This is the wilsome, whilom, and erstwhile journal of Rhetorica. I am a programmer, with an educational background in bioinformatics and sequence analysis. My hobbies include constructed languages, world-building, history of religion, science fiction, graphic design, and historical computing.
Samantics
Municipal utilities in the United States have famously bad information security. It seems that nobody has ever seriously put in the effort to secure these things, despite protracted effort from security researchers to raise awareness of the issue.
Presumably, you think this means utilities companies are absurdly lazy.
Ignore that thought. […]
Presumably, you think this means utilities companies are absurdly lazy.
Ignore that thought. […]
From some very ancient Mozilla build instructions (underlining added for emphasis):
As preposterous as this sounds, the actual intention of the instructions above is to skip the Perl code entirely. Perl is not being used as some sort of preprocessing layer to feed into another language, as one might first assume.
There are around two dozen Perl scripts in the build tree, and they provide niceties like preventing build artifacts from getting recompiled unnecessarily, calculating and embedding an expiry date (timebomb) for the build, and generating build tags that include the NFS hostname. Obviously, these are not really essential functions if you are just trying to get a working browser at home.
2.2 Requirements
The following need to be installed:
- Motif 1.2 (2.1 recommended for RedHat Linux)
- GNU C/C++ compiler 2.7.2
- GNU make 3.74 or better
- Perl (or, if you have no Perl, then set PERL=/bin/echo)
Your hardware should be equal to, or better than: 32 MB RAM, 128 MB swap (64 MB RAM recommended)
The following need to be installed:
- Motif 1.2 (2.1 recommended for RedHat Linux)
- GNU C/C++ compiler 2.7.2
- GNU make 3.74 or better
- Perl (or, if you have no Perl, then set PERL=/bin/echo)
Your hardware should be equal to, or better than: 32 MB RAM, 128 MB swap (64 MB RAM recommended)
As preposterous as this sounds, the actual intention of the instructions above is to skip the Perl code entirely. Perl is not being used as some sort of preprocessing layer to feed into another language, as one might first assume.
There are around two dozen Perl scripts in the build tree, and they provide niceties like preventing build artifacts from getting recompiled unnecessarily, calculating and embedding an expiry date (timebomb) for the build, and generating build tags that include the NFS hostname. Obviously, these are not really essential functions if you are just trying to get a working browser at home.
Building on my previous musings about what I called the fittedness of computing environments, I'd like to introduce another, closely-related concept that emphasises just one aspect of the aesthetics of fittedness. For want of a better term, I'm calling it UI charisma or charm. The gist of it: a UI is charming if it feels like all the parts fit with each other. […]