Tag Archives: Tech

Compiler Humor

Apropos of Nothing, as Cheryl Crow once put it, here’s something you don’t see very often: compiler humor. From another era when engineers were still allowed to inject whimsy into software, Tony Cunningham offers us a selection of error messages … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Striving For A Mouse Free Workflow

As I’ve often suggested—most recently here and here—I try to minimize my use of the mouse as much as I can. Mostly that’s been in the context of Emacs where it’s easy. My desire to avoid the mouse is not … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

REPL Driven Programming

I’ve written many times about what I call “exploratory” or “interactive” programming. The idea is you build your program from the bottom up, trying out expressions, building them into larger and larger units until you have a whole program. For … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Config File Languages

Joe Marshall over at Abstract Heresies has a short allegory on designing configuration file languages. We’ve probably all been there. It starts off simple: he just wants a configuration file that handles key/value pairs. But then he finds he needs … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Old Days

I ran across this amazing picture on Massimo, a splendid site that offers several fascinating and unusual tweets a day. If you like being surprised and astounded, give Massimo a look. The picture is of the original IBM hard drive. … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Worst Practices

Although you may not have heard anything from Mike Zamansky lately, he’s still blogging—mostly about teaching—and maintaining an active presence on the Web. He just retired from Hunter so perhaps he’ll find time to enlighten us with a Using Emacs … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

PDF at 30

PDF. It’s a ubiquitous standard that seems like it’s always been here. How else would you prepare a document that could be printed on virtually any printer or displayed on any screen in the best possible resolution? But, it turns … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Story of Mel

There’s a charming piece of foundation lore that every programmer in my cohort read and admired: The Story of Mel. Even when I was writing assembly language exclusively, the story was about a bygone era and techniques that no one … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Microsoft Reverts To Type

Younger Irreal readers whose memories don’t extent beyond the start of the century may be puzzled by my occasional disparaging of Microsoft. After all, they’ve made a point, lately, of reciting all the appropriate open source mantras and cultivating a … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Making Your Unix Command Names Unique

I’ve been a Unix-head working exclusively in one flavor or another of Unix for more years than I care to contemplate. These days, I seldom see a Unix workflow tip that I didn’t already know about. Still, I do sometimes … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment