Recent blog entries for aaronsw

wmf pointed out that dmullen is complaining about something I wrote. dmullen, I'd appreciate it if you email me@aaronsw.com with a link when you talk about me.

dmullen clearly misunderstood my remark. I found TAOUP to be an interesting and slightly useful read. I don't think it's horrible or filled with flaws. My complaint is simply that the book is not about the art of Unix programming. At best, it might be called the practice of Unix programming. While ESR does have some aesthetically-valid points they're not really the focus of the book and his ugly recommendations seem to far outnumber them.

I also agree with mbp that ESR focuses on his own work too much. There are only so many fetchmail examples one can stand!

With Small is Beautiful, I'm planning to go in the other direction and completely ignore popularity and my own work, and try to communicate what I find beautiful about Unix.

Why are Advogato text boxes set to wrap hard? It inserts annoying spaces where I don't want them.

raph writes: "Another change I'd like to make soonish is to render real names in most contexts. The nicknames are cute, but I think they don't scale well. Of course, this kind of change is not rocket science, but those things are important too."

One interesting trick (in other situations) I've seen is to keep the nicknames, but store the real names in a title attribute, so they appear as "tooltips" in many browsers if you mouse over the nicknames.

raph writes: "I just flat-out don't agree [that kids should be sent to traditional school]. Realistically, the chances of Alan becoming a corporate drone are much lower than, say, making a living writing poetry. Why not prepare him for the latter, then?"

Yes, yes, yes! As an unconventional schooler myself, I can attest that my years in traditional school were simply torture (and I went to an elite private school that wasn't supposed to have these problems). Raising children in a dictatorship is hardly a way to develop young questioning minds, and I am so thankful for having computers, the Internet and a rich home life to keep me thinking and growing. Without them, I don't know how I would have survived -- let alone learn and grow -- all these years.

It's great to see zachlipton is speaking out against LinuxWorld's policy of discrimination.

Great job, Zach. We should put together a forum for young hackers.

Catching up...

Welcome, kishorebalakrishnan!

Good to see you here, edd.

Zooko is cool and friendly!

Ironically, now wmf is no longer certified. Quick, go do the deed!

Thanks to a certification campaign launched by wmf, I'm now accepted by Advogato! Thanks to everyone who helped out.

A special thanks to emk for rating me a Journeyer after doing research. Eric is a certified hoopy frood after the time I've spent with him on UserLand's DG.

When I Get Trusted

Add myself as a contributor to MusicBrainz

I'm not quite sure how all these people manged to find me and certify me, but, thanks guys! Didn't know I had so many fans... ;-) Still, Advogato won't trust me!

I also just realized that I've been getting confused between Jim Winstead (jimw) and Jim Whitehead (ejw). This may take me a while to sort out... If you guys are going to work on the same stuff (WebDAV) you might as well pick different names! ;-)