Tag Archives: Tech

Avoiding Data Capture

Posted on 2016-07-15 by jcs

Although I have Linux and FreeBSD machines, most of you know that I mostly live my digital life within the Apple ecosystem. I like the tight integration between my iPhone, iPad, and Macs. The downside, of course, is that it’s … Continue reading →

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Knuth’s First Lecture

Posted on 2016-07-01 by jcs

Back in November of 1969 a young Don Knuth gave his first lecture as a Stanford professor. The lecture was on a new field in Computer Science called Analysis of Algorithms, a field that Knuth invented and named. Recently, Knuth … Continue reading →

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Schrödinger’s Backup

Posted on 2016-05-18 by jcs

#Sysadmin #Truth #Backup #Unix #Linux pic.twitter.com/suCT9ME58V — nixCraft (@nixcraft) June 24, 2015

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Tail Recursion in gawk

Posted on 2016-05-14 by jcs

Once you’ve used Lisp—especially Scheme—you come to regard tail recursion as a natural and necessary technique. Perhaps even a God given right. Sadly, leave the Lisp world and you’re pretty much out of luck. Of course, you can always make … Continue reading →

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The Demise of Midrange Computers

Posted on 2016-04-17 by jcs

Eric Raymond (ESR) has an interesting post on the death of midrange computers. Some time ago he predicted that in the future we would all carry around smartphone-derived computers in our pockets and plug them into stationary keyboard/screen/pointer devices that … Continue reading →

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Debugging

Posted on 2016-04-13 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis. So true. I remember debugging a problem that disappeared as soon as I put a printf in the code to see what was happening. Typical code debugging. pic.twitter.com/z764dhyJ5Z — Ryan Houdek (@sonicadvance1) March 5, 2016

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The Heisenberg Release Uncertainty Principle

Posted on 2016-02-20 by jcs

Steve Purcell formulates a fundamental law of software engineering Heisenberg's Release Uncertainty Principle says you can accurately know what the software will do, or when you'll get it, but not both. — Steve Purcell (@sanityinc) October 13, 2015

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Query

Posted on 2016-02-10 by jcs

Is anyone else having problems loading twitter.com and pages linked with its url shortener t.co? (This is with a browser, not a twitter app.) What I’m seeing is that sometimes the load will hang. If I retry it a few … Continue reading →

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Navigating to a File

Posted on 2016-02-05 by jcs

If you’re like most people, you access your files by navigating down the directory structure to them. That’s not the only possibility though. You could also use one of the search engines built into your operating system. If you can’t … Continue reading →

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Praising the Command Line

Posted on 2016-01-31 by jcs

Stephan Ramsay has an interesting series of posts in which he takes the retro position that the command line is superior to a GUI. Even more radically, in the current milieu, he argues that the average user—the ever popular man … Continue reading →

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