Lots of projects focus on an MVP, a minimum viable product: the least effort that it takes to make something that someone will pay for. The idea is that you can use that as a base to incrementally improve the product into something that people will actually recommend to each other, and perhaps from there get to a product that everybody wants.

I would like to suggest a different goal: the minimum awesome product. An MAP has one feature which makes it awesome, and everything else about it is the least that can be done without actively scaring away potential …

Let’s name a thing: dominant data formats.

A data format is a specification for how to turn information into a digital encoding that a computer can work with, and of course how to reverse that back into a human-readable method.

A dominant data format is one that is used to such an extent that tools for converting it are essential for any successor format, and such tools will continue to be maintained and universally available for many years after it is no longer the most popular format, because so much data was stored in it that you are likely …

Somehow, without me being consciously aware of it, every device in the house that I use to play music has become capable of playing FLAC.

(FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio CoDec. A CoDec is a compressor/decompressor, a method of potentially squeezing lots of data into less data. Lossless means that the bits you put in one side are exactly the bits that you get out the other side after you decompress them. MP3 and most other music and video formats are lossy – the bits that you get out are an approximation of the bits that you put in …

“It seemed reasonable at the time.”

Well, it did.

Everything is a semi-rational reaction to something else.

Companies used to own and run their own machines on-premises. But doing it properly (HVAC, power, raised floors, standardized racks, management, redundancy, preparedness…) is expensive and not actually most companies’ core competency. So they moved to colocated datacenters, where a competent company would take care of the infrastructure for a fee which would hopefully reflect a discount based on savings from scale.

But managing generations of servers at colo datacenters takes manpower for hardware replacement, upgrades, cabling, and generally doing things right; the customer companies mostly don’t have that as a …

It’s 2019. How much RAM do you need?

For a desktop or laptop, it’s fairly easy: everyone needs 8GB to get general work done. 16GB is suitable for people who are doing heftier work, and people who need 32GB or more always have a specific reason that they can articulate and justify.

Servers are different. Servers can be scaled vertically (made or purchased in heftier configurations) for a ways, but nearly always you will have a reason to scale horizontally (more machines of the same calibre) – high availability, or recovery from disaster, or workloads that are cost-effective to …

The HP Envy 13z is a lightweight, reasonably high-performance laptop with a relatively low price tag - under $600 for the 1080P 13” touchscreen, flip-hinge to tablet, backlit keyboard, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD, Ryzen 2300U four-core system weighing a little over two pounds.

(Those were the specs.)

It generally compares favorably to a non-Retina MacBook Pro.

Unsurprisingly, it ships with Windows 10 and HP support wants nothing to do with Linux. Honestly, if they just changed their stock answer away from hostility to polite indifference, it would be a remarkable improvement. Running Windows disk management utility produced a 112GB partition for …

We’ve had a nominal gigabit fiber connection for more than a year now. Let’s take a look at how much of it we’ve been using.

Luckily, my firewall keeps track for me.

$ vnstat -m -i eth3

There’s this notion of a technological cycle of reincarnation, where an implementation is followed by a logical successor which leads to another one which carries on down a chain until someone has a bright idea which looks an awful lot like the original implementation. For example, it used to be that CPUs did all their math by themselves, then they outsourced the hard parts to floating point coprocessors, then those got built in to the main CPU chip again. Graphics subsystems are particularly prone to the cycle.

It just occurred to me that with the recent trend to enabling …

I remember that there are test patterns built into T1 CSU/DSUs, but not what they are or how to turn them on – if I need to know, I’ll look it up.

I remember that there are three QoS bits in the IPv4 header, but not where they are. Probably pretty early, because of hardware implementations.

I remember that lots of people look down on Perl 5’s object system, but not why. I remember the existence and purpose of lots of Perl modules, but not the interfaces.

I edit JSON and YAML every few weeks, but I don …

Recognize this pattern:

• Set a goal
• Work towards the goal
• Evaluate progress:
• If it didn’t get closer to the goal, try a different approach.
• If it got closer to the goal, try improving it.
• Cycle.

That seems reasonable, right? It accomplishes what you wanted to do, possibly in a naive manner.

Several people have asked me recently what hardware I would buy today for use as a home firewall.

About a year ago, we switched ISPs from RCN to Verizon. I had no particular issues with RCN except that their prices went up each year without providing better service. (It’s true that RCN also fails to handle IPv6 natively, but Verizon shares that failure.) What’s happened in that year?

• Three outages. Two were caused by trucks knocking down the fiber crossing the road; one by an unspecified problem that was fixed by rebooting the Optical Network Terminal (i.e. fiber termination device, which offers ethernet, cable TV and telephone services). The first fiber outage took a week …

In the distant past, the functions of author, editor and page designer were separated. The author wrote things; the editor fixed errors (both objectively and subjectively) and selected choice bits to highlight; the page designer made things look the way they should. The editorial intermediary didn’t consult the author much, and gave limited direction to the page designer.

Pull quotes appeared where the page designer put them.

Because the editor could not predict where the pull quote would be located on the page, it made sense that the quote would not actually be removed from the text body, but …

All email disclaimers are utterly useless – except, possibly, one that a lawyer sends you that, on that particular message, reminds you that you are not in a privileged relationship.

Here’s the proof:

This message (including any attachment(s) hereto) is confidential and may also be privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this message in error you are requested …