To be clear:

• If I link or otherwise attribute a source for a statistical figure, that’s the source that I’m using.

• If I blather off an estimate like 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, that is almost certainly hyperbole.

• If I show my work …

As a manager, you can tell if an engineer is happy with their work if they are comfortable with giving higher-ups constructive feedback about issues at hand directly. As an engineer, you can tell if a manager is actively working for you if you see at least some action performed …

Useful tip (for me): any time ZFS emits internal error: Invalid argument, what it probably means is that the DKMS module and the userland utilities are different versions.

sudo modinfo zfs|head will tell you what version your kernel is using; apt show -a zfsutils-linux will tell you what versions …

I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short …

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as …

This is the end of my second year as a Google Fi subscriber.

TL;DR: I’m keeping this service and I recommend it for people who are happy with the limited phone selection.

Many people like to claim “my time is worth the $/hour I could have earned”. It’s usually bull.

If you are paid hourly, it is 95% likely that your hours are set by your employer, not you. You can’t spend a random extra hour working to get another …

• Melissa Olson, Nightshades
• Harry Connolly, The Twisted Path
• Ryk Spoor, Princess Holy Aura
• Faith Hunter, Flame in the Dark
• Mira Grant, Into The Drowning Deep
• Brandon Sanderson, Oathbound
• Jim Hines, Terminal Alliance
• James Allan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault
• Sebastian de Castell, Spellslinger

I liked all …

Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

A modern librarian selects, installs, configures and administrates knowledge management software. They are experts in organizational methods and search techniques.

A librarian may take in paper documents and convert them to electronic formats. Everything gets stored, indexed, and made searchable …

It’s not enough that Net Neutrality be enforced. That’s just a basic requirement to keep corporations from completely exploiting their customers.

What would a good long-term solution look like?

We can look at history. In 1982, the eight-year antitrust suit against AT&T was ended by the breakup …

If you have a Mac and DNS resolution seems really, really slow — like, five seconds or more per lookup — check to see if you have an IPv6 address. You probably do.

Then check to see if you have an IPv6 DNS server listed. I bet you don’t, or it …

I was a customer of RCN for seven years. The service was fine, in the really boring way that you want commodity services to be. There were occasional glitches, and a few months where the internet service was particularly bad due to our house being at the end of a …

For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.

( – me )

Every decision involves a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes they are formal; often they …