Category Archives: Geeky Musings

WordPress import/export is still pants

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Jacques Chester

It still chokes on ‘large’ files due to causing massive blooms of memory consumption. The XML parser implementation used insists on loading the whole file at once. This is a recipe for PHP choking a modest VPS. A WXR splitter … Continue reading →

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How to run an opensource project.

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Jacques Chester

Step 1: Create a direct financial incentive to produce a buggy, security-hole-ridden, backwards but oh-so-shiny piece of poop. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit.

Posted in Geeky Musings | 1 Comment

DadHacker should be a book, frankly

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Jacques Chester

A great blog. I’ve been re-reading it from beginning to end. This sentence seemed particularly appropriate, given the current sturm und drang about “NoSQL” databases: Databases make lousy file systems. File systems make lousy databases. There is a circle in … Continue reading →

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Musos and Masters

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Jacques Chester

This essay by Zed Shaw resurfaced on Proggit today. Shaw’s essay talks about mastery, as seen from the perspective of martial arts: After reading books on martial arts history for years, and studying everything I can, I started to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Geeky Musings | 2 Comments

A stray thought about exam questions

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Having just finished the final units I need to qualify for an undergraduate degree, the topic of examinations is still fresh in my mind. Generally these fall into two categories: open-book and closed-book; with two major categories of question: multiple-choice and short-answer.
The exact mix of open/closed and MC/SA will vary from professor to professor and […] Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Education, Geeky Musings | Comments Off

Supercomputing Treaties

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Today’s random thought: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the most important development in the history of supercomputing. It has forced the continuous development of ever-more powerful supercomputers to simulate the decay of weapons that can no longer be actually tested. … Continue reading →

Posted in Geeky Musings, Thought Bubbles | Comments Off

I’ve also found this to be true

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Based on current feedback, I’d say paying a lawyer to talk about software patents at this point would be like setting money on fire.
– Ryan Gordon
Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Geeky Musings, IT and Internet, Robojar | Comments Off

A small taste of development life

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Jacques Chester

Jon Skeet explains that human complexity is one of the causes of software complexity. Everything you might think is simple — numbers, letters and dates — is actually devilishly tricky. Continue reading →

Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, Geeky Musings, Humour, IT and Internet | Comments Off

Upsetting the natural order

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Jacques Chester

A lot of progress (and sometimes, regress) in computer science and software engineering seems to come from rejecting, modifying or otherwise modifying the “natural order”. By natural order I refer to the generally accepted, industrial paradigm of how development “is … Continue reading →

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Decisions, decisions …

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Jacques Chester

I am, at long last, within a cooee of actually having an undergraduate degree. The road to this point has been much longer than I expected back when I graduated from high school in 1999. The intervention of depression in … Continue reading →

Posted in Diary, Geeky Musings | 9 Comments