Tag Archives: Tech

Cables

Posted on 2016-11-15 by jcs

We have it pretty good these days. Not very long ago cables were everywhere and they were always breaking and otherwise causing problems. These days we are relatively cable-free. We still have power cables, of course, and cables for a … Continue reading →

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Dennis Ritchie Day

Posted on 2016-10-30 by jcs

Tim O’Reilly declared today, October 30, as Dennis Ritchie Day. That was five years ago but nonetheless we should all pause and consider how much Ritchie affects our life and work. He was a giant and we should give thanks … Continue reading →

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Joel Spolsky on Open Offices

Posted on 2016-10-14 by jcs

If you’ve been around here for awhile, you know my feelings about open offices: despite the self-serving cant from management, they’re really about saving money. Everyone who does creative work knows how devastating the constant interruptions can be on productivity … Continue reading →

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Dennis Ritchie

Posted on 2016-10-13 by jcs

The Internet appears to be on fire with news that Dennis Ritchie has died. Folks, that was 5 years ago. How can you not know this? Ritchie was one our leading lights and his legacy is everywhere within our industry … Continue reading →

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C

Posted on 2016-10-10 by jcs

More and more often, these days, I see the opinion expressed that C is a dead, dangerous, stupid language and no one uses it anymore. For me, that’s like having someone start a discussion by saying ”As everyone knows the … Continue reading →

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PSA: SSH Suddenly Asks for Passwords in OS X

Posted on 2016-09-23 by jcs

Background If you’re an OS X user who uses SSH keys to SSH to remote machines and have just updated to Sierra you may have noticed that SSH has suddenly started asking for a password. My situation is that I’ve … Continue reading →

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Fundamentals

Posted on 2016-09-19 by jcs

So true and so often disregarded I felt like saying this. pic.twitter.com/mHJ1rENoX1 — Hisham (@hisham_hm) December 13, 2015 Hat tip to Karl Voit.

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Wisdom From Wilfred Hughes

Posted on 2016-09-06 by jcs

Some wisdom from Wilfred Hughes. I think this is right. Polyglot programmers are often very effective. They can take designs tested in one language and benefit another! — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) September 6, 2016

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Computerphile: Unrolling Loops

Posted on 2016-09-02 by jcs

Professor Brailsford of Computerphile has an interesting short video on unrolling loops. He motivates the discussion by relating a story about the introduction of the Laserwriter. John Warnock, from Adobe, and Steve Jobs planned to show off the Laserwriter’s capabilities … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming with R

Posted on 2016-07-18 by jcs

Since I’ve been writing about literate programming lately, here’s a nice talk by Don Knuth on Literate Programming in R. Knuth begins his talk with an overview of several books that have been written using literate programming and discussing why … Continue reading →

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