Category Archives: General

Router Security

Posted on 2022-08-23 by jcs

Apple has a useful page on how to set up your routers securely. They don’t currently have a router product so this isn’t about how to configure an Apple product. The advice applies to any router. The page is advertised … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

More On the Brailsford-Kernighan Video

Posted on 2022-08-22 by jcs

The video chat between David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan has sparked a lot of interest and commentary among the Unix faithful. Dough McIlroy offered this story concerning egrep to the conversation. The egrep connection is that it was egrep’s regex … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Unicode in AWK

Posted on 2022-08-21 by jcs

A few days ago I wrote about the excellent video of David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan discussing AWK and its history. In the video, Kernighan mentions that he’s been working on enabling Unicode in the One True AWK. Here’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Shouting at Disks

Posted on 2022-08-20 by jcs

Recently, I wrote about a Janet Jackson song that could cause laptops to crash. That turned out to involve frequencies from the song that resonated with a critical frequency in the disk subsystem and was solved simply by installing a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs and the Unix Philosophy

Posted on 2022-08-19 by jcs

Ramin Honary has a six part series of posts that presses the claim that Emacs does, in fact, adhere to the Unix Philosophy that a program should do one thing and do it well. Almost everyone else’s opinion is that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Janet Jackson and Crashing Laptops

Posted on 2022-08-18 by jcs

Raymond Chen occasionally posts interesting stories from his (long) time at Microsoft. His latest offering tells the story of how Janet Jackson used to have the power to crash laptops. It turned out that playing Jackson’s Rhythm Nation on certain … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Brailsford & Kernighan on AWK

Posted on 2022-08-17 by jcs

Computerphile has a another wonderful discussion between David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan. We are quickly reaching the time when all the original Unix people will be gone (Kernighan is 79 or 80) so these chats are our last chance to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Keeping Data and Code in the Same File

Posted on 2022-08-16 by jcs

John D. Cook has another post in his series on coding in Org-mode. The latest emphasizes how you can keep data, code, and documentation in a single (Org) file. There’s nothing new in that idea for most Irreal readers, of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Tenacity!

Posted on 2022-08-14 by jcs

Apropos of nothing, this story really appealed to me. I admire cranky guys like Chaturvedi who just resist being pushed around no matter how small the stakes are. The story doesn’t make clear his motivation but I’d guess it’s less … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Fundamental Laws

Posted on 2022-08-13 by jcs

For some reason there was a recent pointer to this 6 year post by Matthew Jones on some of the fundamental laws of software development. Most of them will be familiar to Irreal readers but it’s nice to see them … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment