Tag Archives: Tech

Janet Jackson and Crashing Laptops

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

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Brailsford & Kernighan on AWK

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

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Fundamental Laws

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

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From Unix Command to Startup

Matt Rickard has a whimsical post that really appealed to me. The idea, according to his title, is that every Unix command becomes a startup. His first example is grep. Grep’s a utility to search for a particular string in … Continue reading

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Thoughts On Thoughts On RSS

Matt Rickard has a—at least to me—provocative post on RSS. As I’ve said many times, I’m a big believer in and user of RSS. Google did its best to kill it off but it turned out to be too useful … Continue reading

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Red Meat Friday: Commit Messages Don’t Matter

One of our sacred notions—never to be questioned—is the importance of writing good commit messages. There are hundreds of articles on how to write good messages and how to properly format them. Magit will even enforce a length limit on … Continue reading

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Spacing in Displayed Mathematics

Most Irreal readers probably don’t have much need to typeset mathematics but occasionally the need does arise and if you’re like me, you want it to look as good as possible. Most of us will never be as good as … Continue reading

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Programmers and the Flow

Every programmer knows about the flow. They know about it even if they don’t know the word “flow”. Sadly, most other people are not familiar with the concept. Especially members of the management class. This cartoon captures the idea perfectly. … Continue reading

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The Case for Emacs, Vim, and Nano

Over on the Red Hat site there’s a post that makes the cases for the Emacs, Vim, and Nano editors. That may seem like blasphemy to some but different people do have different needs and expectations from their editors. The … Continue reading

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Quadratic Equations Reconsidered Redux

I did a poor job of making my intended point in Irreal’s Quadratic Equations Reconsidered post. The intended point was that Loh had discovered a method of solving quadratic equations without having to remember—or, heaven forefend, rederive—the quadratic formula or … Continue reading

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