Tag Archives: Tech

The first data structure I learned and really internalized was the hash table. I’ve been using them my entire career and, given when I started, that meant implementing them myself. This was before I learned C and even C doesn’t … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →