Tuesday, December 27, 2011

And You Thought Linux Wasn't User Friendly?

Been playing with Plan 9 From Bell Labs.

Man is that counter-intuitive. Unix was all about minimalism. BSD and Linux still are, at the kernel level anyway (let's not talk about GUI wars for a moment.)

Plan 9 is even more extreme. Think of a bare X server (no window manager, etc.) and you're close.

No title bars, nothing even vaguely like 'help' or even 'intuitive icons' (or icons of any kind.)

Getting kind of used to it, but I'll never do anything serious, I think. More's the pity.

Take a look for yourself.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Another no-content link post

This is turning into an extremely low-volume geek version of InstaPundit.

Here's an interesting take on "Are threads still a menace?"

Which is itself something of a riff on this other thread-menace post from about ten years ago.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Quote of the Day

The quote for today:

Hobbyists regularly perform unexpected feats of grand but dubious utility: "I wouldn't have thought it was possible to deep-fry kool-aid, but there it is. I'm still trying to figure out if I should sing your praises or set you on fire." They set out to do one thing, and accomplish three others instead.

From http://www.landley.net/

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Yet another rant

The fun thing about computers is there is a nearly infinite number of things about them to complain about, and an uncountable number of people who do, usually in the most scatalogical terms.

To wit, this guy.

News You Can Abuse

Kindle Fire review "for those who plan to void the warranty"

Friday, November 18, 2011

Snark of the day

I told my wife I'd downloaded the Blogger app, so I can now blog (slowly) from my iPod.

She smiled and said something vaguely supportive.

I said "All I need now is something to say." I paused, then said, "Oh, wait, it's a blog. That's optional."

She said, "You should blog that.."