http://www.paralipsis.org paralipsis: suggesting by deliberately concise treatment that much of significance is omitted Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:02:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently had the opportunity to experience the ultimate in vendor stupidity. I placed an order for a new phone and then called to cancel the order 5 hours later. The cancellation call was around 11am the same day I placed the order with the vendor. Instead ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/06/getting-customers-to-go-away/ I suppose it’s entirely indicative of the software industry, but I was still saddened when I noticed that the embedded ‘title’ field of the PDF version of the IEEE Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, is “Microsoft Word - Title_page 2004.rtf”. The meta-data shows that the file was created ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/05/swebok-indeed/ The folks over at Bad Astronomy really put it best, “Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.” Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/05/this-is-what-we-can-do/ It turns out there are others who are fans of the sadly out-of-print Avalon Hill title Advanced Civilization. A group calling themselves Civilization: The Expansion Project have been working on updated rules and an expanded map board to support 16 player play! Awesome. If only it were possible to ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/05/avalon-hills-advanced-civilization-is-not-quite-dead/ The Great Southern California ShakeOut November 12–16, 2008 The Great Southern California ShakeOut is a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history, organized to inspire Southern Californians to get ready for big earthquakes, and to prevent disasters from becoming catastrophes. http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/05/great-southern-california-shakeout/ Marc Balmer has a wonderful writeup of a bug in the BSD directory handling code that laid dormant for 25 years. The only tragic thing was that Samba programmers encountered and worked around the bug several years ago and somehow the message never got back to the BSD folks. The ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/05/25-year-old-bug-fixed-in-bsd/ With the moving of ubuntu from the old fashioned init to the modern upstart, the daemontools svscanboot package doesn’t cleanly install. Here’s how to fix it. You really do need daemontools if you’re going to run djbdns or qmail. The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan/svscanboot process ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/04/configuring-daemontools-under-ubuntu-upstart/ As someone who must saddle his students with pricey textbooks, I try as much as possible to avoid requiring anything but the barest essentials. However, sometimes there are materials the student needs to have in order to be successful in a class. Frankly making the tradeoff between recommended ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/04/textbooks-cost-too-much/ Microsoft has published tips on how to make vista run faster and in a nutshell, the tips are: Run fewer programs (though they have to repeat it SIX times) Defragment your hard drive (welcome to 1990) Turn off visual effects (isn’t that what the whole point of vista is?) Restart your computer regularly Buy more ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/02/make-windows-vista-more-faster/ I shouldn’t be, but I’m amazed that there are still gullible crackpots who are earnestly working every day toward achieving free energy. Not in a tongue-in-cheek, or steampunk-cybergoth manner, but in an actual effort to achieve the impossible of free, perpetual energy. A world filled with alleged friend-of-a-friend ... http://www.paralipsis.org/2008/01/free-energy-crackpots/