Author Archives: Stephan Sokolow

Book Review: Venus Equilateral

Note: Venus Equilateral is more correctly a series of novelettes which may be bound in one or more volumes. The edition which I’m reading and reviewing is the second printing of The Complete Venus Equilateral with introduction by Arthur C. … Continue reading

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Topic Glimpse: Distributed Issue Tracking

One topic that’s been getting explored off and on for the last half-decade is distributed issue tracking. The idea is that, with distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial, maybe it’d be a good idea to also store your … Continue reading

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Chrome vs. Firefox: August 2011

With Firefox making various controversial decisions lately, like wanting to remove the version number from the About dialog and following Chrome in removing http:// from the address bar without any reasonable justification I’m aware of, now feels like a good … Continue reading

Posted in Geek Stuff | 4 Comments

Open Source: The Scientific Community in Technology

tl;dr Free/open-source software is to producing software as science is to accumulating knowledge… science just had a “different upbringing” and more time to build up formal structures. Note: This was originally written in October of 2010 as an essay for … Continue reading

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“Tangled” and Disney’s Big Weakness

Since rediscovering and posting my little essay on the problem with having a big bad, I’ve been thinking on how this relates to the problems in Disney “cheapquels” and their more modern animated works like The Princess and the Frog … Continue reading

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Why Disney Cartoons Grow Up With You And Looney Tunes Don’t

Note: I originally wrote this in April of 2009, but I forgot about it until recently when I started tidying up my notes on how to write better fiction. Many of the most iconic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons were … Continue reading

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Why A Big Bad Is A Bad Idea

Note: I originally wrote this at the beginning of December of 2008, but I forgot about it until recently when I started tidying up my notes on how to write better fiction. Update 2011-08-14: I now also have a more … Continue reading

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