Category: Lazy Reading

I bring the audio and the visual today.

• The History of Mana.  (via)
• Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from.  (via)
• Futuristic User Interface 16.  (video)
• Floppy table.  The storage space is clever.
• As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software.  This time, it’s Rust.  (via)
• Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!”  It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere.  (via)
• Best of Vim Tips.  (via)  Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
• vimawesome.com.  Pretty!  (via)
• The Internet of Newsletters.  A reaction (and a good one) to social media.  (via)
• Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
• “I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
• Awww, it’s cute.
• Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars.  And a counter-argument.  (both via)
• Modern tech in 1977 Atari style.  (via)  Did I link this before?  I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
• Sorta related: Betamaxx.  (via)
• “Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
• Lisp implementation in sed.  (via)
• Unix: having fun with diff.
• Visualizing Algorithms.  Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap.  (via)

You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis.  I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.

Again, a backlog from last week means this week is fat.

• Non-classical processor behavior: How doing something can be faster than not doing it.  Confusing but interesting.
• Rudd Canaday’s blog.  One of the people behind UNIX, though not as well known.  His stories have some very interesting glimpses into early computing.  (via)
• Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine.  Lisp machines get talked about as if they were the last remnants of a superior, extinct precursor race.  Maybe they are?  I’ve never touched one.  (via)
• Mapping the decentralization movement.  I can get behind this idea.  (via)
• KnightOS, an operating system for z80 calculators.  (via)
• The SSD Endurance Experiment.  (via)
• The first Photoshopped image.  (via)
• Does your capacitive load purr?
• The very worst subject lines.
• Facebook has built its own switch – and it looks a lot like a server.  Not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Open Compute idea, but the source article for the link has some useful references to equipment that you can actually get, unlike the Facebook doodad.
• UNIX: $42,000.  (this and other links via this thread.)  (update: that link was to a FTP server at Bell Labs, which appears to be down…  darnit.)
• The end of Freshmeat, and a surprise link to the origins.  (via)
• Aggregate hardware and software use patterns from The Setup.  A sort of crowdsourced ‘effective tools’ report.  Not necessarily perfect – Aeron chairs are popular, for instance, but I’d pick something else..  In an odd coincidence, a former teacher/coworker of mine is #3 on The Setup right now.  (via)
• Happy World Productivity Day.
• A three-sided die, which I didn’t think was possible.
• 8088 Domination, part 1 and part 2.  Full-motion video on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 chip from 1981.
• The Early History of Smalltalk.  It’s a long read, but a good one.  (via)

Your unrelated links of the week: My side hobby I never mention here is baking.  I looked up a word I didn’t know, found out about an ice cream type I’ve never seen, started reading about odd things to do with eggs and pressure cookers, and now I’m confused by the possibilities.  No narrative point here; I just need to get in the kitchen.

I’ve been short on this week (worked 19 hour day Tues/Wed, ug), so the list is short.

• All Is Lost, the results of feeding the worst possible player stats into the NBA Y2K game.  I don’t watch basketball or play sports games, but the forced scrambling of the game is entertaining.  The author did a similar thing to Madden NFL.  The animated GIFs are the best.  (via)
• UNIX Uniforms.  (via)
• UNIX: Root Cause Analysis.  Always makes you sound fancy to say that.
• jwz says: stop centralizing things.
• The Burroughs B6500 Status Report.  That’s some oooooold computing there.  (via)
• textql: SQL queries on CSV/TSV, which is something I’ve silently wished for before.  (via)
• Not sure what this is or the source, but it’s neat looking.

Your unrelated link of the week: Another Cyriak music video, this time for Bonobo.  (via)

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.

Lots to read this week – enjoy!

• Stories from net.rumors.  War stories about old, big hardware – the file is from USENET in 1989, so many of the stories are about UNIX or pre-UNIX.  It’s a long read, but worth it.  (via)
• Via the previous link: olduse.net.   “Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago.”  Also available via NNTP.  The web page simulates a terminal news reader, down to the key commands.  I’ve mentioned it before.
• SSH Tunnel – Local and Remote Port Forwarding Explained With Examples.  Partially for my own benefit, since I’ve always intended to set up forwarding but never had enough of a dire need to do so.  (via)
• Windows in video games.  A neat description of how video games simulate building interiors, and a near-perfect usage case for animated GIFs.  (via)
• Go for sysadmins.  Go seems to approach problems in a different way than Python/Ruby, but I don’t have enough experience to quantify that yet.  Also, we need to document PFI better to show how you can already do exactly what the presenter does, with DragonFly.  (via a mailinglist)
• The 12-Factor App, noticed in the video in the previous link.
• Building a homebrew USB device.  (via)  related: I wish lobste.rs would let you link directly to a story even if there weren’t comments yet.
• UNIX: Database connection testing.
• The future that everyone forgot.  I always liked what Danger did.  (via)
• Arcade Story.  I used to be that good with Black Tiger, though it wasn’t as flashy a game.  (via)
• RFC7258.  “Pervasive monitoring is an attack”.  (via many places)
• Problem of the Week at the Harvard Physics Department.  (via)
• Notation, notation, notation: a brief history of mathematical symbols. (via)
• An Open Letter on Feminism In Tech.  Related: I am still trying to hire a system admin at my workplace.  (via several places)
• Microservices and the migrating Unix philosophy.  As the first comment in the source link says, “They’ve not read Brooks enough.”
• A curated list of open source sysadmin resources.  Interesting set of links, though it seems silly to have this list as a Github project.  (via)
• Everything is Broken.  (via many places)

Your unrelated link of the week: Well, not really unrelated, but this thought occurred to me.

I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing.  I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too.  There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…

• Arabic programming language artwork.  “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.”  (via)
• How babies are like Unix.
• Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator.  (via)
• How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch.  From the man himself.  (via)
• The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop.  Diving into language use and data analysis.  (via)
• The Quest for Randomness.  (via)
•  Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.  An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative.   (via)
• Recreational Mathematics Magazine.  Someone will find this deeply satisfying.  (via)
• Practical Alternatives to systemd?
• The operating system: should there be one?  (PDF)  Smalltalk, lurking.  (via)
• Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment.  (PDF)  Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’.  Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
• Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.

Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex.  As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”.  (via)

Busy week, but lots to read.

• My brush with Oulipo.  Thinking far harder about language patterns than I thought possible.
• The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was.  Follow the links, and feel disappointment.
• BASIC turns 50.  I like BASIC – specifically AppleBASIC – in a way only nostalgia can cause.  (via)
• More secure than telnetmallows.  (via)
• The Great Works of Software.  “…works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.”  An accurate description.  UNIX is #4.   (via)
• GitHub monoculture.  Git is decentralized, GitHub is not.  (via)
• Novena’s hackable bezel.  A spiffy way to hold a keyboard.
• “Here’s my favorite operating systems war story, what’s yours?”  Some excellent, old-school war stories in the originating link.

Your unrelated link of the week: Doc Brown on My Proper Tea.  Language warning.

This is the first Lazy Reading in a while that I hadn’t already started before the previous week’s Lazy Reading was displayed.

• Eventually, Javascript will eat everything.  (via)
• Wrong and Right Reasons to be Upset about Oculus.   Gets at something that’s been bothering me: too many new companies have acquisition as an exit strategy.  Over time, that becomes the only strategy.  (via many places)
• How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40%.  I can confirm this works, via the small sample of the class I taught recently.  (via I lost track, sorry)
• Toward a better programming.   Makes some good points about programming, though it unfortunately ends not with solutions but with a ‘buy my stuff’ push.  (via)
• Michael W. Lucas reviews “Applied Network Security Monitoring”, the book.
• 7 Habits of Highly Successful UNIX Admins.
• thread patterns, about surviving mailing list overload.  You will recognize exactly what’s being described if you’ve read any mailing list for more than a year of your life.  (via #dragonflybsd)
• How pinball and boardwalk amusements gave rise to video games.
• RPN calculation, a description and history.
• I don’t know if this conspiracy theory with Red Hat, systemd, and the military-industrial complex is even realistic, but it’s kinda fun to see, in a “look at that mess over there in that other operating system” kind of way.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: The Very Hungry Rust Monster.