IT documentation has a disease: in-text links. The disease-inducing thinking is quite clear: someone writing the documentation writes 'install the drivers for your graphics card', and then provides a link to how to install graphics cards because they saw others do that sort of thing. But once you accept the general …

Could you drive the car over to my sister's place? Then she'll give you the KEYS once you're there. What a confusing request! What keys could this person mean? The car KEYS, for the car that she needs. You'll get the KEYS once you're there. Now you have found the confusion - this person is not thinking clearly. You …

We - the open source zealots - talk a lot about corporations with unkind interests quashing the movement, pushing their proprietary code, and violating everyone's 'privacy'. We don't talk much about push-back from coders, but it exists, because writing in the open is scary. We can say to engineers, 'your users will be …

I am a morlock - a naturally technocratic creature, comfortable with the darkness. When the pandemic hit, I heard the shock waves across the internet, and noticed every day how little my life had changed. It was at times, almost a nice excuse to sit and tap on the keyboard, and make dinner slowly to the sound of Nine …

Can we stop pretending it's the 80's? I like Unix-style programs. I like the expectation of a manual with every program, instead of every programmer coming up with their own way to telling people how something works. I like being able to ignore licences, and there's no better licence to ignore than the GPL - it will …

Anglophone reporting on the current Serbian political situation has been a general failure of the ears and eyes. Every report I've seen only elucidates the strength of the reporters' political prescriptions. One of the worst distortions I've come across was listening to The Rest is Politics - a political podcast, by …

Over the years, I've become convinced, that 'backups' are a bad paradigm, and should be left to edge-cases. We should instead focus on 'synchronization' where possible. Where backups say 'make a copy, on tape, place it in the basement, and lock it tight', they immediately have to follow this statement with '...and …

Stepping Stones: rocks to step on, to avoid the surrounding mud or water. When crossing a river, the more stepping stones it has, the better. Walking across six stepping stones feels much better than hopping across three, and hopping across three is better than jumping to one stepping stone in the middle of a river, …