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Observations from a West Coast family

File: Position

2005-09-28 :: Stephen // Position
Arrogance and approachability

Although I have been writing a lot lately—slides, draft policies and processes, and slews of email—none of it has managed to reach my blog. I’ve been a Wall Street Journal subscriber since graduate school—skimming the paper in the morning is a habit I’ve maintained despite the hazard of having milk-sodden cereal hurled in my face [...]

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2005-04-06 :: Stephen // Position
Cameras on Solaris

Dan noted a while ago the libusb/libgphoto2 stack works well on Solaris 10 (and newer Express releases, of course). I’ve been using the gphoto2 CLI to manipulate my beaten-up Canon over USB, and then gthumb as my image browser/cataloguer. There are a few bugs here and there and some obvious enhancements needed, but the trajectory [...]

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2005-03-16 :: Stephen // Position
String theory split

A few people mentioned an article in the San Francisco Chronicle describing the current support and skepticism around string theory in the physics community to me. It’s worth a read. I would have liked to see some comments about aspects of theory—signs of the Higgs particle or supersymmetric structure—that should become testable at CERN‘s Large [...]

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2005-01-26 :: Stephen // Position
smf(5) design admissions

In a Usenet thread on comp.unix.solaris and an earlier comment series in the “Comparing Linux to System VR4″ on Slashdot last week, some valid smf(5) criticisms have been raised. I thought I would reply to them here, and acknowledge the impact on some practices. The strongest recent critic has been Tim Hogard, and I hope [...]

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2004-09-21 :: Stephen // Position
Had no effect, given my coloured lenses

The Register is displaying with a Sun Blue theme today.

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2004-06-29 :: Stephen // Position
Assembling a collective viewpoint

Bryan fielded some questions at USENIX today, and in doing so augments some of Andy‘s first comments on why we are pursuing an open source development model for Solaris.

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2004-06-25 :: Stephen // Position
Why predictable?

I titled my blog “Predictable” more out of genuine interest about making systems more so, than any particular cynicism about how things (any things) turn out. We have a pretty established language about desirable system attributes: reliability, availability, serviceability, and performance. Predictability is a courtier of all of these, but really doesn’t dominate any of [...]

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