fcheblog  -

2010-08-21 14:43 | fche blog tech hacker documentaries

For those of us who started their hacker careers in the 1980s, documentaries like Jason Scott’s Get Lamp and BBS are a pure sentimental pleasure. They cover technologies we grew up with, participated in, which gave us our impetus in the field. Their authenticity separates them from a routine TV show: the interviews are given by the real people who built and championed all that great early home computer stuff. However, Jason is a talented enough to weave them into stories that are interesting to non-specialists too. My dear lady wife has enjoyed whole chunks of the BBS documentary.

The documentaries are CC-licensed, so you can watch/try them for free. If you like them, toss some bucks Jason’s way and get the disks.

2010-08-11 16:08 | fche blog tech systemtap is not a "rejected kernel patch"

If this article quotes Ted Ts’o correctly, we have a problem.

2010-08-01 19:49 | fche blog tech fedora upgrade

I’m flabbergasted at the ease of upgrading a live fedora system between versions. This is not supposed to work, especially with lots of customized public/service processes. Yet, a ‘yum update’ from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, live, worked almost with out a hitch.

Well, there is always postgresql, breaking updates since (before) 2007.

2010-05-07 10:47 | fche blog tech frame pointers vs. debugging tools

Pithy commentary from my colleague Roland McGrath, regarding placing complexity into debugging tools vs. penalizing everything else.

[14:57:49] yeah, well, we’re silly. we let the compiler people make the right optimization decisions and then don’t degrade them to make writing debugging tools easier but instead work on making debugging tools work with optimal code. solaris is big on hyping how fabulous their debugging tools are because they quietly constrain them to working in the easy cases by degrading the compilations.

2010-03-29 10:25 | fche blog tech so long, powerpc

If this announcement is not a joke, then Sony’s move would turn off the most accessible machine on which one can develop/test software on the powerpc architectures. For fans, or conscientious programmers who wish to test the portability of their code, this means that ppc is becoming ephemeral. It is not worth $severalK to buy an IBM box, and simulators may or may not be good enough. With linux distributions also dropping powerpc, there will be less and less software to run on the thing in whatever form. IBM must be thrilled. Intel might feel some schadenfreude, but then again the ia64 was never a hobbyist platform.

Sony, you suck.

2010-03-08 17:17 | fche blog tech bright solar idea

Here in Ontario, the provincial government last year started our own super subsidized solar microgeneration program – $0.81/kWh “earned”, if generated from a rooftop photovoltaic panel, which is about ten times the value of that same electricity flowing the other way, purchased from the grid. I’ve been tempted to jump into it, just on the charming theory of personal backup power in case the grid goes down. (I will leave aside whether such a subsidy makes any economic or environmental sense.)

But for the scruple-free, it provides an opportunity to maximize profit using this European technique:

A German aristocrat of my acquaintance has figured out that the price he will be paid for the output of a solar panel is so high compared with the price he will pay for his input of normal electricity, that he is thinking of rigging up powerful arc lamps to shine on solar panels on his extensive roof.

UPDATE: Someone’s actually tried this scam.

2010-02-17 18:11 | fche blog tech passport privacy

I am a recent customer of Flashpass, a little software package to partially automate the US Customs data reporting necessary to fly to/from the USA in private aircraft. Flashpass is basically an XML editor that assembles all the personal information required by the USA government: passport numbers, full names, birthdates, home and away addresses, trip dates.

Now comes from the same outfit an online version of the tool, where a web browser is the client. The application and the all above data is presumably stored elsewhere. On the lobo-labs computers. In Mexico.

What could possibly go wrong?

2009-12-17 07:46 | fche blog tech unencrypted drone videos

It is so unbelievable that it might just be true: some US military drones operating over iraq/afghanistan uplink their video data unencrypted. What could possibly go wrong