Author: Justin Sherrill

Again, a backlog from last week means this week is fat.

• Non-classical processor behavior: How doing something can be faster than not doing it.  Confusing but interesting.
• Rudd Canaday’s blog.  One of the people behind UNIX, though not as well known.  His stories have some very interesting glimpses into early computing.  (via)
• Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine.  Lisp machines get talked about as if they were the last remnants of a superior, extinct precursor race.  Maybe they are?  I’ve never touched one.  (via)
• Mapping the decentralization movement.  I can get behind this idea.  (via)
• KnightOS, an operating system for z80 calculators.  (via)
• The SSD Endurance Experiment.  (via)
• The first Photoshopped image.  (via)
• Does your capacitive load purr?
• The very worst subject lines.
• Facebook has built its own switch – and it looks a lot like a server.  Not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Open Compute idea, but the source article for the link has some useful references to equipment that you can actually get, unlike the Facebook doodad.
• UNIX: $42,000.  (this and other links via this thread.)  (update: that link was to a FTP server at Bell Labs, which appears to be down…  darnit.)
• The end of Freshmeat, and a surprise link to the origins.  (via)
• Aggregate hardware and software use patterns from The Setup.  A sort of crowdsourced ‘effective tools’ report.  Not necessarily perfect – Aeron chairs are popular, for instance, but I’d pick something else..  In an odd coincidence, a former teacher/coworker of mine is #3 on The Setup right now.  (via)
• Happy World Productivity Day.
• A three-sided die, which I didn’t think was possible.
• 8088 Domination, part 1 and part 2.  Full-motion video on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 chip from 1981.
• The Early History of Smalltalk.  It’s a long read, but a good one.  (via)

Your unrelated links of the week: My side hobby I never mention here is baking.  I looked up a word I didn’t know, found out about an ice cream type I’ve never seen, started reading about odd things to do with eggs and pressure cookers, and now I’m confused by the possibilities.  No narrative point here; I just need to get in the kitchen.

I’ve been short on this week (worked 19 hour day Tues/Wed, ug), so the list is short.

• All Is Lost, the results of feeding the worst possible player stats into the NBA Y2K game.  I don’t watch basketball or play sports games, but the forced scrambling of the game is entertaining.  The author did a similar thing to Madden NFL.  The animated GIFs are the best.  (via)
• UNIX Uniforms.  (via)
• UNIX: Root Cause Analysis.  Always makes you sound fancy to say that.
• jwz says: stop centralizing things.
• The Burroughs B6500 Status Report.  That’s some oooooold computing there.  (via)
• textql: SQL queries on CSV/TSV, which is something I’ve silently wished for before.  (via)
• Not sure what this is or the source, but it’s neat looking.

Your unrelated link of the week: Another Cyriak music video, this time for Bonobo.  (via)