Subscribe via Email·RSS
103 posts

Ben Berry

Gains in Computer Hardware

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical lapt … (Continued)

Attention Spans and Perfection

Excerpts from an interview with Tom West and Tracy Kidder, three years after the publication of The Soul of a New Machine: West: If somebody walks into your office after five minutes of staring at a sheet of paper and asks: "Should we make this register sixteen bits wide or thirty-two bits wide?" you know the answer to this question if you have been through it over and over and over again. So you can tell him the answer, and he goes back and puts it in. The he sits around for another five m … (Continued)

Christmas 2019

We spent the day painting a closet and building the laundry room cabinet. Cooking our modest feast took a few hours. It's our first big meal in the new house. This may look ordinary, but it's a milestone for us. The roast beef in particular was my first experiment cooking something low and slow in the new oven. It turned out well. The last month and a half has been a blur of packing, unpacking, painting, building, organizing. Cooking and enjoying this was a nice break from that. The first of ma … (Continued)

Trust and Risk

"Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business." Tom West quoted in The Soul of a New Machine (p.131), by Tracy Kidder. The business always wants to avoid risk. The hidden downside to this is that low-risk businesses also tend to be very un-trusting. This is dissatisfying to people who value autonomy. If you insist on low-risk, eventually they remove themselves from your labor pool.

Toward Federated Microblogging

Microblogging is a term coined, I believe, in the Tumblr days, before Twitter as we know it, but it basically refers to what we now think of as Twitter. Short messages, a few sentences at most, and maybe a few photos. For my purposes, it's just a way to share with friends and family a few photos as a way of saying "Here's a thing we did recently." without needing to write an entire blog post about it. This blog that you're reading right now is running Ghost, a lightweight, simple piece … (Continued)

Recent Adventures in Plumbing

Don't ever neglect an opportunity to learn something, even if it doesn't seem all that relevant right now. Two or three months ago, the metal rod that lifted the stopper in our master bedroom sink rusted away so the drain was permanently closed. So we fished out the stopper and set it aside, but that left a big hole in the sink, perfect for dropping things into. So, figuring it couldn't be that hard, I watched some YouTube videos, got the parts from Lowe's, and set to replacing the drain and st … (Continued)

SteerMouse and the Logitech G604

Steph and I are in the middle of the process of moving (big moving day is the day after tomorrow) and so it's been a long week of work, eat takeout, pack until bedtime. People talk about how you have more stuff than you think in your house when you go to pack, and for better or worse I will say that we have about as much stuff as I thought we would have, it just takes a long time to pack  it all. But one bright spot this week has been SteerMouse adding support for the Logitech … (Continued)

USPSA and Friendship Distance

At dinner last night, the topic came up again about how I've gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of shooting USPSA, but that I've never really made friends (in the "hang out and drink beer together"/"help you move"/"bail you out of jail" way) through USPSA. I've met lots of interesting USPSA people and had good internet conversations, but that only goes so far. All of the shooting friends that I've made were made shooting either IDPA or Parrish's Action Pistol matches. … (Continued)

Reputation and Resilience

If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place. Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy It's so tempting to think that your reputation is fragile. You feel like you spent years building it up, and then someone posts something negative about you. More people pile on. People you've never heard of before, who just enjoy the bandwagon of hate. People so empty that they have to keep busy pointing out the flaws of others to avoid facing their own. Meanwhile, … (Continued)

Improving Reading

I wouldn't call myself a voracious reader, but I try to spend 30 minutes each day doing serious, dedicated reading. Not reading to pass the time while I wait for my food at a restaurant or scrolling through my RSS reader after dinner. Sitting in a comfortable chair, with my phone out of reach, a book in my hand, a notebook within reach, with nothing else to do, for half an houror more. I am also in a never-ending experiment with different ways to take notes on books in a way that gives me the b … (Continued)

Fixing the Door

Tonight's project was a lesson in the problem not being what you thought it was. A few months ago, the front door started "catching" when we went to close the deadbolt. You had to pull the door tight to get the deadbolt to close smoothly. I thought it might just be the house settling or the door frame shifting, but Steph pointed out the house is almost 20 years old. It shouldn't be settling that much anymore. Regardless, I set out the other night to pull the deadbolt apart and see what I could … (Continued)

Areas of Influence

The smaller area you try to improve, the more effect and influence you can have. You are a tiny sliver of your country, but you are a tenth of your team at work, a quarter of your family, and one half of your marriage. You are also, of course, 100% of your own self.

On Moderation

As you move about on the internet, on each page, ask yourself "Who moderates this?" If it's someone's Twitter feed, that person doesn't just moderate it, they directly control it. Every tweet is either written by them or retweeted by them. But if you click one of their tweets and Twitter shows you the responses, who moderates those? Nobody. Literally. Even the person who originally posted the tweet, unless they block the person that replied, has no control of the content shown just below to … (Continued)

(Most) Everyone Is A Loser

Competitive shooting is an interesting sport because on any given weekend, 60-100 people show up, divided among 6-8 gear divisions. So, out of those 100, 5 or 6 might win their division. Roughly 95% of the people who show up will not win. And yet they show up anyway. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to only show up to matches you have a good shot at winning. But that's not what people do. I regularly win local matches that I show up to, but I'm planning my year … (Continued)

Seth Godin on Placebos

This is an interesting short piece from Seth about placebos: Ignoring the placebo effect won’t make it go away. Embracing it will help you do much better work, work that quite possibly is based on those skills and practices you’ve worked so hard to be good at. If it’s worth doing your work, it’s worth doing it in a way where placebos will help you do it better. Reading this, I realized that I tend look at the placebo effect at work the way a scientist might look at it in an experiment: trying … (Continued)