JDD (Jenkins driven development) - noun - A development process in which the coder in question has one or two commits to the source code repository adding a feature or fixing a bug, followed by two or three dozen commits to fix things in the comments, unit tests, variable names, or some other such fiddly thing to coax the Jenkins server into actually running the unit tests to exercise the new code and hopefully integrate the new feature. The primary usage of time by developers in DevOps environments. The later commit messages usually consist of variations of "Does it work yet?", "WTF …
It seems like everybody is reviewing the book To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell, and most of the book reviews are, to be frank, kind of pants. The mainstream book reviewers seem to have read only the first and last chapters and make light (at best) or a joke (at worst) of the life's work of people who are actually doing the work in some parts of the medical profession instead of just playing "Won't it be nice when..." on Slack channels and Facebook. A …
Slackpathy - noun - The phenomenon where conversations in a Slack channel are carried out using roughly 50% emoji or reaction gifs and 50% written natural language. The term derives from the hypothesized phenomenon of telepaths sending entire thought-complexes to each other rather than streams of speech.
I've been asked to signal boost this by AJ, one of the few people whom I would say in public that I trust.
Lapis, a friend of his, is a transwoman who is disabled and is also at this time homeless. Lapis is undergoing a mental health crisis at this time and is actively seeking assistance. However, the mental health system has judged that Lapis is not undergoing a sufficiently bad crisis to warrant hospitalization (which would mean getting her off the street). As far as I know, Lapis is estranged from her family so they are not an option …
In the last couple of years, a meme that's come to be known as security nihilism has appeared in the security community. In a nutshell, because there is no such thing as perfect security, there is no security at all, so why bother? Talking about layered security controls that reinforce each other is pointless because they always skip right to the end, which is the circumvention of the nth countermeasure and final defeat. In the crypto community, cries of "Quantum computer!" are the equivalent of invoking Godwin's Law, leading to the end of all discourse, nevermind trying to separate …
For the last couple of years, the meme of an EMP attack against the United States has been an integral part of the thoughtbase of the prepper community. So the idea goes, the next major attack by a foreign power will involve not the bombing of a major city but bombardment with an electromagnetic pulse (local mirror, snapshot taken 20170310 @ 2030 hours PST8PDT). Due to the fact that "electromagnetic" is kind of a loose term, sometimes they mean an actual magnetic field, sometimes they speak of a microwave burst (which means that you've got bigger problems than your electronics getting …
You may or may not have noticed amongst the blizzard of other stuff that's happened in the last two weeks that Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai to the chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission. Pai has a history of being something of a contrarian; during his time as one of the five commissioners of the FCC, he repeatedly spoke against regulations that protected the consumer and was against diverse media ownership (since the 1980's, we went from 50 media companies to just six). Time and again Pai's said that he was going to tear down regulation after regulation that the …
In California, we periodically have problems with armies of Argentine ants invading houses at certain times of the year. It doesn't matter how clean you keep your house or how carefully you maintain it, they'll still find a way in. They're quite small and routinely squeeze through cracks less than 1mm in size, which is roughly the size of the gap between a baseboard and floor in most homes out here. They invade (and I use that word carefully) in extremely large numbers, often in the hundreds; often your first sign is an inch-wide column of ants marching down a …
UPDATE - 20170228 - Added more stuff I've discovered about KBFS.
A couple of years ago you probably heard about this thing called Keybase launching with a private beta, and it purported itself to be a new form of public key encryption for the masses, blah blah blah, whatever.. but what's this thing good for, exactly? I mean, it was pretty easy to request an invite from the service and either never get one, or eventually receive an e-mail and promptly forget about it. I've been using it off and on for a while, and I recently sat down to really mess …
I've mentioned once or twice that I have a media box at home running Kodi on top of Arch Linux. Once you've got your media drives registered and indexed, it's pretty easy to use. Save for the clock in the upper right-hand corner of the display, which almost never seems to coincide with the timezone set when you install Arch. So I don't forget again, and to try to fix the problem of skillions of worthless threads on the Kodi forums, here's how you fix it from inside of Kodi when it's running:
