Category: Lazy Reading

Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!

• Don’t panic and keep forking Debian.  It leads to devuan.org.  For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not.  (via)
• Advent Planet.  Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
• On file formats, very briefly.  I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read.  (via)
• Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via)  6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
• Bumper Sticker Computer Science.  More “epigrams”.  Some dated, some excellent.  (PDF, via)
• ParkyTowers thin clients.  Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
• The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game.  See Softalk link below too.  (via)
• Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
• Grand St.  short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
• A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide.  (PDF, via)  Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
• The strange world of computer-generated novels.  (via)
• Why my book can be downloaded for free.
• Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI.  (via)
• The Softalk Apple Project.
• Unix: tricks with history.
• Clip Art is dead. Awww.
• RowHammer.  Ugh.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.

Short this week because of the amount of time I was at work, but what I have is good.

• System/360, older computing pictures.  (via)
• Everyone wants a ports system.  EVERYONE.
• Salto, the Xerox Alto emulator.  For those who saw the Alto code release last week.  (via)
• Hidden Histories of the Information Age.  (scroll all through for links)
• Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic.  Fun if you are the right kind of nerd.  (via)
• Why You Should Never Use MongoDB.  Not a diatribe against MongoDB as you might expect, but an excellent, extended talk about data structure.  (also via)
• I thought I had linked this already: Internet Arcade; many old games re-implemented in Javascript.
• Beginning to Observe Network Management Practices as a Third Party. (via)

Lots of light topic links this week.

• A 50 Year-old Teletype Powered by a Raspberry Pi.  (via)
• Found via the same link: teletype restoration.
• Also found: the rotary VoIP phone.  I’ve made rotaries work again via ATA, but only for inbound.  This, I would love to do.
• How SimCity came to Unix.  It’s available now as Micropolis.
• Which reminds me: Magnasanti, the biggest SimCity 3000 city ever.  (video)
• The Xerox Alto source code has been released.  There’s a nice history at that page.  (via)
• Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
• The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
• Computing is women’s work, in 1967.
• An interview with Tom Limoncelli.  (About LISA)
• Why Hypercard had to die.  I taught a Hypercard class to older students during college; it was surprisingly easy to get people with no computer experience to build things.  I miss the old “computer as tool” approach Apple had back then.
• Shall we fork Debian?  (via)
• Hints for writing Unix tools.  (via)
• Vimswitch.
• curl | sh.  (via)
• PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (via several places)
• An excellent description of the social ‘littlenets‘ concept.  (via)
• Web frameworks from Wal-Mart.  Not a sentence I thought I’d type.

Your unrelated animation of the week: Karateka.  I remember discovering this, and laughing and laughing…

Writing this now, and hoping I’ll get the server apart and back together fast enough nobody notices.

• BlackBerry: The Endgame.  Points out that QNX is/was a problem for the ecosystem.
• Breaking Madden: Edge of Tom-morrow.  I love these despite being indifferent to football.
• Measure your open source community’s age to keep it healthy.
• The Bot of Mormon.
• Trouble at the Koolaid point.  Rethink the “ignore it and move on” response.  (via)
• How tilde.club came together. There’s a potential tilde.club on every BSD machine.
• Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js.  That’s pretty much what I always envisioned the future to look like.  (Youtube, via I forget)
• Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals.  (via)
• The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution.  (via)
• slfsrv, a GUI wrapper for command line programs.  (via)
• NTK, the archive.
• The Shen of Programming.  (via, via)
• TinyScreen, another Kickstarter project, with hardware so small it’s adorable.  (via)
• My Philosophy on Alerting.  (via)  Linking for myself at some point.

Whee!

A talking car dashboard from the 1980s.

Argos Catalogs.  Count how many of the pictured items have been absorbed by cell phones.  (via)

Features are Faults.

King of click.  More Model M stories.

I spent a good chunk of this weekend at work for various reasons, so it’s a slightly less long list.  On the plus side, I know a bit more about setting up fiber links now.

• On the Design of Editors for Small Computers.  Pre-vi, pre-emacs.  (via)
• Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems.  Video.  (via)
• Writing a Simple Operating System – From Scratch.  PDF.  (via)
• tilde.club, an effort to resurrect the ~/username web page.  Wish I had got in. (via many places)
• The “Mark I“, (one of) the first programmable computers, designed in 1937.
• Cool-retro-term, another analog terminal simulator.  (via)
• A progress update on the Novena computer, with significant manufacturing detail.
• An interesting paper on Alan Turing. (PDF)
• disk seeks are slow don’t do them.  SQLite internals.  (via)
• BadUSB, which naturally leads to USB Condom.

Your unrelated image of the week:

I’m getting a new pet tomorrow.

Lots of links this week.

• Device names.  (via)
• xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
• One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
• This hard drive still worked.  (via)
• Unix: Scripting with templates.
• Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Intel Edison.  Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale.  (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
• Bézier Method.  (via)
• wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
• How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft.  (via)
• Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile.  (via)
• HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want.  (via)
• Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC.  BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
• Booting directly into Vim.  (via)
• Memory Management Reference.  (via)
• ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s.  (via SIGCIS)
• The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
• XScreenSaver on YouTube.
• World’s longest traceroutes.

 

I hope you like your links eclectic!

• A Tale of Postmortems.  As a work strategy, this strategy can restore trust that would otherwise be lost when people outside IT/Engineering experience problems.  (via)
• Unix: Viewing your processes through the eyes of /proc.
• “Writing Aliens”, or, “Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt”  Data patterns as seen by a science fiction author, and how it comes out in history and twitter.  Really, a good presentation just for the range it covers.  More bits on the author’s blog.  (via)
• A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it.  I was just thinking the other day about how much I hated PS/2 connectors, especially because I encountered a KVM switch in a rack that didn’t do USB.  (via)
• How Flash changes the design of database storage engines.  It’s funny that when people say “Flash” nowadays, they mean the disk product, not the software.
• Tweetable Mathematical Art.  (via)
• RGB LEDs that change color if a Server has a problem/is not responding.  (via)
• Not Rocket Science.  An astonishingly good idea.  (also via)
• Years later, this image still gives me a mild jolt of panic.
• Halfassed implementations of SSH are no fun.
• Thursday, IRL.  I just like the expression he makes.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: John Pound, one of the original Garbage Pail Kids artists, nowadays creates his art by coding it – mostly by writing out Postscript.  He doesn’t draw sketchbooks – he generates them.  (via)

For once, a shorter week.

• One of the better telemarketer things I’ve ever read… and I realized what he was trying halfway through, cause I maintain the same models.  (via)
• Password Gropers Take the Spamtrap Bait.  Peter Hansteen is the same person who found the Hail Mary Cloud.
• Pseudo Automata, Fakes & Robot costumes.  (via a Kickstarter email)
• Input, a non-monospaced coding font, with a preview.  (via)
• Unix: Gaining network insights with tcpdump.
• Are you near Shenzen?  This hacker camp may interest you.
• UNIX Wildcards Gone Wild.  (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Continuous Integration and Delivery Illustrated.  Sometimes drawn versions are better than any text.  (via)
• Ten Years of OpenStreetMap.  OSM is one of those things that I’m happy it just exists.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wrenchies.  I like Farel Dalrymple’s style.

Bonus unrelated: New Cyriak video!

This week’s Lazy Reading started as overflow from last week.

• Cron checker.  Cron commands to English.  (via)
• Unboxing the Magnus supercomputer.  Aw, Crays don’t look as cool as they used to.  (via)
• OpenVMS gets a new lease on life.  (via)  Also, there are public OpenVMS installations like deathrow (via) and pub1 (via).
• Unix: Controlling privileged access.
• Unix: Top networking commands and what they tell you.
• runit instead of systemd, on Void Linux.  A ray of hope.  (via)
• The future of iced coffee.  Why can’t someone put the same treatment into tea?  (via)
• What ORMS have taught me: just learn SQL.  (via)
• Docker security with SELinux.  Containerization, which is all the rage these days, does not enforce the same security wall as with a virtual machine – containers can ‘leak’ to their parent operating system.  I’m not sure enough people realize this.  (via)
• A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font.  Check the screenshot of it being used on a 320×200 screen.  (via)
• lowRISC.  Open source System on a Chip.
• The Worst API Ever Made.  I can’t judge if that’s really so, but it’s always fun to watch trainwrecks.  (via)
• My history with Forth & stack machines.  Forth is a crazy language, in a good way.  (via)
• Lawless Legends, an Apple][ FRPG – in development.  (via)
• A Mac IIci

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Quantum & Pixel.  Another Boulet comic, this time exploring 2D physics.

There’s a lot to read this week… I’m not sure how that happened.

• Schwa, two decades later.  I had this, then.
• Famous Women of Computer Science.  At least some of the names should be familiar to you.  (via)
• Anil Dash on the shifting meaning of “public”.  An outgrowth of the jerktech problem.(via)
• The History of Autocorrect.  (via a newsletter)
• -2000 lines of code.  An early Macintosh story.  (via)
• Bill Atkinson’s name in the previous link made me think of Burger Bill (Rebecca, now) Heineman, which led to this: Mentions of Wolf3D for the Apple ][gs.  It’s findable, even.
• And that Sheppyware link reminds me of Sweet16, a really nice ][gs emulator for the Mac.  Excuse me as I wander down the halls of memory…
• Cool-old-term.  Requires qt5 and I don’t know if it works on BSD…  but it’s neat looking.  (via)
• Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim.  There’s some more good resources in the source for this link.
• At the same site: SSH Hacks.
• hicat, cat with syntax highlighting.  (via)
• I’ve mentioned ISO 3103 before, or at least I thought I did, but there are apparently 25 more tea-related standards.
• That led me to find George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams all had Opinions on Tea.  I must have linked to one of them before, but I can’t find it.  Douglas Adams is correct, though: most people in the U.S. have never had a decent cup of tea.  (via)
• Origins of common UI symbols.  (via)
• Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve.  This interests me because it’s in the town where I live, but there’s something else.  The vast, vast quantities of film out there was filmed in the last 100 years or so.  Most of that film is still readable, though the older nitrate films are fragile.  If all that video was digital, how would we access it?  I don’t have a single digital storage item in my house older than 10 years, except maybe a Zip disk or two, and there’s no way I can read them.  (via)
• How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors.  I expected the article to quote itself in the middle or something similar; Internet jokes are warping my expectations.  (via)
• Software, it’s a thing.  Talking about how software exists when it is used, not just as a saved file but rather as a multitude of activities – and how that relates to preserving that history.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mmmm…  diagrams.  That describes me.  The subject and artist, Scott McCloud, has a book called Understanding Comics that is an excellent discussion of perception and communication.  His exploration of visual “closure” is good for anyone who has to think about interfaces.

I was low on time but I still brought the links!

• This is why software sucks.  Many people get tech news by skimming headlines, and don’t read details – so prominently writing an opinionated title is more effective sometimes than, say, reasoned argument.
• “selective disclosure” is a better term.  (same author)
• The EFF’s Open Wireless Router project.  Can they get a 48-port one built?
• UNIX: knowing your memory commands.
• The Open Source Identity Crisis.  I agree with the article – some people still think open source developers are the coders, and then there’s everyone else… which is emphatically not the case any more.  (via)
• Used/refurbished server sellers.  This is going to be useful to someone.
• Programming with Punched Cards.  (PDF, via)
• Escher: Choiceless programming.  Weird.  (via)
• Apparently I’ll link to anything about Dwarf Fortress; it’s a culturally distinct thing – so much so that it’s being used as an art exhibit.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Summer cakes.  The second recipe is from Nicola Humble.  I just read her surprisingly interesting history of the cookbook in the UK, hence the link.  Plus, I’m hungry.