Tag Archives: Tech

Merry Christmas the Linux Way

Posted on 2018-12-25 by jcs

It’s Christmas and the Interweebs are quiet so I’ll just pass on this as your Christmas card from Irreal.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The History of cat

Posted on 2018-12-24 by jcs

Over at Two-Bit History Sinclair Target makes the case that although it seems as if computer technology is always advancing and changing, we are still using software that is virtually unchanged from the dawn of the computer age. As a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Yoda of Silicon Valley

Posted on 2018-12-21 by jcs

The New York Times has a nice article on Don Knuth entitled The Yoda of Silicon Valley that talks briefly about his life and contributions to Computer Science. It’s been all over Internet but if you haven’t had a chance … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Statistics and Lies

Posted on 2018-11-20 by jcs

Regular readers know that we here at Irreal have occasionally been hard on researchers in the social sciences. That’s especially true for Psychology where at least one study found that only 39% of published research results could be reproduced. One … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Moving the iOS Cursor

Posted on 2018-11-19 by jcs

I’m a bit under the weather today so this is just a quickie. Not only is it just a quickie, it’s a quickie of interest to only iOS users. You know how when you’re entering text in an iOS app … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Proof Reading with Text-To-Speech

Posted on 2018-11-13 by jcs

Via Wilfred Hughes here’s a really neat trick for those of you who write things other than code: Life hack I don’t share often enough: using text-to-speech to proofread your writing. Your eye will gloss over all sorts of mistakes … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Implementing Strings

Posted on 2018-11-05 by jcs

Andreas Zwinkau has a very nice article on strings and how to implement them. If you’re a C programmer, your first reaction might be, “Meh. They’re an array of bytes. What’s to implement?” If you’re, say, a Python programmer, you … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

High School Students and Basic Computer Skills

Posted on 2018-11-02 by jcs

Chris Wellons over at Null Program has an interesting post on High School students and how they lack a couple of basic computer skills that hamper their advancement in the subject. Wellons mentors students so he’s seen these problems first … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

An Interview with RMS

Posted on 2018-10-30 by jcs

There’s a nice interview with Richard Stallman in the latest issue of The New Left Review. NLR is, of course, a left leaning publication in the Marxist tradition but don’t let that put you off. Mostly, the discussion of politics … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Advanced Hashing Techniques

Posted on 2018-10-16 by jcs

One of the first advanced programming techniques I learned back when I was beginning was the use of hashing for fast table lookup. The use of the adjective “advanced” probably looks strange to younger engineers who are used to languages … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment