Tag Archives: Tech

Nerd Talk: Kernighan & McIlroy

Posted on 2022-01-29 by jcs

Everyone with even a tenuous connection to our field knows who Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are. They probably also know who Brian Kernighan is but unless they’re fully immersed in Bell Labs lore they probably don’t know about Doug … Continue reading →

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Automating Your Job

Posted on 2022-01-20 by jcs

One of my favorite bits of—obviously apocryphal—Lisp folklore is the story of the invention of macros. The TL;DR is a that some senior Lisp developers got tired of writing the same boilerplate code all the time so that started using … Continue reading →

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Corner Quotes

Posted on 2022-01-19 by jcs

John D. Cook has a useful post on using “corner quotes” (⌜ ⌟) to delimit regular expressions in text. As Cook says, it makes a lot of sense especially when the regular expression begins or ends with a space. Cook’s … Continue reading →

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Users Sue PayPal

Posted on 2022-01-17 by jcs

I love the idea of PayPal: a neutral broker that holds funds involved in online purchases until both sides have fulfilled their obligations. The buyer sends the funds for a purchase to PayPal, which tells the seller it has the … Continue reading →

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Encoding, Encryption, and Hashing

Posted on 2022-01-14 by jcs

Encoding, encryption, and hashing: those are three different things only loosely connected. It never occurred to me that anyone in our tribe wouldn’t understand the difference among them but according to Eric Mann there is confusing about them. Mann has … Continue reading →

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Yak Shaving

Posted on 2022-01-10 by jcs

“Yak shaving”. It is, at base, an opprobrious term but with a touch of indulgence and humor. Sort of like “rascal”: naughty, yes, but lovably so. It’s clear why yak shaving has a bad reputation. It’s a distraction from what … Continue reading →

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Are Google Searches Losing Quality?

Posted on 2022-01-03 by jcs

As most of you know, I try to avoid Google as much as possible. In particular, I haven’t used the Google search engine in years. But that’s because of privacy concerns and Google’s sordid record of vacuuming up as much … Continue reading →

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Finite Automata State Diagrams With Tikz

Posted on 2021-12-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite implementation techniques is finite state machines. I started using them for communication protocol implementations but soon discovered that they could be applied to several sorts of problems. It’s easy enough to sketch … Continue reading →

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The Sam Editor

Posted on 2021-12-26 by jcs

I’ve used most of the traditional editors. By “traditional” I mean editors like ed, ex, vi/vim, Emacs, Acme, and even—back in the day—brief. One editor I’ve never tried is Sam. Sam, like Acme, was written by Rob Pike so if … Continue reading →

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Rethinking Email

Posted on 2021-12-06 by jcs

Everyone seems to have a love/hate (for some, a mostly hate) relationship with email. Some even speak of it in terms of punishments appropriate to the ninth circle of hell. I don’t get that exercised probably because I’m parsimonious about … Continue reading →

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