Feb
19
2011
I recently transferred a few thousand files, totalling gigabytes, from one computer to another over a slowish internet connection. At the end of the transfer, I realized the process I used had lost all the original file timestamps. Rather, all the files on the destination machine had a create/modify date of when the transfer occurred. […]
Tags: sysadmin, windows
Aug
23
2010
I adopted Git as my primary source control tool a couple of years ago, when I was using Windows as my primary (90%) desktop OS. Since then I’ve switched to 75% Mac OSX, but I still use Git on Windows for a few projects, and I get a lot of questions about Git on Windows. […]
Tags: git, source-control, windows
Nov
30
2009
I just read James Hamilton’s comments on “Microslice” servers, which are very low-power, but high CPU-to-wattage ratio servers. As he explains in detail, at scale the economics of this design are compelling. In some ways, of course, this is the opposite of another big trend going on, which is consolidation through virtualization. I reconcile these […]
Tags: commentary, concurrency, linux, sysadmin, windows
Nov
15
2009
Not really, it just seemed like the sort of over-the-top thing a rabid Mac fan might say. But I did replace my main Windows PC with a MacBook Pro. I’ve used Apple products occasionally over the decades, going all the way back to the Apple II, IIe, IIgs, and orignal 1984 Macintosh. I’m not “switching”, but rather adding; our […]
Tags: commentary, hardware, osx, sysadmin, windows
May
26
2007
The Java software development kit documentation can be downloaded from java.sun.com, in the form of a ZIP file with tens of thousands of linked HTML file. This seems like an ideal canonical form for this documentation, but it is inconvenient to use, and inconvenient to have so many files sitting around. If your development machine […]
Tags: java, windows
Sep
17
2006
A few hours ago I started with a fresh Windows XP Home install for a computer for my family. I’m still going. I have lost count of how many times I have had to reboot the machine then get a new round of updates to install. It is ludicrous. Modern Linux distributions are far superior […]
Tags: linux, windows