Ray Brinzer

Every now and then, it’s expeditious to use Windows.

By and large, Gentoo Linux and WindowMaker suit me quite well. It’s not for everybody, but I like using good, straightforward tools, and having control over my machine. And while I have any number of complaints about Linux, for my purposes it’s still the best there is. Macintosh is pretty, but from the few occasions I’ve used them in modern times I don’t like the command line environment as well, and the command line is where I live. Windows is much better than it used to be, but still no comparison to a proper Unix for my needs.

It depends, though, on how you’re using it. Back in the ’90s, at a little dot-com I worked for, we had Windows workstations, but we all just ran full-screen X sessions and worked on the server. Then we could drop back into Windows when it was time to play Command & Conquer. That’s using Windows for its strength.

These days, too, Cygwin and a large batch of open-source software can ameliorate the situation. With a lot of configuration, Windows can be almost as tasty as the real thing for casual use. And with SSH, it really doesn’t matter that the command line you’re using isn’t on the system in front of you. So, you’re mostly using Windows as a window manager. If you have to test websites in Internet Explorer, this is a very likely scenario.

But it doesn’t have virtual desktops.

Really, this is madness… Read more »

After poking around Squeak for a few days, I noticed a blog post about an image called “Pharo”. So, I downloaded it, and tried it out.

I was nothing short of astonished. It was very attractive, and loaded almost instantly. Someone has been working hard on this. Turns out the project is a fork from Squeak; the rapid progress reminds me a lot of when X.Org broke away from XFree86.

Now, my instincts tell me that when you’re just getting started with a not-so-mainstream development tool, it’s not the time to pick up an even-less-mainstream fork which is less than a year old. I’m really tempted to do so, anyway, though. It’s not like I’m trying to get work done with it (yet).

It is a shame, though, to see a small community divided. Besides, I like the mouse.

Every once in awhile, most programmers step back and consider what other tools are out there, and whether there’s a better place they could be. I frequently look up the language ladder at Lisp, Smalltalk, and friends, while I often actually go down the ladder to PHP. The reason for this is simple: it’s easiest to solve a problem when someone else has already done the work for you. Read more »

It’s pretty well-known that, “the opposite of progress is congress.” But you don’t hear so often that “the opposite of the constitution is prostitution”, or that, “if you are not a contestant, you must be a protestant.”

Like most things in English, affixes are weird. By affix, I mean a prefix or a suffix; these sometimes come in predictable opposites, as with “prepaid” and “postpaid”. But while the prefix for “prefix” is “pre-”, the prefix for “suffix” isn’t “post-”… and the postmaster’s arch-enemy isn’t the premaster. Nor can you tell, just by looking at the form of a word, whether it has an affix (though older writers often made it easier by hyphenating prefixes; e.g. to-day and to-morrow).

Now, this leads us very naturally to a deep discussion of linguistics. If you’re qualified to lead such a discussion, great; I look forward to reading it in the comments. I know just enough to be certain that a non-inflected language isn’t outflected, that you don’t find diphthongs in the lingerie department, and that you don’t wear them over your agglutination.

Which, really, is all for the better. Why labor to understand something, when you can abuse it for cheap thrills? I wrote a quick script to find matches between pro- and con- words… and to find the non-matches. The non-matches, really, are more interesting… because while the opposite of procrastinating isn’t ‘concrastinating’, it should be. Given that this sort of thing makes the language more regular, we’d actually be protorting it, rather than contorting it, so we should see this as a conblem. In fact, it’s prosiderate to convide such words.

Anyway, though… below are three tables. The first is the list of words (from the Unix ‘cracklib’ file) where the same ending forms legitimate words with both pro- and con- at the beginning (though not necessarily as prefixes modifying a root). The second and third list nonsense words made from swapping the letters ‘con’ and ‘pro’ at the beginnings of real words. And then, just for completeness, the code I wrote to generate the lists.

If you find the tables interesting reading… well, congratulations. You’re a geek.
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