Author: Justin Sherrill

I bring the audio and the visual today.

• The History of Mana.  (via)
• Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from.  (via)
• Futuristic User Interface 16.  (video)
• Floppy table.  The storage space is clever.
• As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software.  This time, it’s Rust.  (via)
• Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!”  It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere.  (via)
• Best of Vim Tips.  (via)  Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
• vimawesome.com.  Pretty!  (via)
• The Internet of Newsletters.  A reaction (and a good one) to social media.  (via)
• Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
• “I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
• Awww, it’s cute.
• Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars.  And a counter-argument.  (both via)
• Modern tech in 1977 Atari style.  (via)  Did I link this before?  I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
• Sorta related: Betamaxx.  (via)
• “Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
• Lisp implementation in sed.  (via)
• Unix: having fun with diff.
• Visualizing Algorithms.  Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap.  (via)

You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis.  I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.

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.