/dev/dump

As a result of work I've been doing for illumos , I've recently gotten re-engaged with internationalization, and the support for this in libc and localedef (I am the original author for our localedef.) I've decided that human languages suck.  Some suck worse than others though, so I thought I'd write up a guide.  You can take this as "your language sucks if...", or perhaps a better view might be "your program sucks if you make assumptions this breaks..." (Full disclosure, I'm spoiled.  I am a native speaker of English.  English is pretty awesome for data-processing, at least at the written level.  I'm not going to concern myself with questions about deeper issues like grammar, natural language recognition, speech synthesis, or recognition, automatic translation, etc.  Instead this is focused strictly on the most basic display and simple operations like collation (sorting), case conversion, and character classification.) 1. Too many cod...

I'm going to say some things here that may be controversial.  Certainly that headline is.  But please, bear with me, and read this before you judge too harshly. As another writer said, 2014 has been a terrible year for women in tech.  (Whether in the industry, or in gaming.)  Arguably, this is not a new  thing, but rather events are reaching a head.  Women (some at any rate) are being more vocal, and awareness of women's issues is up.  On the face of it, this should be a good thing. And yet, we have incredible conflict between women and men.  And this is at the heart of my problem with "Feminism". The F-Word Don't get me wrong.  I strongly believe that women should be treated fairly and with respect; in the professional place they should receive the same level of professional respect -- and compensation! -- as their male counterparts can expect.  I believe this passionately -- as a nerd, I prefer to judge people on the merits ...

Please have a look at Sage Weil's blog post on supporting the Ada Initiative, which supports women in open source development. Sage is sponsoring an $8192 matching grant, to support women in open source development of open storage technology. You may have heard my talk recently, where I expressed that there have been no female contributions to illumos (that includes ZFS by the way!)  This is kind of a tragedy; intelligence and creativity of at least half the population are simply not represented here, and we are worser for it. If you want to try to do something about it, heres a small thing.  There's a week remaining to do so, so I encourage folks to step up.  ($3392 has already been granted.) I'm making a donation myself, if you think supporting more women in open source is a worthwhile cause, please join me!