Tag Archives: Tech

The Bash Bible

Posted on 2022-02-19 by jcs

Years ago I remember reading in Kernighan and Pike’s The Unix Programming Environment a quote about how the shell was very often their preferred programming language: When you’re faced with writing a new program, there’s a natural tendency to start … Continue reading →

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Delivery Robot Traffic Jam

Posted on 2022-02-18 by jcs

One of the reasons I love being in New York City is that you can get virtually any type of food delivered at any time. Tampa is hardly a backwater but pre-covid we didn’t have a robust food delivery infrastructure … Continue reading →

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More on Google’s Poor Search Results

Posted on 2022-02-16 by jcs

Back in January, I wrote about a Twitter thread concerning poor Google search results. The complaint was almost all the results were ads. DKB has a new post that covers the same ground. He says that Google is dying and … Continue reading →

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Kernighan Podcast on Unix and C History

Posted on 2022-02-08 by jcs

Here’s a pointer to another interesting talk by Brian Kernighan. This time, it’s a podcast on Unix and C history. The podcast is with CppCast a series specializing on Cpp matters (of course) but that isn’t afraid to venture into … Continue reading →

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Early Unix at Bell Labs

Posted on 2022-02-01 by jcs

At the 2022 Linux Conference Australia, Brian Kernighan gave a delightful talk on the early days of Unix at Bell Labs. It’s not so much that Kernighan tells us stories that we haven’t heard before but that he puts everything … Continue reading →

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Switching to Android

Posted on 2022-01-31 by jcs

You all know that I’m primarily an Apple person and that I like their hardware and the way their various devices work together more or less seamlessly. Even so, I’m not a Fan Boy and as in most things I’m … Continue reading →

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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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