In my ongoing effort to stray farther off the beaten path than other nerdblogs, I bring you a link to this post at the Nonist: Objectified Circuitry. Think of it this way: the computer you are sitting at right now has probably at least a million of each circuit type pictured in that article.
OpenBSD is, as usual, selling CDs of their 4.3 release. It appears that related-but-not-directly-linked goods like The Book of PF are being sold right along side.
The sight of a thick technical book with an included (and probably out of date) CD has been common for years; however, this reversal strikes me as a good idea. Selling a good book along with the operating system that will use it is worthwhile.
Not necessarily about me, but I read an article about the continuous stress of blogging, in the New York Times. Entertainingly, the article says:
Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.
$10 a post? Given that I’ve been doing this for near-free (the Google Ads buy me a sandwich every now and then) for years, that seems like a lot. Not much to live on, though.
Despite the logarithmic expansion of computers and drop in costs of the years, everyone looks back on their first computer systems with a sense of nostalgia. This is why certain readers will find the Raymond Commodore Amiga store in Minneapolis interesting. You should be able to gues their exclusive inventory from the store name. It’s so old-school, the website is a ~username directory. (via Boing Boing Gadgets)
A diversion: Robots robots robots.
(Discovered, strangely, via an old BeOS mailing list)
Something I encountered today: a story of the earliest start on BSD, ever.
I had an Apple ][+ when I was younger, and Gamasutra has an article up all about pre-Mac Apples, exploiting my sense of nostalgia. (Via the howling void)
While we’re on the subject, there’s an online Apple ][gs emulator at virtualapple.org. One of these days I’ll get around to scanning my original Castle Wolfenstein disk just to show how old-school I am…
An experiment in Barcelona, last year, took a number of people with no coding experience but plenty of graphic design experience whatever and got them to modify a version of the old game Breakout. The results were quite interesting. You’ll need Flash to see the video of the abstract results. (Via waxy)
Why do I mention this? Open source systems tend to assume users are either very experienced or totally inexperienced. Looking for people who don’t fit either of those categories is a much more useful goal, as it produces new methods and ways of looking at things.
This has nothing to do with BSD, really, but it’s a live-action film by one of my favorite cartoonists, and it’s excellent.
View at Yooootube – embedding it gets mangled by this blog software.
A off-topic item: Jonas Sundström suggested a PIC32 microcontroller for anyone looking to get into hardware hacking. Robert ‘r3tex’ Luciani followed up with a suggestion for ‘baby steps‘. Or, as Matthew Dillon wrote: start very small.
GameSetWatch has a very in-depth article talking about Angband and Nethack, two classic roguelike games. It’s well worth a read if you are familiar with the genre.
Along the same lines, Julian Dibbell’s book “My Tiny Life” is now available. It describes his time playing in LambdaMOO , and is based in part on his Village Voice article, “A Rape In Cyberspace“.
For those readers too young to know these games, roguelike games are single-player dungeon exploration games like Diablo, and MOO/MUDs a type of MMORPG. The mechanisms are remarkably similar, but the graphics were all terminal based. Keep in mind you can still try these games right now.
While we are on the topic: It Is Pitch Dark.
For your entertainment: (some of these require Flash; all are off-topic)
- Why geeks are a handy weapon
- 10 minutes of awesome
- Working on short attention spans (last two via)
- Oldie but goodie: the Electronic Music Guide
- A nice open-source payback story
This AP news story seen in several places describes how the BSA has been vigorously obtaining money in and out of court for pirated software, and it appears to be procuring more money than the actual value of the pirated software. … Another good reason to use open source, which the article touches on, by the end.
(Warning: another visual timewaster)Â Seen at SrslyCool: Apple computer design parts one and two, Nintendo devices through the years, iPod evolution, various computer case mods, and of course knockoffs.
Some entertainment: This article at American Scientist talks about programming language choice and the arguments that have come up over the years. The bibliography at the end of this 5-page essay is worth special attention, because of the links to early documents describing these battles over languages and choices nobody thinks of these days, like PL/I or Cobol.
Some specific links to articles cited:
- How do we tell truths that might hurt? (Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975)
- On holy wars and a plea for peace (Danny Cohen, 1980)
- Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (Brian W. Kernighan, 1981)
- Computer Languages History (Éric Lévénez, 2006)
- Programming languages and their relationship styles (Meredith L. Patterson, 2006)
All the citations are worth investigating – take some time to read them.
This Associated Press story about a teacher assigning Wikipedia article writing as a project for students notes that “Knowing their work was headed for the Web … helped students reach higher”. I’d draw a parallel to open source, since knowing your code (or perhaps your news blog…) will be viewed by multiple people encourages harder work. (Via)
Here’s some lazy reading for a Friday: “The Digital Revolution“, a history of digital technology, which not surprisingly is mostly about computer history. There’s some interesting mentions of World War 2-era computer technology there. (via)
The Lost Format Preservation Society documents the different data storage formats that have existed in recent times. Scroll to the right, as they cover a lot. Depending on your age, you will be surprised by the number of analog recording formats that have vanished in the past 10 years. (via)
Some nostalgia for those who have been computing for a long time: a chronological picture index of various Apple models. (Via Underwire)Yes, I know there were other computers in the 80’s, but they weren’t fun to look at, with some exceptions.
While not DragonFly specific, I think this Worse Than Failure article about what’s wrong with Agile development is interesting for its main point: strategy is not a replacement for skill.