Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy [...]
Public wireless networks can be scary; you never know who might be sniffing your traffic, recording your GMail authentication cookies, or worse. Ideally, all of your net activity should be end-to-end authenticated and encrypted. Fortunately, since this is not always feasible, ssh makes it easy to use an untrusted network by routing your traffic through a trusted end-point. All you need is an ssh [...]
Twitter is the hot messaging platform of choice for many discerning technologists and early adopters. (If you don’t know what Twitter is, check out the CommonCraft intro video for a quick overview.) In short, Twitter provides laconic insight into what people are doing, with a diversity of client interfaces to satisfy (almost) every need. While Twitter is nominally for providing [...]
During the course of a given week, I answer a lot of technical questions. They range from the friend asking, “What laptop should I buy?” to strangers with very specific questions about the source code used in my research. I rather enjoy solving technical questions and taking a line from Jon Udell’s “Too busy to blog?” post, I’m [...]
When switching to a new version control system, it is important to be able to bring along all the past history of a project. There are several tools capable of converting a CVS repository to Mercurial; I have considered cvs20hg, tailor and Mercurial’s own convert-repo. While these all do the conversion, careful testing of the results is necessary. [...]
Over the past few years, distributed version control systems have flourished; there are now so many that is hard to choose between them. Each choice offers an evolution beyond CVS including, among other things, whole-tree views with atomic commits, complete and transparent offline operation, and excellent branching support. Always on the look out for better tools, I have played with [...]
The SunGrid is an on-demand grid computing infrastructure: you pay per CPU-hour as you need it, Sun provides the hardware. I recently got access to the SunGrid as part of a generous grant of CPU hours by Sun to my research lab, CSAIL, and I’m mostly quite pleased with it.
John Powers rightly notes that it is not trivial to [...]
Today, Robert O’Callahan stopped by MIT as part of his US Tour. He works for Novell is one of the “super reviewers” at the Mozilla Foundation. If you use FireFox (like 63% of my visitors this week), you probably run code he’s touched. He also wrote TTSSH, an SSH client that I linked to from my homepage for [...]
