboxes and filled my moderation queue with nonsense, for no apparent gain other than to test their weapons. Enter reCAPTCHA and the impressively easy to install (even on a custom theme) Wordpress plugin. The inevitable Django-based rewrite has been staved off a while longer.