John P. Willis
Opinions presented here are held in all of my roles and capacities, both personal and professional.
Summary
| Politics: |
Leftist (AnCom)
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| Religion: |
Militantly Atheist |
| Occupation: |
Software Engineer |
| Preferences: |
View |
Social Networking
Diaspora*
Mastodon
Twitter
Organizations
The GNU Project
The Free Software Foundation
American Civil Liberties Union
Computers & Programming
Programming Languages I Know
Greatest Common Divisor in 19 Languages
Microcomputer OS History
UNIX Tricks
The Datashed (personal datacenter)
Computer Collection
ChivaNet Internet Services
The VAX Pirate's Lair (my old website, ca. 2002)
YOUNGMUMPSTER (my tech blog)
GitLab
GitHub
GCC OS Test Macros
Genealogy
Genealogy Home
English Notable Kin
Scottish Notable Kin
Hobbies
Music
Telephones & PBX
Other Sites
Polls
Geek Code
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/E/G/H/IT/L/MU/P/SS d-- s+: a+ C++++ UBLAVHS++++$ P+ L++ E++ W+++$ N+ o?
K- w++ O+++ M V+++>$ PS+++ PE-- Y+ !PGP t+++ !5 !X R tv b+++ DI++ D--- G e
h---- r+++ x++++
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Site Info
This site is hosted on a Sun SPARCserver 20
running Apache 2.2, Perl 5,
and a home-built CMS.
RSS feed generation is done with a BASH script I have implemented, called Syndicator.
This site contains no JavaScript, no CSS, and should render in any HTML 2.0-compliant browser.
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Likes and Dislikes
These are things that I like and dislike, and a summary of why.
Likes
| Subject |
Reason |
| Family |
My wife and children are amazing! They make me extremely happy. |
| Friends |
Good friends are priceless and I love them. |
| Sun Solaris |
Great OS. Real UNIX. Robust, feature-rich, and all-around wonderful. |
| SPARC |
SPARC hardware rules. Works wonderfully well with Solaris. |
Other real UNIX |
Research UNIX, SGI IRIX, SCO UNIX, DEC Ultrix, DEC Tru64, HP-UX, etc. |
| OpenVMS |
One of the greatest and most robust enterprise operating systems of all-time. Also encompasses VAX and Alpha hardware. |
| OS/360, MVS, z/OS |
Another fantastic enterprise OS, with great hardware to boot. |
| International Business Machines |
A great tech company, great on diversity, great products, total win. |
| Sun Microsystems |
Best UNIX company ever. |
| Digital Equipment Corporation |
Greatest hardware company ever, after IBM. |
| Silicon Graphics Inc. |
Another great UNIX vendor. |
| VM, VM/ESA, z/VM |
The "other" great mainframe OS from Big Blue. |
| IBM OS/2 |
One of the two greatest desktop operating systems ever made, thanks to the WorkPlace Shell. |
| AmigaOS |
The other greatest desktop OS ever made. |
| Commodore Amiga |
Greatest end-user desktop computing hardware ever made. |
| ColdFusion |
Best web language and application server ever made. |
| Mac OS (Classic) |
A charming and wonderful little UI. |
| Mac OS X (10.5 and earlier; especially 10.2) |
Lickable UI. Need I say more? |
| MUMPS |
Favorite programming language. |
| BASIC |
Another favorite programming language. Nowadays, especially FreeBASIC. |
| Relational Databases |
Such a useful and wonderful tool. |
| Pianos |
Especially Bosendorfer, Yamaha, and Mason & Hamlin. |
| Korg |
Best electronic keyboards ever. Roland sucks. |
| Constitutional Monarchy |
The government structure of the UK is cool. |
| POWER/PowerPC |
Great RISC architecture. |
| MIPS |
More great RISC. |
| Final Fantasy X/X-2 |
Favorite JRPGs |
| Mario |
Favorite video game franchise |
| Zelda |
Another favorite video game franchise |
| Sonic the Hedgehog |
Greatness from SEGA. |
| SEGA |
Second-best gaming company ever. |
| The 1990s |
Best decade ever. |
| SimCity |
Best simulation games ever. Especially SimCity 2000/3000. |
| PA-RISC |
PA-RISC is another great CPU architecture. |
| Mexican Culture |
No words can describe it. |
| Nintendo |
The best gaming company ever. |
| World of Warcraft |
Best MMORPG ever made, with an expansive and immersive world. |
| Star Trek |
Best science fiction franchise ever made. |
| Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit |
Best fantasy ever. |
| Anime |
So fun and cute and interesting. |
| Subsistence Farming/Permaculture |
I dream of having my own homestead... |
| Cats |
Best pets ever. |
Dislikes
| Subject |
Reason |
Viable Alternatives |
| Donald Trump |
Racist, ignorant, xenophobic, chauvinistic, authoritarian pig. |
No clue. But a trained monkey would be a significant improvement. |
| Division of Labor |
We need to get closer to our food, dammit! And we need to be more self-reliant. |
Self-Reliance |
| Flat UI |
I miss the fluid and charming interfaces of old. |
Skeumorphism |
| Oracle Corp. |
They destroyed one of my favorite tech companies of all time, Sun Microsystems. |
Larry Ellison, tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. |
| Spammers and Scammers |
These people are sub-human and should be driven into the sea. |
N/A |
systemd |
Too big, too many moving parts, touches too many components, contrary to the UNIX Philosophy, binary log files, unneeded abstraction. Also, the author is unpleasantly arrogant. |
sysvinit, upstart, BSD-style init |
| PulseAudio |
Too big, too unreliable, not enough functionality exposed in upper-layer UIs. Also, anything by Poettering is an abomination, almost by definition. |
ALSA, OSS, JACK |
| NetworkManager |
Unneeded abstraction that eschews the principle of least surprise. |
/etc/ifconfig.interface, /etc/network/interfaces |
| Windows 10 |
Forced updates, spyware, advertising, attempt to move operating systems to SaaS model |
Almost any other OS |
| Google |
1990s-Microsoft-style arrogance about web standards, discontinuation of useful products without offering replacements with feature parity, bad UI design, YouTube censorship through demonitization, "cloud" agenda, DNS-over-HTTPS, contributing to Internet centralization, obsequiousness to advertisers, API instablity, lack of respect for privacy. |
Other than Apple for smartphones (and Apple has issues too), Google has little real competition. |
| Facebook |
Contributing to Internet centralization. Privacy, privacy, privacy. |
Diaspora |
| Twitter |
Contributing to Internet centralization. Wonky feed algorithm. No editing of posts. |
Mastodon |
| Node.js |
Too much library churn, too many similar packages, makes front-end developers think they can do back-end, catalyst for Docker and Kubernetes adoption and most other vile tech trends. |
Servers: Apache, nginx, lighttpd, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft PWS
Languages: Perl+CGI/FastCGI, Python, Go, ASP+VBScript, C#, PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby, bash+CGI, tcsh+CGI, INTERCAL+CGI... |
| The Cloud |
"Web Scale" is not a thing unless you're Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc., and placing all Internet eggs in the Azure/AWS baskets is incredibly stupid. Following the Google/Facebook model is stupid because the model itself is wrong. They're too big, and control too much. |
On-Premises Hosting. Even an eMachines box in your bedroom running Windows 98 and the Microsoft Personal Web Server is better. |
| DevOps |
Most developers should not go anywhere near systems administration. Systems, storage, network, and development should be re-siloed as they were prior to the Internet becoming stupid. |
Traditional organizational silos |
| Agile Methodology |
Just more garbage to make project managers feel needed. 99.9% of PMs are bad and should be deleted. Vomit-inducing pep talks about deadlines, stand-up meetings, and backlog pruning are unneeded. |
N/A |
| Internet Centralization |
See entry for "The Cloud" |
Internet Decentralization |
| Telecom Carriers |
The Internet should be considered a public utility. If carriers want to eliminate settlement-free peering, they should be made legally responsible for all illegal activity traversing their networks. |
Telecom Cooperatives |
| Starbucks |
Overpriced subpar coffee for pretentious hipsters. |
Milagro Coffee y Espresso, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, your own coffee pot and some Folgers |
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