history ¶
I once had a website named treedragon a few years ago (with tremendous google juice). I no longer need the hits, but I want to repost old tech stuff related to this site.
Many parts of this archive will be verbose, untidy, cluttered, and poorly organized, because it wasn't written for cohesive presentation on a single page. In many cases, pages below this one will excerpt fragments of blog postings widely separated in time, but about the same common topic.
told you so ¶
Usually my point in reposting something is to say, "I did in fact write about this once before: here it is."
where data lives ¶
Seven years ago I spent a two weeks in October of 2000 writing on the topic of online storage with elaborate illustrative figures. It was near the end of a several months long vacation after I left Netscape, not long before I returned to work (on a Linux server for content delivery) and I was in the mood to write cynically about online apps and whether you could trust a business with your data. The material is still oddly relevant today. (Some pages are near empty stubs.)
Pages below repost my old blog entries organized according to some common topic theme:
- shellgame (see description last section above)
- refcounting (reference counting tech)
- events (async events or event passing)
Choose one of these demos for sample code and related docs, developed together to motivate þ C++ code for this purpose.
mu: toy, peg, imm, tag, box, symbol, token, number, bigint, class, method, reader, writer, eval, env, vm, gc, world, pcode, compiler, asm, lathe, lisp, smalltalk, design, weight, jar, card, harp, debug, profile
thorn: todo, names, iovec, assert, log, run, hex, crc, buf, in, out, quote, escape, compare, file, deck, cow, arc, blob, tree, slice, rand, time, stat, heap, node, primes, page, book, pile, stack, atomic, lock, mutex, thread, map, meter, list, iter, ctype
The similarity between briarpig and treedragon derives from Jack Vance's award-winning Moon Moth short story (cf summary), featuring a culture in which everyone wore a mask of their own choice. Such masks often had similar sounding names, like Moon Moth, Sand Tiger, and Magic Hornet. The following commentary on Moon Moth presents an appropriate take on the symbolism:
Why do human beings wear masks? Children (and adults) do it for fun, but anthropologists use the term "liminality" to discuss the purpose of mask-wearing. Masks are used when people step outside the limits of ordinary behavior. For example, a person wearing a clown "mask" is allowed to do things that adults are ordinarily not permitted to do. Wearing a mask allows a shaman to become a spirit or a dangerous beast. In the Vance story, a person could change masks if they wished, but they had to have the strakh needed to pull off the new role.
(Except in the Moon Moth story, wearing a mask is normal behavior in a culture that nurtures individuality and self determination for its members. Masks with more prestige are just harder to wear.)
My new briarpig name signifies no great deal of prestige. A seventh little pig living in a briar patch is modest and non-threatening. I see both masks as part of the same cycle.
I might censor my name when it appears in reposts like quoted emails. I don't want random strangers to easily search for my name, and I hope to avoid being mistaken for a public person. (Please avoid my last name when linking these pages from your own; I prefer citation as briarpig.)
