Long, long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, a new technology was invented for downloading research papers.
Its creator prophetically named it the "World Wide Web", which in today’s busy world takes too long to say.
So we called it www, which some people initially pronounced "double-u …
Whenever I have to use most ports/packaging schemes other than OpenBSD's, I am blown away by their complexity. I marvel at how easy it is to use OpenBSD's ports by contrast.
For example, on the "easy to use" macOS, I recently upgraded a Mac from OS 10.9 to 10.10, and MacPorts totally stopped …
My friends Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates have a badass new book called, well, Badass: Making Users Awesome. One of the key points is: users don’t give a fig how awesome your product is, only how awesome it makes them. Read more at https://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036593.do. <br/> <!-- …
So Vizio has this real nice Google TV set-top box called the Co-Star, that they are now taking pre-orders for. But the web site is a total fail from the human factors point of view. It has fields for allowing you to enter different shipping and billing addresses, but when you do, it tells you they …
As most readers know, I use the UNIX operating system, particularly OpenBSD, on all my computers. On desktops I flit about between several "desktop environments" or user interface systems. OpenBSD's default is a simple window manager called fvwm, but it also provides an extreme minimalist …
O'Reilly has opened a site called Beautiful Code with discussions and articles about the eponymous topic, partly by the authors of the eponymous book. Sample openers include "One of the reasons there's less beautiful code in the world than most of us would like is that academic computer …
One of OpenBSD's mottos is "Secure by Default", but a more general form might be "Sensible by Default." I was astonished to find out the other day that some of the Linux distributions apparently produce CD-ROMs that will wipe out your hard disk if you just boot them and press …
It's been forty years and IBM still has not learned how to write a simple interactive tool that generates usable information to the user.
$ db2 -u db2inst1 -w topSecret DB21002E The parameter for option "-u" specified after the "db2" command or in the DB2OPTIONS variable is missing or incorrect. $ …