I love you Pelican, but I’m struggling.

Happy 2017 all! A little over two years ago, the WordPress instance I had been “maintaining” to run my blog was hacked by a bunch of script kiddies. Not like I’m excusing them or anything, hacking someone’s hobby domain feels rather like walking into someone’s yard and, if you’ll forgive me for being crass for […]

The Zen of Shaving (Safety Razor Edition)

So as I think I’ve mentioned before here, I co-host a podcast. Each week on the show we do what we call “picks” – we each showcase two or three things we like and can recommend. It could be a book, software, beer, whatever we feel like. That week in particular Tobias picked a safety […]

The Three Rs

No, I’m not talking about reading, writing, and ‘rithmitic, I’m talking about the three Rs that are critical in creating and keeping a software organization strong. The three Rs in this case are Rigor, Resources, and Raison d’etre. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn. Resources I begin with resources because when […]

Bacon + Microwave = Jerky :)

If you’ll indulge me for just a few moments I want to say a few words on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: Bacon! I’ve encountered more than a few people who think that cooking bacon in the microwave is the way to go. Far be it from me to dictate anyone’s […]

Democratic Primary 2016: I’m committed to Bernie, but concerned.

2016 Democratic Primary – I’m Committed but Concerned When push comes to shove, let there be no doubt about the fact that I think we, as one of the wealthiest societies on the planet, should be doing everything we can to help the poor and under served enjoy a standard of living that gives them […]

A few random thoughts on keyboards

I’ve recently been very underwhelmed with the keyboards Apple ships with their computers. They’re trying to make them all feel like laptop keyboards, which is an idea I rather disapprove of. In particular the recent Apple Keyboard has such shallow key travel it’s very easy to fall into the bad habit of pounding the keys, […]

Vim Versus Emacs – Minus the Religion

Vim Versus Emacs – Minus the Religion [Note: I originally wrote this for Quora but am reposting it here with slight embelishment. Introduction In hard core technical circles, discussing the relative merits of these two editors is pretty much verboten. In the past, debates around this issue have actually become vicious (which is ludicrous when […]

The One Feature that Keeps Me Addicted to Chrome

I’ve been using Chrome for the last few years, and generally speaking I’m pretty happy with it. However recently Google has made some decisions (notably the on by default voice search features) that make me question the wisdom of that choice. I also very much enjoy using Firefox, a 100% open source browser that’s very […]

Oh WordPress, I love you but you make it so hard…

It feels like there are new security issues around WordPress every week.

GNU Terry Pratchett

Recently, pretty much the entire geek/fandom community was in full on mourning over the death of fantasy author Terry Pratchett.