This is another week where I find neat stuff at the start of the week, start the post, and by the time the post date rolls around, those links have been seen everywhere. Yes, I’m complaining I don’t get “First Post!” the way I want.
- UNIX: More ways to spin the top command.
- Leslie Lamport’s Thinking for Programmers talk. It’s the opposite of a TED talk; not glamorous, not made accessible, and not there to make you feel good about yourself – but quite useful. (via)
- A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross. This fascinates me in the same way Markov-chain generated text can be interesting. (via)
- How ‘DevOps’ is Killing the Developer. Not necessarily an accurate description of how DevOps works, but accurate for describing problems with poorly implemented DevOps. ‘Reaction-to-new-strategy-that-gets-implemented-poorly’ is not new – see Agile. (via)
- Here’s a conversational intro to Dwarf Fortress. Unlike every other article, it emphasizes how quickly you can get into the game. This is probably the better way to talk about it.
- A Secure C and C++ reference recommendation.
- @ around Europe. I can’t confirm this, but I’m sure many readers can. (via)
- According to this story about XENIX, Microsoft almost went with it as a successor to DOS. That certainly would have made things different. (via)
- UNIX ACTUAL. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Heads or Tails. Chris Ware’s comics are all about using the comic as a way of expressing the movement of time, in so many ways. (via)
I don’t really understand the map about the ‘@’ symbol. Does it mean that in some country, they used the same word as for an elephant or a monkey ?
In France, it has its own name, we call it “arobase”.
The word isn’t a mix of “aro” and “base” because “aro” doesn’t mean anything alone, and base is like base in english :)
I learned something, arobase is a mass unit.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arobase
étonnant non ?
@Charles Rapenne: At least in Germany, the symbol is indeed widely referred to as “Klammeraffe”, i. e., this animal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_monkey
I think it’s worth mentioning with regard to the top article that GNU top and its arguments aren’t the same as BSD top, but still good reading for learning things you might not have used in those ways.
When I started in the IT business in the mid-80s, the Norsk Data family of minicomputers were market leaders in Norway. The command interpreter prompt was usually ‘@’, and we used to call it “grisehale” (“pig’s tail”).
Related: The ‘option’ key on the Apple keyboard has been called a couple different things – open-apple (dating back to pre-Mac days), puppy paw, splat key.