Homage to Icarus

[There’s a whole bunch of mean­der­ing aca­d­e­mic pon­tif­i­cat­ing and me tak­ing myself too seri­ously. About two thirds of the way down it gets really good, though. I promise. Also, the woman is now online and back in school. –JC]
So appar­ently, some­one was try­ing to take online courses, ordered the cheap­est Dell with a CD  —  which happens […]

It’s prob­a­bly worth not­ing at this point that there are a few lessons to the debian OpenSSL débâcle:

There is now a corol­lary to “do not write your own cryp­to­graphic rou­tines”: “do not fix bugs in some­one else’s cryp­to­graphic rou­tines.” If there is a anno­tated view of the OpenSSL tree (I don’t know/don’t care), the DD […]

Here’s Knuth in an inter­view:
As to your real ques­tion, the idea of imme­di­ate com­pi­la­tion and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feel­ing my way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment and need feed­back about what works and what doesn’t…
Hmm, peo­ple who are “feel­ing their way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment”… Like new contributors […]

Upgraded my own install of Zimbra to 5.0.4 today, haven’t played with IM yet. Shared doc­u­ments, a task list, seems cool. BTW, don’t ever, ever, ever mod­ify the LDAP schema in Zimbra. Even via their own “posix­Ac­count” exten­sions. It’s just bad news all around.
Also, I’m enjoy­ing muxtape.

Aside from the laugh­able idea of “mil­i­tantly” sup­port­ing any­thing with a blog post, Miguel sim­ply noted that these peo­ple exist, have writ­ten a book, and will be doing the speaking-tour-thing near him. Does he agree with the con­tents? (shakes eight-ball) Signs point to Yes.
Is he free to do so? Also yes.
Are you free to ignore him? Still yes.
Does […]