Insanely Large Machines

Posted on 2013-November-23 in astronomy • Tagged with large telescope, vlt, xkcd

Just saw this xkcd being pointed to by ESO today: xkcd Telescope names.

The Very Large Telescope is a project I was lucky enough to help bring from its infancy to daily operations. In the crowd of engineers who worked on that project, Daniel Enard was considered by most as …


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Config file hell

Posted on 2011-October-12 in programming • Tagged with complexity, config file, file format, xkcd, xml

Complexity

xkcd 963 nailed it once again. How much fun is it to have to open one of the zillion Unix config files on your Debian box and start tweaking until it finally works? The graph could just as well show "Time since I last opened wpa_supplicant.conf", or "/etc/network …


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