Author: Justin Sherrill

This week’s Lazy Reading started as overflow from last week.

• Cron checker.  Cron commands to English.  (via)
• Unboxing the Magnus supercomputer.  Aw, Crays don’t look as cool as they used to.  (via)
• OpenVMS gets a new lease on life.  (via)  Also, there are public OpenVMS installations like deathrow (via) and pub1 (via).
• Unix: Controlling privileged access.
• Unix: Top networking commands and what they tell you.
• runit instead of systemd, on Void Linux.  A ray of hope.  (via)
• The future of iced coffee.  Why can’t someone put the same treatment into tea?  (via)
• What ORMS have taught me: just learn SQL.  (via)
• Docker security with SELinux.  Containerization, which is all the rage these days, does not enforce the same security wall as with a virtual machine – containers can ‘leak’ to their parent operating system.  I’m not sure enough people realize this.  (via)
• A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font.  Check the screenshot of it being used on a 320×200 screen.  (via)
• lowRISC.  Open source System on a Chip.
• The Worst API Ever Made.  I can’t judge if that’s really so, but it’s always fun to watch trainwrecks.  (via)
• My history with Forth & stack machines.  Forth is a crazy language, in a good way.  (via)
• Lawless Legends, an Apple][ FRPG – in development.  (via)
• A Mac IIci

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Quantum & Pixel.  Another Boulet comic, this time exploring 2D physics.

There’s a lot to read this week… I’m not sure how that happened.

• Schwa, two decades later.  I had this, then.
• Famous Women of Computer Science.  At least some of the names should be familiar to you.  (via)
• Anil Dash on the shifting meaning of “public”.  An outgrowth of the jerktech problem.(via)
• The History of Autocorrect.  (via a newsletter)
• -2000 lines of code.  An early Macintosh story.  (via)
• Bill Atkinson’s name in the previous link made me think of Burger Bill (Rebecca, now) Heineman, which led to this: Mentions of Wolf3D for the Apple ][gs.  It’s findable, even.
• And that Sheppyware link reminds me of Sweet16, a really nice ][gs emulator for the Mac.  Excuse me as I wander down the halls of memory…
• Cool-old-term.  Requires qt5 and I don’t know if it works on BSD…  but it’s neat looking.  (via)
• Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim.  There’s some more good resources in the source for this link.
• At the same site: SSH Hacks.
• hicat, cat with syntax highlighting.  (via)
• I’ve mentioned ISO 3103 before, or at least I thought I did, but there are apparently 25 more tea-related standards.
• That led me to find George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams all had Opinions on Tea.  I must have linked to one of them before, but I can’t find it.  Douglas Adams is correct, though: most people in the U.S. have never had a decent cup of tea.  (via)
• Origins of common UI symbols.  (via)
• Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve.  This interests me because it’s in the town where I live, but there’s something else.  The vast, vast quantities of film out there was filmed in the last 100 years or so.  Most of that film is still readable, though the older nitrate films are fragile.  If all that video was digital, how would we access it?  I don’t have a single digital storage item in my house older than 10 years, except maybe a Zip disk or two, and there’s no way I can read them.  (via)
• How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors.  I expected the article to quote itself in the middle or something similar; Internet jokes are warping my expectations.  (via)
• Software, it’s a thing.  Talking about how software exists when it is used, not just as a saved file but rather as a multitude of activities – and how that relates to preserving that history.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mmmm…  diagrams.  That describes me.  The subject and artist, Scott McCloud, has a book called Understanding Comics that is an excellent discussion of perception and communication.  His exploration of visual “closure” is good for anyone who has to think about interfaces.