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Men Commenting on Women’s Issues

A lecture at LCA 2011 which included some inappropriate slides was followed by long discussions on mailing lists. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in two lists [1]. One of the noteworthy incidents in the mailing list discussion concerned Ted Ts’o (an influential member of the Linux […]

Being Obviously Wrong About Autism

I’m watching a Louis Theroux documentary about Autism (here’s the link to the BBC web site [1]). The main thing that strikes me so far (after watching 7.5 minutes of it) is the bad design of the DLC-Warren school for Autistic kids in New Jersey [2].

A significant portion of people on the Autism Spectrum […]

Booting GPT

I’m installing new 4TB disks on an older Dell server, it’s a PowerEdge T110 with a G6950 CPU so it’s not really old, but it’s a couple of generations behind the latest Dell servers.

I tried to enable UEFI booting, but when I turned that option on the system locked up during the BIOS process […]

More BTRFS Fun

I wrote a BTRFS status report yesterday commenting on the uneventful use of BTRFS recently [1].

Early this morning the server that stores my email (which had 93 days uptime) had a filesystem related problem. The root filesystem became read-only and then the kernel message log filled with unrelated messages so there was no record […]

Links July 2014

Dave Johnson wrote an interesting article for Salon about companies ripping off the tax system by claiming that all their income is produced in low tax countries [1].

Seb Lee-Delisle wrote an insightful article about how to ask to get paid to speak [2]. I should do that.

Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about […]

BTRFS Status July 2014

My last BTRFS status report was in April [1], it wasn’t the most positive report with data corruption and system hangs. Hacker News has a brief discussion of BTRFS which includes the statement “Russell Coker’s reports of his experiences with BTRFS give me the screaming heebie-jeebies, no matter how up-beat and positive he stays about […]

Android Screen Saving

Just over a year ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. About 3 months ago I noticed that some of the Ingress menus had burned in to the screen. Back in ancient computer times there were “screen saver” programs that blanked the screen to avoid this, then the “screen saver” programs transitioned to […]

Happiness and Lecture Questions

I just attended a lecture about happiness comparing Australia and India at the Australia India Institute [1]. The lecture was interesting but the “questions” were so bad that it makes a good case for entirely banning questions from public lectures. Based on this and other lectures I’ve attended I’ve written a document about how to […]

Public Lectures About FOSS

Eventbrite

I’ve recently started using the Eventbrite Web site [1] and the associated Eventbrite Android app [2] to discover public events in my area. Both the web site and the Android app lack features for searching (I’d like to save alerts for my accounts and have my phone notify me when new events are added […]

Improving Computer Reliability

In a comment on my post about Taxing Inferior Products [1] Ben pointed out that most crashes are due to software bugs. Both Ben and I work on the Debian project and have had significant experience of software causing system crashes for Debian users.

But I still think that the widespread adoption of ECC RAM […]