Tag Archives: Tech

As many of you know, I’ve long been fascinated with interactive or exploratory programming—what some call REPL driven programming. It’s the idea that you write a bit of code and try it immediately by executing it to see what happens. … Continue reading →

A funny thing about human beings is that once they’re out of their young adult years they tend to like things the way they’ve always been. In the tech world, that often takes the form of preferring the text editor … Continue reading →

Richard Smith over at The BMJ has a cute article that asks whether the time has come to assume medical research is frauduent until proven otherwise. I say “cute” because everyone paying attention knows that most published medical research is … Continue reading →

I’ve long known about the Reply-To header in emails but I’ve always been unclear on exactly what it did and how it worked. Karl Voit has an excellent short blog post on using the Reply-To header in emails. It turns … Continue reading →

It’s likely that very few Irreal readers have ever used punch cards or maybe even know what they are. Nevertheless, they were once the mainstay of the computer industry. Indeed, IBM started out as a company that made punch-card-tabulating machines … Continue reading →

Everything you read about tech these days is more or less a screed on the evils of the technology community. The smugly ignorant journalists of the tech press, most of whom wouldn’t know code from a cod, float every conceivable … Continue reading →

Universities seem intent on forsaking their traditional values with the expected results. Enrollments are down significantly and an increasing number of parents are performing cost/benefit analyses that don’t bode well for an improvement of those enrollment figures. One would think, … Continue reading →