Humour in manpages

I just discovered surfraw in the results of an apt-cache search (love that command) and I had to laugh at the manpage: DESCRIPTION Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many [...]

Java time capsule

I’ve been involved in some discussions regarding Java recently, and I’ve repeated said that I mostly find it a solution that is still looking for a problem. Looking back at this post by Paul Graham on “Java’s Cover” I find it interesting how many of his points still ring true, 8 years later. My favorite [...]

Java sucks

Well yes, we know this already from the way that it makes easy things hard, and hard things nearly impossible, but it’s rarely been captured with the eloquence that I find in these wonderful quotes on the topic. And yet, as cockroaches are to humans this technology/language/marketing campaign continues unabated until having java on one’s [...]

It could be worse

Hey, if you think your job is bad… it could be worse. Coming soon to a high-tech company near you.

Java dependency hell

So, while I’m not Java’s biggest fan, I went ahead and built the sun-jdk package on my Gentoo system so I could have java applet support in Firefox, and occasionally write a little code in it (rare, but it happens at times). It built quickly enough, with only 3 dependencies. So, I follow that up [...]

My son

Maria recently asked Jaan where his favorite place was. He surprised and amused with his response. “I don’t know, I haven’t been everywhere yet.”

Dilbert on lawyers

I just love Dilbert’s take on lawyers. This guy must write EULAs for a living.

Our Dalek composter

We recently ordered a composter from CostCo, and we assembled it last weekend. Is it just me, or does it look a lot like a Dalek from Dr. Who?

Clearcase woes, and some needed rebellion

I’ve been looking for ways of making life in Clearcase easier. This isn’t easy considering just how much clearcase sucks. I’ve found that the only way to make this environment palatable is to work in other, superior version control systems. I’ve been working with Mercurial and Clearcase for a while now, and now I’m playing [...]

ASCII Art Collection

I recently came across this lovely ASCII art collection. It really makes me wax nostalgic for the pre-web days of the Internet, before such atrocities as HTML email, and sites full of advertising.