On the off chance that there are some people reading my live journal, we're doing a survey on what people think about the costs authentication advice. There's a version for people who tend servers/computers/services here, and if you have 10-15 minutes, we'd love if you could give us your opinion on a miscellany of advice ( Read more... )

Rational choice theories are those that reason about behaviour based on those in the system acting on rationally to achieve their own interests. Rational ignorance is when you are ignorant about something, but the cost of addressing that ignorance is larger than the possible gains from knowing the answer. Rational irrationality is when you have a ( Read more... )

It seems that French people actually say "fait accompli", or at least one of them did on a phone call within earshot...

Chirality is basically a fancy way of saying "handedness".

I keep meaning to write down a reasonable set of options for making the serial console for booting FreeBSD on a Soekris box work well, so I don't have to keep looking them up. In the BIOS, set ConSpeed=19200. Next, in /boot.config add -P -S19200 - this tells the boot blocks to use a serial console at 19200 if there no keyboard attached. Then, in / ( Read more... )

The oldest reference I can find to "principle of least astonishment" on Usenet is in comp.sys.amiga in 1988, though the new google groups interface seems to have trouble sorting by date (feedback filed ( Read more... )

The Economist had a nice chart showing long you have to work to earn 500ml of beer. However, they didn't include a link to the original report and didn't include Ireland (for shame, tomorrow is Arthur's day)

I can find the average hourly wage on the CSO site and it looks like the average is usually about 120% of the median, so I reckon the median ( Read more... )

Today I converted a YouTube video to a DVD for one relative, and converted a programme recorded using out DVB-T&S DVR box into a DVD for another. It took a bit of fiddling around to find a smooth path for both, but the following seems to work ( Read more... )

This list of non-errors in English reminded me that CA has a nice regularisation in his grammar at the moment. He must know that adverbs often end in "ly" in British English, so at the moment, somethings are done "fastly" and "hardly". We did get "goodly" for a bit, but it seems to be less common now.

The search "ping user process" found David Mills's copy of the Fuzzball router code. The help file has sample output from ping dated 22-Aug-81. While the help file is considerably newer, that's an indication of how far ping might go back.