Tag Archives: Tech

Brian Kernighan & Ken Thompson Chat

Posted on 2019-05-07 by jcs

Last Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival East, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson sat down and chatted about some Unix history and other interesting events in Thompson’s life. The chat was billed as “Kernighan interviewing Thompson” but it was really … Continue reading →

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A Practical Guide to Sed

Posted on 2019-05-06 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about Liran B. H’s Practical AWK Guide. He has a similar guide for sed called Understanding sed – Practical Guide. Like the Practical AWK post, it illustrates some of sed’s power by showing a few sed one-liners. … Continue reading →

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A Practical Guide to Understanding AWK

Posted on 2019-05-05 by jcs

Over at the Developers Area, Liran B.H has a nice practical guide to understanding AWK. There’s a whole book dedicated to AWK so obviously a single blog post isn’t going to cover everything but it does speak to one of … Continue reading →

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Drawing Figures in Math Lectures

Posted on 2019-04-29 by jcs

A month ago I wrote about Gilles Castel’s system for taking notes with LaTeX during Math lectures. As I wrote at the time, I was astounded that he could type the LaTeX fast enough to keep up with the lecturer. … Continue reading →

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Vivek Haldar on Why He’s Video Blogging

Posted on 2019-04-24 by jcs

I’ve written a few times about Vivek Haldar’s Read A Paper videos. They’re vlogs that “read” a seminal paper in Computer Science. They’re really great. If I’ve already read the paper, that particular vlog serves to remind me of the … Continue reading →

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Vivek Haldar: Global Variables

Posted on 2019-04-23 by jcs

Vivek Haldar has been blogging up a storm with his video readings of seminal CS papers. I’ve written about a few of them but there’s lots more. See his blog for an up-to-date list. A recent post was about the … Continue reading →

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The Dream Draws Nearer

Posted on 2019-04-21 by jcs

If you’re a hardcore Emacser or Lisper, you’ve probably always drooled over the famous space-cadet keyboard. Just think, you’d have keys for all four bucky bits, not to mention a multitude of other keys with no apparent use if you … Continue reading →

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How Uber Debugged a Latency Problem

Posted on 2019-04-20 by jcs

Even though I’m an Uber user, I’ve never thought very much about their IT infrastructure other than to form an (hilariously) simplified mental model of what it probably looks like. It turns out to be a pretty sophisticated operation that … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Is Closing Its Ebook Store

Posted on 2019-04-16 by jcs

Microsoft is closing its ebook store. Who cares? The people who have bought books from them care because they will no longer be able to read their books. Microsoft, to its credit is offering to refund the purchase price but … Continue reading →

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RSS vs. Twitter

Posted on 2019-04-15 by jcs

Over at Gizmodo, Patrick Howell O’Neill belabors—what seems to me to be—the obvious. He posits that RSS is a much better way to keep up on what’s going on than Twitter. Wen I read that, my immediate reaction was, “Well, … Continue reading →

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