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In our age of world-wide web, cybersquatting (in its broad sense) is a major problem for choosing a name for a company, organization, etc. Of course, being 20 or more years late to the party, one shouldn’t expect to easily find a good unoccupied second level domain name. However, when you more frequently hit domain names that have been reserved with the sole purpose of selling them later than domain names used for a real website you start getting angry (at least, I, personally, do). [Read More]

Almost entire day was spent on inventing a good name for my platform. There were several interesting findings, some of which were even available as second level domains. However, though some of them may serve as good names of certain tools or components or be used as new jargon terms, they don’t make a good name for the full platform. One theme was to use the metaphor of genes - the most valueable artefacts of hard intellectual work are those that are fundamental and intangible but allow to easily produce tangible stuff. [Read More]

Still searching for a good name for my ambitious project. Several days ago it occurred to me that one of its core principles should be producing fundamental artefacts with long lasting value. While exploring ways to reflect that in the name I started doubting if the noun fundament is a valid English word. I checked the dictionary to find out that it is and one of its meanings is anus.

Now reading Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. It’s very different from what I expected when I ran against a reference to it in Eric Raymond’s Open Minds, Open Source. Had I a better idea what it was, I probably wouldn’t have started reading it in the first place, but once there I can’t leave it halfway. It’s worth checking out the SF writings of Neal Stephenson too. [Read More]

Open Minds, Open Source … How can giving up on central control, pre-planning and the vertical command organization of software development produce better results? The answer is implicit in the way that cost nonlinearities associated with scaling change the tradeoffs of complex systems. Ask any architect. Have you ever wondered what the practical limit on the height of skyscrapers is? Turns out it’s not strength of materials, nor our ability to design very tall structures that are stable under load. [Read More]

A Fan of Freedom: Thoughts on the Biography of RMS … All of us narratize our lives; we all reinvent our own histories to some extent. But one of the perils of reinventing yourself as a prophet/visionary is that you can end up forgetting who you were before the vision. … Again, one of the most interesting things about RMS’s story is the respects in which it is not unique, but representative of themes which recur constantly in the lives of people like us. [Read More]

Link Ladies and gentlemen, CPSR incautiously invited me to say a few words about social responsibility in computing tonight. And my first words are these: when I hear someone speak of “social responsibility”, that’s when I reach for my revolver. In point of fact, I don’t actually own a revolver; but I do believe the rhetoric and the very concept of “social responsibility” have become badly corrupted by political abuse. All too often, people who invoke “social responsibility” are demanding that we give up individual liberty — that we accept just a bit more taxation, just a bit more regulation, just a bit more governmental intrusiveness, all for the the supposed good of society. [Read More]

Two days ago I hard-bricked my phone. Today I un-bricked it. I bought my first smartphone a couple of weeks ago. I had selected a 3.5 years old model - a Mi A1 32GB - through the store’s website. It was being sold at a clearance price of about $120. Its Chinese sibling Mi 5X with twice as much storage cost $20 more. I intended to re-flash the phone (I had learnt about LineageOS shortly before that), so I chose the cheaper model for two reasons: [Read More]

In the new - hopefully a better - year and a new setting it’s time to define the goals for the future. When I quit my day job five years ago, I did that with the purpose of working on my own project(s). Time flew by, and none of them even started to materialize. Partly that can be explained by the goals being too ambitious, leading to an extended analysis paralysis period. [Read More]