borg.org

borg.org, the nobody reads it blog.

  • NO! It’s Not a “glitch”.

    Pet peeve: News people love the word “glitch”, every computer bug is a “glitch”, even in headlines were they are usually looking for short words, and “bug” is a lot shorter than “glitch”. The truth that every bug is a “glitch” is kind of like how cameras are for selfies, everyone knows these things. And […]

  • “Selfies” are Something New

    We are watching a program on Apple TV+ and it has venerable old actors in it who would know better, but there are flashback sequences, with young actors, shot by the B unit. So far they take place in Europe, in the ’70s, I’d say. Young American couple traveling, he has a Nikon 35mm camera, […]

  • Thoughts on Blowing up a Pager

    The news today was that thousands of pagers in southern Lebanon exploded. Presumably Israel targeting Hezbollah. Effects and Purpose Not sure what to make of it. Sounds like mostly not lethal injuries, but it does disrupt things, it pains individuals, it marks locations, it litters their ranks with injuries that will mark them forever, disrupts […]

  • Firewalls are a Bad Idea, Always Have Been

    I have always argued that using firewalls to protect computer networks is a mistake. The argument for firewalls is they are an extra layer of protection. My counter argument is firewalls end up being the only protection. Computers started out insecure—the fact they worked at all was frankly a miracle, how much do you want? […]

  • Two Wristwatches

    I realized that there is a very specific group of people out there (Hello!) who wear two wristwatches. The Venn diagram makes it a pretty exclusive group.

  • Running on a New Server

    After many years (and a lot of dormant time) I moved my blog over to a new (and much cheaper) server. I was a little sad to delete the old VM. Some good news: Comments finally work again.

  • Should Hunter Biden Go to Jail?

    Children of presidents should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us.

  • Async Rust: Why is it so Fast?

    Everyone knows that a web server, for example, will be able to serve up a lot more traffic if it is written using Rust async code rather than straight OS threads. Lots of people have the numbers to prove it. But I have wondered why, and none of the explanations I have read have explained […]

  • Using emacs as a Rust IDE

    Turns out I don’t like Helix very much. The problem? My fingers know emacs. I hate emacs, but it is what my fingers know. So I decided to figure out how to get emacs to be a Rust IDE. This was made a little tricky because I had attempted to do so a few years […]

  • Helix, Terminal-based Rust IDE

    I was skimming through the latest 2023 Rust Survey, and I noticed the 5th most popular “editor or IDE setup” is Helix. (Just ahead of emacs, even!) What the heck is Helix? Helix seems to be: Rust IDE, seems to do other languages, too, but I’m interested in Rust. Heavily inspired by vim, Written in […]