Part of what I do for a living is write. I’ve co-authored a book, written a rather large number of technical articles, and I’ve also done professional editing, tech review, and manuscript review for magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses. Also, my wife is an English teacher. In short, though I make my fair share of…
Author: bkjones
Thumbs up for Synergy
I have heard a couple of people mention this tool on IRC and mailing lists, but I didn’t ever make time to try it myself for some reason. That is, until my buddy and coworker Steve gave me a quick demo of its functionality, and told me that it was brainless to install and get…
The Future of IT and IT Policy
For those who didn’t already know, I work in academia. I work in the Computer Science Dept. at Princeton University. Every week I attend the “IT Policy Lunch”, which is a gathering of anyone on campus who is concerned with IT Policy. It’s hosted by Ed Felten, who heads up research into IT Policy. You…
Not feelin’ the Joost
Joost is getting ready to launch out of beta and unleash themselves unto the masses. I participated in the beta, and I have to say that there are some good things that I think will result from Joost, but I think ultimately Joost will fall from favor within 12 months from their public launch. First,…
Anniversary: 4 Months, 0 Cigarettes
My quit date was January 1st, 2007. I haven’t had a smoke since. I *have* had the occasional cigar, but I never finish those, and they’re a rare pleasure. I can’t commit to smoking something for over an hour. That’s just too much, and it reminds me of one of the reasons I hate smoking:…
Cron != Shell
I’m as guilty as anyone of treating cron as if it’s “just a shell”, and it finally bit me today. I had a quick-n-dirty Postgres backup command that worked wonderfully from the command line: /usr/local/postgres/bin/pg_dumpall -U pgadmin | gzip -9 > \ /usr/local/db/backups/pgsql/pgdump.`/bin/date +”%Y%m%d-%H%M%S”`.gz But when I put this into my crontab, I started getting…
Why Does SourceForge Hate Its Users?
SourceForge has been a lumbering, slow, clumsy, ugly site for a long time. So-called “improvements” over the past couple of *years* have done as much to hurt performance of the site as it has to make it prettier and (debatably) easy to navigate. In reality, it seems that most of the changes made to SourceForge…
*STILL* No Multiple Inheritance in PHP!
This is maddening. There have been requests for multiple inheritance in PHP since I started using it in mid 1999. Of course, in mid-1999, I didn’t really care. There wasn’t much written in PHP that was any good, so I was writing little scripts of glue code to tie pieces of HTML together and the…
Quick CVS Cheat Sheet
Actually, I’d love to say that I’ve moved completely to using git instead of CVS, but the truth of the matter is that, for a recent project where I’m just trying to consolidate a whole bunch of admin scripts, organize them under one (managed) roof, and (most importantly) get a bunch of admins on board…
I’m Now A FiOS Customer
Some people will be shocked to hear that I’m now a FiOS customer, especially if they’ve read a previous post I made over a year ago now about how FiOS looked like the biggest scam ever. Well, I’m not sure I changed my mind per se, but a number of realizations have been made over…