I have possibly two weeks worth of Lazy Reading built up here, so sit down and get with the clicking:
- The Internet with a Human Face. Maciej Ceglowski’s recent talk. This is the you-should-read-it link of the week. (via)
- I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome. Bunnie Huang finds the best place in the world to smash your cell phone.
- The Art of UNIX Programming. Prompted by this.
- Alert Design. The design of network monitor warnings, not designing alertly. (via)
- UNIX History Repository. On GitHub. So much is on GitHub these days… (via)
- A Trip Down UNIX Memory Lane. A lot of UNIX links this week; I don’t know why.
- “Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms?” Funny but sorta realistic.
- Presenting Data and Information, taught by Edward Tufte. Might be both interesting and local to some reader. (via)
- Python 3 is killing Python. This sort of thing has happened before, called “Perl 6”. (via)
- The Design of SQLite 4. The more I use SQLite, the more I like it. (via)
- Relics of Technology. How many of these things have you actually used? (via)
- tetris-bsd: the most basic version of tetris I’ve ever seen. (via saved Google search)
- That previous link led me to taipan, which is a game I loved on my Apple ][. Wait, I can still play it now?
- Apple phone and tablet models from the 80s. I remember shaping and painting models out of that sort of foam, years ago, before CAD ate it all.
- Notepad: more dangerous than you thought.
- Not necessarily the wrong way to look at tech blogs.
- 2000 or so Unicode characters. What common fonts actually implement everything in Unicode? Cause that would be a heck of a lot of designs. (via a Kickstarter newsletter)
- Beyond the stack. This way of setting up systems has taken over computing firms that are producing software for the Internet… but I don’t think people realize that isn’t all companies.
- The current Humble Book Bundle includes some Top Shelf comics publications, including semi-fictional-early-hacking-history Wizzywig which I’ve mentioned before, and the colossal not-related-to-computers work From Hell. Hopefully will still be up when you read this…
- If I can run an arbitrary program, I can do arbitrary things.
- Sun stories. Remember, it used to be BSD, back when Sun did was growing. One thing everyone seems to agree on: the workstations were great. (via)
- What’s going on with TrueCrypt. Since DragonFly has a truecrypt-compatible implementation, I’d certainly like to see it continue. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: The End of Garfield. I don’t know if this is the original source for the image.
I see Andy daily, he’s at Arista Networks these days.
That Unix History Repository might be pretty neat. I wasn’t sure how reliable it would be, but it seems that a few notable Unix and BSD folks have contributed some info to it.
> This sort of thing has happened before, called “Perl 6?.
Except perl5 is still being developed. 5.20 was released last week.There are still cool things happening on the perl5 front: p5-mop for instance. Or modern web frameworks like Mojolicious. Most newly released perl code is still for perl5. Why? Because of the existing codebase and because perl6 is still not ready. We don’t have a 6.0 release yet. Actually the Python 2 vs. 3 problem is much much worse as python 2 is no longer maintained.
Python 2 vs Python 3 is different for a different reason. Although the code is incompatible, it’s the same project. Perl 6 is basically a fork of Perl 5 with a different direction, like DragonFlyBSD was to FreeBSD. Perl 6 might not be ready for production ( they’re devs would disagree ), but it’s not the next release of Perl as the name would seemingly imply, it’s more of what they felt was the logical continuation of perl. That said, I don’t know what’s going to happen to Perl 5 when they want to bump a major release at some point. Both parties pretty much disown each other. If you took all the perl 5 and 6 users together, it would still only be a fraction of the users of python. I don’t know why perl has lost favor over the years, but it has sadly.
Perl6 is *not* a fork of perl5, it’s a new language designed from the ground up with at least one working implementation rewritten from scratch. Perl 5 will still be maintained as a language, either in its current form or inside perl6 as a slang or otherwise (eg. by embedding the perl5 interpreter into moarvm). In the latter case it’s likely that we will lose support for XS based code on CPAN.
I’m hoping PyPy will become the next Python2 (it also supports Python3). The main missing thing at the moment is C extensions.