Tag Archives: Tech

Linux Removes Strncpy

Posted on 2026-07-06 by jcs

Back when I learned C, people were still using strcpy and even gets. After a while, people started saying that strcpy wasn’t safe and that you should use strncpy instead to avoid buffer overruns, either accidental or deliberate. Those days … Continue reading →

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The CBS Report On The Unix v4 Recovery

Posted on 2026-06-30 by jcs

Today (Monday) on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, Thalia Archibald reports on a CBS report on the Unix v4 recovery at the University of Utah. Sadly, the report misses the two most important things about the recovery. The first, … Continue reading →

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Chen On Red Squiggles

Posted on 2026-06-29 by jcs

All of us are familiar with the red squiggles that appear under spelling errors when we’re writing text. They appear in Emacs buffers and probably most other applications as well. One place they certainly appear is in Microsoft Word documents. … Continue reading →

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Your Digital Inheritance

Posted on 2026-06-13 by jcs

As you most of you know, I live a digital life. That doesn’t mean I have no existence outside the Internet or that I don’t have real life friends and loved ones. It simply means that almost all my transactions … Continue reading →

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The First Wireless Telephone

Posted on 2026-06-09 by jcs

A short quiz in two parts for you: When was the first wireless telephone invented? Who invented it? The answers are surprising and not at all what you might have expected. If you’re like me, something involving radio is probably … Continue reading →

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Rethinking Your Desk

Posted on 2026-05-31 by jcs

I’ve always had a thing about desks. I really enjoy looking at pictures of people’s work areas and in particular their desks. I’ve gone through stages. Sometimes I really liked renaissance desks, sometimes colonial desks, and sometime modern desks. Basically, … Continue reading →

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ICanHazShortcut 2.0

Posted on 2026-05-11 by jcs

I’ve been using ICanHazShortcut for years. I originally started using it to have an easy way to switch to Emacs from anywhere in my system. Eventually, I added Safari and HomeKit to the list of apps I can invoke with … Continue reading →

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Microsoft, IBM, And The TAB Key

Posted on 2026-05-06 by jcs

Raymond Chen has an amusing story just in time for Mothers’ Day. It’s a story from the joint OS/2 development effort of Microsoft and IBM about the mismatch in organizational structures between Microsoft and IBM. In those days, at least, … Continue reading →

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Coffee: It’s Good For You

Posted on 2026-05-04 by jcs

An old joke, known and beloved by every developer, is “A programmer is a machine for turning coffee into code.” It’s certainly true that it’s an important component of my productivity, coding and otherwise. An overwhelming proportion of Irreal readers, … Continue reading →

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Fast16

Posted on 2026-04-28 by jcs

There are few Irreal readers, I sure, who don’t know what Stuxnet was and, whatever their feelings about the underlying politics, don’t consider it a tour de force of software engineering. Recently a new candidate for the championship of such … Continue reading →

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