Slashdot Mirror

Sorry about the bad link in the above post. Still learning how blog software works. Try:

http://picknit.com/mt4/isaac/a-slashdot-post-that-wasnt.html

You see Russian words ending in "ski" all the time. The Russian word for "Russian" is often latinized as "Russki".

There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.

My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "". (Oops, Slashdot doesn't like Cyrillic. Full post here). I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it without the "t", and you'll see the "tch" replaced by "z" and/or the "v" replaced by "w".

Why so many variations? Well, "" (no, I don't know what it's called, I'm the third generation off the boat) is pronounced like the English "v", but many people (even English speakers) use a convention that originates in Germany, where "w" stands for the same sound. As for ""; it represents a sound that isn't even used in English (I myself cannot pronounce it) so whether you use "tch", "ch" or "z" is pretty arbitrary.

(And of course, there's no single standard for pronouncing my name; don't even get me started on that.)

The fun part is that no matter which convention you use, somebody's bound to "correct" you. Phillip Davis wrote a book called Interpolation and Approximation for a very specialized audience of mathematicians. Most of the letters he got about the book were not about his math or his writing, but about his "misspelling" of the name of a Russian mathematician, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff!

I was referring to the physics of hearing. Is that your specialty?

I've been considering getting a hearing aid myself, and recently downloaded this buyer's guide. Perhaps I'm getting snowed, but I really do see more here than a graphic equalizer.

Dude, evaluate words in context. "Everything" implicitly means "everything that we're talking about." If I go into a football huddle and say "everything's at stake in this next play" everybody knows I mean the game and nobody infers that dropping the ball means the end of the universe.

Your alternative headline ("everything virtual") implies that only Java software is affected. Which I hope is not what you meant. I haven't seen a proper description of this exploit, but if it allows the attacker to inject native code into the target, then everything on that computer is affected. And to an IT director, computers are everything.

I'm not faulting you for nitpicking. That's what I do for a living. But not all nits are worth picking.

And if you reduce downtime, you're more likely to avoid it!

I have nothing against nitpicking, in as much as I do it for a living. But let's not quibble about a choice of words when the words don't really mean anything different.

"Insight" is probably the wrong word. I'm just good at explaining stuff. Speaking of which, please buy my book.

The virtual machines you mention all run on a single existing system. You want a virtual machine that runs on multiple systems. That goes way beyond what the existing VMs do. They just implement the hardware instructions of a single system in software running on a single system. Taking that implementation and spreading it out among multiple systems means anticipating every clustering problem the code might raise, and solving it in advance.

Nobody knows how to do that. If they did, they'd implement it as the back end of compiler rather than waste the overhead of using a VM.

(They say that there are no stupid questions. Not true. But there are lame stupid questions, and interesting stupid questions. My vocation is answering interesting stupid questions, which is why I'm grateful for this one!)

Firefox is hardly bug-free. Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.) At this point in time, Firefox has a lot fewer bugs (or at least a lot fewer bugs that really matter) than Internet Explorer. But this has as much to do with the increasing flakiness of Internet Explorer as with the improvement in Firefox.

In other words, do it in small pieces, and don't try to do everything at once. Once you actually record all the stuff you need to talk about, you can think about structuring it so that people can find the specific facts they're looking for. And of course prettying it up so people won't think you're totally illiterate.

Of course, this is ass-backwards from the way you learned to write in Freshman English, where you start out by outlining your subject, and the actual writing consists of filling in the outline. Some people actually are able to write that way, but I never really cared for it. Sometimes I go through the motions, because the a document plan is something some companies like to see before you start writing. But even when I do write an outline, it's always obsoleted by stuff I learn along the way.

There's a second way to get your CMS documented: hire me.

I predict flamewars during the writing of the guide on a scale not seen since the Emacsian Jihad.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a tech writer, and style guides are part of my professional toolset. But the point of a style guide is to get a bunch of disparate people writing with a common voice, so that the reader isn't distracted or confused by inconsistent usage. How could you possibly expect anything like a common voice from the odd assortment of volunteers that write Linux documentation?

I guess you could argue that PuTTY's strength is also its weakness. The authors have very specific ideas about the architecture of the program, and don't leave a lot of room for tweaking.

am still waiting for the Tab support, nowadays my desktop at work is full of putty windows, what is a bit annoying.

Personally, I don't use tabs, even when I use Mozilla or another program that supports them -- two levels of window access is too complex for my feeble brain. I like to have everything in the taskbar. (But isn't it hard to find stuff when you have 15 window buttons in the taskbar?) Not if you resize and rearrange the taskbar so that you have two or three rows of window buttons. You also need to increase the height of your caption bars (which also specifies the height of your taskbar buttons) so they're easier to read.

What's really helpful is to have a utility to rearrange your taskbar buttons into some kind of logical order. The best ones simply implement drag-and-drop on the taskbar. Unfortunately XP broke all of these -- the only utility that still works is Taskbar Commander which makes you pop up a special window to rearrange your buttons.

You work at IBM? Please check out my resume.

But it is mind-boggling what people can get away with on their resumes. Knew a guy who claimed to have graduate degrees from schools whose names he couldn't spell. You'd think employers would spot that, but no -- he actually held a couple of director-level jobs at the height of the bubble.

I really should get a little more creative with my resume. People who see it always ask why I don't mention where I got my 4-year degree. Answer: I don't have one. Which is a pain -- some companies won't even talk to me because of it. I could fudge up a degree from Whatsamatter U (double major, computer engineering and journalism). I'm sure nobody'd check. But I'm too much of a coward to pull off that kind of fib!

Oops. Just had a thought. I know Java. My credentials are impeccable: I wrote the JDK release notes for almost a year, and I once played a video game with James Gosling! But I've never worked as a Java programmer, being absolutely the worst coder on the planet. But if the shortage of Java programmers is that bad, maybe that's not such a problem!

Have you read anything about Blaster? It's spread via email attachments posing as Microsoft patches. A firewire isn't going to do a damn thing to keep it out.

The fact that you apparently write technical manuals for a living, makes this rather amusing.

I suggest you go and read Microsoft KB article KB823980 and take a look at Microsoft patch MS03-026.

While it is entirely feasible that someone could email the Blaster payload in an email message that appears to be a page from Microsoft's website, this is not how the worm spreads itself.