Lazy Reading for 2013/12/01

Now that I’m going into more descriptive detail with these, I’m going to try without the bullet points.  It’s less of a Wall Of Text that way.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code.  Really, very good advice.  (via)

‘vr’ mentioned the Space Cadet and Symbolics Macivory keyboards in comments for last week’s Lazy Reading keyboard links.  I didn’t know what they were, so searching around found me this Symbolics keyboard image (the model itself is apparently dearly missed)and the inevitable Wikipedia Space Cadet entry.  I also found this study of keyboards that mentions some other ‘special’ modern models I’ve heard of in passing – Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking models.

Also found as part of that search: one man’s quest to get his own Lisp Machine.  That appears to be about 10 years old, so my guess is that you’d go for emulation these days.

Sorting information that isn’t quite numeric.  This bites everyone sooner or later.

The death and life of great Internet cities.  “Whatever we may ultimately make of our move towards sites like Facebook, it’s almost certainly the case that, for the average netizen, it was a movement away from online literacy.”  An excellent article about how communities are no longer built online – at least not through social networks.  (via)

Farming hard drives: 2 years and $1m later.  Data-driven analysis of hard drive prices, and how they’ve recovered poorly from the Thailand floods.  I always like it when a company takes data from doing something on a large scale – something very few people are doing or could do – and releases it.  (via)

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant.  Rob Pike pointing out how the system ecosystem was becoming monocultural.  It’s over 10 years old, so some of the problems have changed.  The interesting thing is to look at it and see which parts were identification of upcoming trends.  (via)

DragonFly 3.6 video review.  This person doesn’t realize the shell is tcsh, not bash, and it really, really messes him up.  I had to stop watching about 6 minutes in.  (via blakkheim on IRC)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Church of the Subgenius is selling 2-for-1 deals on ordainment.  It’s really a legal ordainment, too, at least in the U.S.  You can perform weddings, funerals… circumcisions?  Not sure about the legal restrictions on that, and maybe I don’t want to know.  Anyway, you get an entertaining pack of literature which you can take either completely seriously, or not at all.