ahefner

7 ms·

31.
by ahefner 2y ago
On the NES (or other 6502 machines), use assembly. That CPU just isn't a good target for C - pointers are awkward, you can't really do stack frames, and the addressing modes don't even support 'structs' very well. F
32.
by ahefner 2y ago
Never apologize.
33.
by ahefner 2y ago
It would be interesting to see if there are any useful integrations possible between this and 'Clouseau', the Inspector provided by McCLIM (McCLIM being a somewhat idiosyncratic UI toolkit implemented in pure Common Lisp). Years a
34.
by ahefner 2y ago
"were as"
35.
by ahefner 2y ago
"were around". Not "where around". Sorry to nitpick but I've seen this grammatical error in comments here three times just this morning and it begins to grate.
36.
by ahefner 2y ago
"were". Not "where".
37.
by ahefner 3y ago
autoconf is a mess for developers, but when it's working it is great for users who want to build software from source. Fantastic feedback and help at the command line to enable/disable features and dependencies. Much friendlier th
38.
by ahefner 3y ago
> ...or even just looks (i.e. fake chrome bits, spoilers and vents that don't do anything etc.) Yes, and such decisions exemplify the horrible taste of many car designs, designers, and possibly buyers.
39.
by ahefner 3y ago
And a partial answer to this, my memory being jogged by the linked article's mention of Autodesk Animator (which I spent a lot of time with as a kid), is that Autodesk Animator includes a font SIXBYSIX.FNT appears identical to the Atar
40.
by ahefner 3y ago
One thing I've wondered lately is about the 6x6 fonts (or perhaps one particular one) that I've seen in all kinds of old (late 80s to very early 90s) games, particularly on Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. The Atari ST had a 6x6 font i
41.
by ahefner 3y ago
I think they're generally reliable. I have a pair of Filco keyboards, one five years old, the other ten, and I haven't had any trouble except I did have to open the older one up and clean it recently as a couple switches had gotte
42.
by ahefner 3y ago
...and yet Python people routinely fail to grasp this and end up writing ad-hoc config language interpreters on top of yaml anyway. Granted the conveniences of Python syntax for code are mostly lost when trying to express tree structured da
43.
by ahefner 3y ago
So I inherited a machine in our lab last week (not a "production" or "test" server, just a random machine being used as a dev environment) and decided to change its hostname using systemd's hostnamectl. Subsequently
44.
by ahefner 3y ago
Thanks for the information!
45.
by ahefner 3y ago
Interesting. I was considering opening a second account specifically as a backup card and hedge against lockouts while travelling, and Schwab was high on my list, but it sounds like based on your experience that they are not fit for purpose
46.
by ahefner 3y ago
What if, like so many capable engineers, he deep down loathes Windows and wishes to do it harm?
47.
by ahefner 3y ago
Yeah, it's either crushing everyone with an invincible upgraded flagship, or mastering the delicate art of the Secret Spathi butt-torpedo strafing run and save-scumming whenever you accidentally lose your 1 Spathi ship. I loved the mel
48.
by ahefner 3y ago
The contents of the line-tracking buffer (ignoring its gap for a moment, which you could move anywhere) only change when the text-buffer's gap moves. When that happens, each time a line break moves across the gap, you need to update it
49.
by ahefner 3y ago
Moving the gap from front to end - it takes O(n) time to do that both on the text (gap) buffer and the line-tracking (gap) buffer, so you're only a small constant factor worse. Find the position of the Nth line is O(1) because N is eit
50.
by ahefner 3y ago
A neat trick with gap buffers is you can track the line boundaries as indices into the gap buffer itself rather than 'real' indices into the document. In this way the indices of line starts seldom change except when the gap buffer
51.
by ahefner 3y ago
"Think of the children", except the population increasingly doesn't have any. It's nice then to imagine that approach would stop working at some point in the future, but probably not.
52.
by ahefner 3y ago
I understand in practice that "nobody knows or likes Prolog" is a valid criticism, but was it a sound idea technically?
53.
by ahefner 3y ago
There's a kernel of a brilliant idea to it, but when it's really just marketing speak for spinning up a VM or container on demand, it's kind of a joke.
54.
by ahefner 3y ago
Oddly, I grew up (in the 80s!) feeling the way you describe about the 2600, that it was just too crude to revisit.. but when i finally bought one some years back, paired with an authentic CRT, I was really enchanted by the elemental simplic
55.
by ahefner 3y ago
I had a good hacking opportunity on this game as well - a chap named Ravi Iyengar made a General MIDI sound driver you could drop into these SCI0 games (apparently they all did MT-32, but none did General Midi, and the driver from the later
56.
by ahefner 3y ago
Curious. For a few years I'd have looked to Google Maps / Google Local as one of the great services Google provides (along with gmail, Chat, Android, Chrome and ChromeOS development...) as an argument for how ad-supported Google i
57.
by ahefner 3y ago
Any reflections / lessons learned from this project?
58.
by ahefner 3y ago
Thanks. The original linked site was very suspicious. Seemingly invented persona with stock photo, site pushing credit card offers... "Thought leader in travel" indeed.
59.
by ahefner 3y ago
I first saw this animation on a VHS tape as a kid - ever since I learned about Lisp and Symbolics and all that history, I've thought it would be cool to redo this animation rendered in real-time. Hardly a challenge for modern computers
60.
by ahefner 3y ago
Was that really a thing? I ask because it feels like what I see people doing today around cloud and related technologies (kuber-this, kafka-that, etcd.), choosing solutions even before defining their problem.

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