fbomb

Oh my goodness! This gives me similar vibes as the first time I picked up an issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal in the early 80's. Just awesome!

Well, not exactly a book and not necessarily something I recommend everybody reads, but when I was getting started (early 80's) I purchased a copy of the source code to HDOS, the HeathKit Disk Operating System (written by J. Gordon Letwin, who went on to work on IBM's OS/2). I spent many months poring over every line of 8080 assembly language code in that massive set of bound photocopies of source code printouts. The OS itself, device drivers, command shell, assembler, BASIC interpreter...everything was there. I don't think anyone can realistically do the same thing on a modern system but that experience taught me so much about programming and software engineering.

I learned regex incidentally from reading the classic book "Software Tools" (Kernighan & Plauger). It has a chapter which briefly describes the syntax but focuses on an analysis of the code used to parse & process them (in RATFOR).

My policy has always been to not have children.

Over the last 30+ years, I've found automata theory to be pretty much indispensable. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've run across hideously complex logic that I replaced with a simple and maintainable finite state machine.

got some cool images by keeping the owl drawing and changing the prompt to "batman on drugs"

"Microsoft is going to provide the U.S. military with access to the best technology – all the technology we create."

So which is it? The best technology or the technology Microsoft creates? You can't have it both ways.

The unicode power symbol looks like someone's giving you the finger. Nice.

55. Just stumbled across a philosophy course online. I had always thought of philosophy as archaic, useless and boring. I could not have been more wrong.

Holy crap! this brings back memories. I actually did this many years ago with real logic gates, eventually ending up with a 4-bit CPU that could address an entire 16 nybbles of RAM. That was so much fun!

Nice. Consider adding a favicon so that people who put it on their bookmarks bar without a name can easily distinguish it.

I literally just finished reading an article on how the myth of learning styles keeps getting debunked - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...

I remember these machines fondly. I suppose they were pretty Unixy, but since it was the first *nix system I was ever exposed to, it was hard for me to judge. I do remember they renamed a lot of the command line tools (like fpat instead of grep).

After working on some of the console-based systems of the time (VMS, CTOS, PC-DOS), Apollo systems seemed almost magical to me. It had a mouse and I could just click on a file to edit it (it was also my first GUI).

We used their Pascal compiler to develop software for a certain government agency. The very day that we flew to DC to install the software on their systems, they let us know that they had changed some of the fundamental requirements. Back to the drawing board...

My first thought was that this was a trailer for a new Rambo movie. First Blood: Transfusion

Perhaps, but doesn't the fact that a piece of code has bugs imply that it wasn't actually written as cleverly as possible?

I agree with you completely, but if I actually had a chance to talk to my 18-year old self, I'd tell him to put every penny he could spare into Apple ;-)

YMMV. I found the style extremely distracting to the subject matter.

I handle a number of sites that require a login but need Google to index their content. I verify that Googlebot requests are actually coming from a domain owned by Google. I can't imagine that I'm the only one doing that.

Have a good backup system which keeps every version of a file for at least a few months - or is that too obvious?

"Simulation." - You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Hahaha - I just used GRC's Never10 tool to stop the constant annoying pestering to upgrade to Windows 10. Now, I'm not so sure anymore.

MacBook Pro, mid-2009, 17" 8GB. Original 100GB SSD + 120GB SSD in slot on the side. Replaced the battery a few months ago. Still runs great. I think the DVD drive died from lack of use (and dust).

Am I the only one who thought this had something to do with fantasy games?

Who's Al?

I put avocados and goat cheese on home-made pizza. Absolutely delicious although they turn brown, which can be off-putting.

How does performance compare to 0mq?

It's not really that terrible. If he became the republican nominee, all it would accomplish would be to hand the election over to the democrats on a silver platter.

I found a rather elegant solution for the halting problem. I would share it here but it won't fit in the margins.

I could go for some Chicken Pennsylvania right about now.