Hacks Blog

Cost of porting vs. cost of continued development, Part II 16 years ago
I have always worked on software that needed to squeeze the last bit of practical performance out of a piece of hardware. Anything less, and I'm bored at work. For most of the 2000s, this has been financial software, which is a brilliant example of how Moore's Law solves nothing. See, every year…

On the semantic web, RDF, and other such things 16 years ago
It's coming up in both Rm and Photohub , and I've got some rants about it, so there's a few entries on tap about the Semantic web and RDF and the like. So, let this blog entry serve as a brief introduction where I try to at least introduce some of the terms. The Semantic web is a huge, massive…

New web content engine, part 7 16 years ago
I made a few more modifications to Rm. I took it easy this weekend -- I've had a number of important design bits at work, so there wasn't much brain-juice left over for recreation this weekend. So there's a number of changes to Rm that aren't enabled yet. I discovered that one bug that I was…

Cost of porting vs. cost of continued development 16 years ago
I thought I'd take the occasion of OpenVMS turning 30 to share some thoughts about why I have OpenVMS experience on my resume. See, I once worked for a company that was severely stuck in OpenVMS land. Now, when they switched to VMS (from I forget what... but you can't buy one now) it wasn't the…

New web content engine: Part 6 16 years ago
I've got a new version of Rm running on the site now. I hacked up media support, tags, and some random backend features. One should note that, while I'm not stealing flickr's code, it kinda makes sense to generate the same size of thumbnails that Flickr does, so I added 75x75 thumbnails for…

When Apple will offer OS X on the PC 16 years ago
It's very clear that Apple has tremendous foresight, sometimes to their own detriment, with the design of both hardware and software. Back in the good old days, when I was but a wee little Wirehead, Apple managed to make hardware that was much more compatible and easy to deal with than your average…

Gentoo was not a good idea 16 years ago
I'm kinda sick of Gentoo. See, I installed Gentoo a long time ago because I wanted something that was a little more "current" than what I was getting out of Debian Stable. So I tried out Gentoo on my household server machine (named "junkyardog") It's dumb. Really dumb. See, the whole idea of Gentoo…

New web content engine: Part 5 16 years ago
I've got a new version of Rm installed, mostly with behind-the-scenes tweaks to let me do more things with it. I already like being able to go to the site and edit a page like a wiki. Plus, The site didn't die a nasty death when it started getting traffic. I'm reaching the point where the…

New web content engine: Part 4 16 years ago
If you can read this, the new engine is live. One of my ex-cow-orkers was making fun of me that this would take over a year... and it did, although mostly because I stopped working on it for a while.

New web content engine: Part 3 16 years ago
I got distracted by a few big things in my life of late, so I put the code away for a while. Lately, because I've been wanting to change gears a little bit on my recreational coding, I went back and dusted off my code and took a fresh perspective on things. I've been in a weird state where the code…