Recent Stories
VMware Users Adjust to Broadcom Subscription Licensing
At VMware Explore last month, customers expressed unease at the new subscription model but remained hopeful that they could make it work.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-11 .
Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu)
One of the benefits of being a Charles Schwab analyst is that you can pull up a new PostgreSQL database at a click of a button.
(The New Stack), 2024-09-04 .
Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today
Once, Azure was a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. These days, the company tests over 1,000 Linux distributions a month just to ensure their customer apps run smoothly on Azure.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-19 .
RustLang Semantic Versioning Still Breaks Too Many Apps
In an environment of automated builds, incorrectly versioned packages build can wreak havoc, one Rust dev notes on the Changelog podcast.
(The New Stack), 2024-07-05 .
Why Python Is So Slow (And What Is Being Done About It)
PyCon 2024 showcased a number of ways to speed the pokey Python programming language including sub-interpreters, immortal objects, just-in-time compilation and more.
(The New Stack), 2024-06-14 .
PyCon US: Simon Willison on Hacking LLMs for Fun and Profit
Prompt engineering is a big bag of dumb tricks, argued the co-creator of Django. But that is no reason you can not create interesting apps with the technology.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-19 .
5 Lessons From LinkedIn’s First Foray Into GenAI Development
LinkedIn has found that prototyping a Generative AI-based feature can be done really quickly. Getting it into production, however, is another matter entirely.
(The New Stack), 2024-05-02 .
Guider Daemon Automates Linux Performance Monitoring
Guider, built over a period of nine years, comes with over 150 performance-tracking and visualization command-line tools.
(The New Stack), 2024-04-19 .
Golang 1.22 Redefines the For Loop for Easier Concurrency
Golang 1.22 fixes a quirk in the for loop that has long-thwarted closure users.
(The New Stack), 2024-04-04 .
Linux xz Backdoor Damage Could Be Greater Than Feared
A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there?
(The New Stack), 2024-03-31 .
20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry
GnuCOBOL has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-15 .
Meet DBOS: A Database Alternative to Kubernetes
The creator of PostgreSQL has teamed with the creator of Apache Spark to build a cloud OS on top of a distributed database.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-12 .
With YAMLScript, YAML Becomes a Proper Programming Language
A scripting language that brings to YAML all the programming capabilities many assumed it already had.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-11 .
Vendoring: Why You Still Have Overlooked Security Holes
A cautionary FOSDEM talk from the Nix community about all the vulnerable software that may still overlooked on your systems.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-08 .
Can the Unix Shell Be Improved? Hell Yes!
A look inside the world of alternative command line environments.
(The New Stack), 2024-03-02 .
Selected Blog Posts
Patsy Cline and the Paddle
December 2015
Patsy Cline, in today's parlance, gave zero fucks. I feel a certain kinship to Cline, if only because I attended the same school she did, Gore Elementary, 12 miles west of Winchester, Virginia (though I attended 30 years after she did).
Back up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gore is a tiny unincorporated town, mostly a few buildings coalescing around a single road breaking off Route 50.
Many of the refined folk in the nearby metropolis of sorts, Winchester, had looked down on Patsy Cline, as being
from the wrong side of the tracks, even after she became famous. Click to See the Tracks She Was on the Wrong Side Of...
Liquor in the Front, Poker in the Rear
November 2018
Some dirty truths about running a newspaper:I am sorry to hear of the passing of the Village Voice, and for, my own kindred, the Baltimore City Paper, both of which folded last year. But I am pretty cynical about attempts to revive them. Quarter-page ads from the local coffee shops were not what drove those newspapers. My advice for anyone foolhardy to try to start an actual print newspaper or magazine these days? Find a source of dirty money to keep the books healthy.
Click to Read More...
The Path to Totality
April 2018
I would not recommend driving 1,400 miles in approximately 30 hours. But if you must do it, it helps
to have a speedy set of wheels. Our goal was to experience the eclipse in its entirety,
to get under the path of totality as its darkness cut a swath across the United States mid-day August 21, 2017.
Others had made plans,
procured camping spots and sleeping bags for the night before. We had a
Ford Mustang to get us there, and get us back, through a 30 hour day all in order
to experience the 3 minute micro-day of pure planetary discombobulation within.
Click to See...
Friends of John Sargent
Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925),
in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people
who are now all long deceased. Sargent painted portraits of his friends, often trading a payment for
freedom of artistic direction, which allowed him to more accurately capture their personalities.
Tight with Claude Monet, Sargent often borrowed techniques from impressionism to make his work more dynamic
and subtle. The results remain almost eerily vivacious over a century later.
Click to See
August 2015
Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925),
in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people
who are now all long deceased. Sargent painted portraits of his friends, often trading a payment for
freedom of artistic direction, which allowed him to more accurately capture their personalities.
Tight with Claude Monet, Sargent often borrowed techniques from impressionism to make his work more dynamic
and subtle. The results remain almost eerily vivacious over a century later.
Click to See
Better Life Through Medicine
April 2000
As a teenage fuck-up who had recently (and barely) graduated high school, I, of limited opportunities,
joined the U.S. Army in the summer of 1983. I had never been outside the northeast U.S., and after advanced
training, was first assigned to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Cool, I thought, I would be close to my
girlfriend, who lived not too far away in Harrisburg, Pa. But then, in would I would later understand to be in
true U.S. Army fashion, a last minute phone call came in: I would be instead be dispatched to South Korea,
a place that seemed for my lovelorn heart to be on the other side of the planet.
Click to See
Darwin by the Fire
July 2014
Sometimes a piece of writing so closely describes the truth, that it itself becomes the truth. Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," first published in 1859, made its argument so thoroughly, so absolutely, it literally willed evolution into being in the human consciousness. Click to Read More...
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