Tag Archives: Tech

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 →

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 →

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of the Model M keyboard and even had one that I lost at my last job when I left. Fortunately, Unicomp resurrected the Model M and … Continue reading →

Nir Eyal has an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about the horrible, Orwellian practice of businesses using spyware to monitor what their employees are doing. Even putting aside the Stasi element, it should be clear to anyone with … Continue reading →

Many of you know that I’m a big fan of AWK. After Lisp and C, it’s my go to language, especially for scripts that involve reading a bunch of lines and performing some sort of regex-mediated action on them. Its … Continue reading →

Even before I learned Lisp, I really loved coding with recursive algorithms. When I decided to learn Lisp, I did so through Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp, which meant, of course, that recursive programming became part of my programming DNA. … Continue reading →

There’s a substantial body of lore associated with Dennis Ritchie and his work. One of the minor stories involves his PhD or lack of it. The most common story is that Harvard refused to award Ritchie his degree because Ritchie … Continue reading →

I just came across this link to a 1965 short BBC interview of Isaac Asimov concerning his famous three laws of robotics. Those laws, as Asimov stipulates, are purposefully ambiguous to that he can use that ambiguity as a vehicle … Continue reading →