Tag Archives: Tech

Boeing Again

I was reading this PBS story on the recent Alaskan Airlines incident in which a door panel blew off in midair and it tickled a distant memory of a post I wrote about Boeing before. A simple search of Irreal … Continue reading

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Developing In Difficult Places

Over at Bite Code! there’s a post that I found really interesting. It’s about doing software deveopment or training in difficult places. “Difficult places” means places lacking the usual computing infrastructure or having a hostile political or geographical environment. The … Continue reading

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Bugs, Linux, and Open Source

Millions of pixels have been sacrificed exclaiming the glories and greatness of open source. Most everybody but Microsoft agrees and even Microsoft seems to have come around lately. At least on paper. There is, to be sure, a lot to … Continue reading

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Chrome Atrocities

Metanote: I wasn’t sure if this post really merited being designated a Red Meat Friday item but it is polemical and will doubtless anger some people so I guess it qualifies. As most of you know, we here at Irreal … Continue reading

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Racket and SICP

As I’ve written—seemingly hundreds of times—I’m a huge fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). In my opinion, it is one of the best—arguably the best—books on Computer Science. I read it relatively late in … Continue reading

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Pike’s Rules Of Programming

I may have mentioned this before but someone recently posted Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming. The rules are simple and beautiful, almost obvious, but very often ignored. The five rules can be condensed into three principles: Your intuition stinks. … Continue reading

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The History of Vi, Vim, and Other Vi Clones

Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that I never enlisted in the Vi/Emacs wars. Indeed, I have decades of experience with both and hold each in the highest regard. For a long time now, … Continue reading

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Running Unix v6

There are lots of people who enjoy the opportunity to experience what it was like to work on early Unix systems. That’s been possible for a long time. Indeed, there’s a cottage industry of experimenters who have built PDP emulators, … Continue reading

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The ed Video

After yesterday’s post on Thompson’s famous hack, I watched the video of Thompson’s talk at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo that Cox mentioned. That was pretty interesting as another example of Thompson’s curiosity and genius but the point for … Continue reading

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How The Thompson Hack Worked

Every year or so I revisit and write about Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. It’s one of those papers that should be read every year: it seems there’s always something new to learn. The paper … Continue reading

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