I’m going tell you the tale of oho, a program which is arguably the world’s greatest ANSI text to HTML converter, and how it solved a real business problem. I’m sharing this because, as a geek, it’s important to remember that you can frequently solve work needs, while having fun creating open source tools that interest you.
Side note: ANSI escape sequences are the things that cause text to be colored, bolded, etc when displayed in a terimnal.
In 1981 Robert Cox came up with a slogan for Ford; “Quality is Job 1”.
It has always stuck with me.
In the software industry there are few slogans could be further from the truth. C-level’s and other customer facing types frequently proclaim the “quality” of their products, but they aren’t the ones making the product. They’re frequently not even the ones using the product.
In software there are two viable ways to release quality software.
I’ve had an idea buzzbuling around my head for a while, that I’d like to share with you. If you’re a devout follower of any religion, I ask that you set aside what your preconceptions for a few minutes, and listen openly to this somewhat heretical thought.
Premise All, or at least most, gods are created by people. Maybe I’m wrong, and there is one true deity, but logically if one is true, then all the conflicting gods must be the creation of human minds.
Basic readiness is a problem for most people. We assume that we’ll always have power, water, and food. We ignore the fact that this stuff goes away regularly, because it usually happens to someone else.
There was a snow storm here in Vermont (USA) last week. This was not a blizzard. As far as weather goes, this wasn’t particularly dramatic. There was just a lot of heavy snow and some high winds.
One of my coworkers was trying to understand the differences between libraries, frameworks, and DSLs and asked me
…how do I know what i’m using when all these things are
interacting and being used within each other, etc
To some degree, you don’t, and it doesn’t matter, but that’s not a very helpful answer. So let me step back and talk about what each of these are. Libraries Libraries are the simplest.
I recently needed to convert some HTML to PDF on the command line and went hunting down the options.
There numerous posts saying “X is great” “Y works great for me” but no-one gives examples that show you anything.
I’ve tried WeasyPrint, wkhtmltopdf, Pandoc and Google Chrome (yes via the command line). The test was simple. Take a simple color chart, made from pre-formatted text and render it as a pdf.
A high level summary (and paraphrasing) of Zed Shaw’s talk at DEFCON 15 (in 2007) because I couldn’t find a good text version.
Utu is the Maori word for a system of revenge used by Maori society to provide social controls and retribution. Utu is also a protocol that uses cryptographic models of social interaction to allow peers to vote on their dislike of other peer’s behavior. The goal of Utu is to experiment with the effects of bringing identity, reputation, and retribution to human communications on the Internet.
(or Why A Healthy Work-Life Balance Is Important)
During the dot com boom I worked at a company with a developer who loved his work. The problems were challenging, and we really valued the things he produced. Everyone who worked late late got dinner, and sometimes he’d work so late that he ended up sleeping by his desk. Bob (not his real name) wasn’t pushed to do this. He just really liked his job.
Ok, you’ve been hearing about Scuttlebutt and decided that “Yes, I do want to join an amazing social network with lots of good people that no company can control and also happens to also work offline.
Here’s a quick overview with the basics you need to know.
First off Scuttlebutt is a protocol on which many different kinds of apps can be built.
As for the social network, there are many clients, just like there are many Twitter clients.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Scuttlebutt lately (see my Why Scuttlebutt post), and Srol just wrote a great post about how Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again.
There’s a lot of good reasons for people to use tools like them for socializing online, and I don’t want these services to just wither as their users wander off. I want there to be options that aren’t controlled by large companies, but at the same time services that require servers (like Mastodon) need someone to pay for those servers.
