zengargoyle

8 ms·

31.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I arrived in 1987 with my Amiga 1000 in tow, quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations (Sun 3/50, 3/60) and started using my Amiga more. They had the same a.out format so you could compile on the Sun systems with the
32.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Now you just need to port it to Raku. (Maybe you have).
33.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
I HATE ring lights. Makes everybody look like they're being abducted by a UFO or something. Or they're robots. They need some diffusion or something.
34.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Thanks, I had that humor idea rolling around in my mind since the early 90's strong AI era but had forgotten where I read it. Minsky sounds about right. Humor is a forced reset of a failed prediction model, reality does not conform t
35.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
No joke, back in like 1985 or so when I was in high school I found a book in the public library that was a tour of various computer languages. Like all of them. PL/I, SNOBOL, Lisp, Smalltalk, the old ones from ancient times. Each ha
36.
by zengargoyle 5y ago
Practice slow, learn fast. Practice fast, learn slow.
37.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Ah, thanks. I wasn't certain that the C-64 or any other computer at the time that could make sounds didn't have the same little demo program. I guess the choice of music paired with the visual explains the flashbacks. As far as I
38.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
What easter egg? I remember my Amiga doing the same thing soundwiseish but that was 8bit digital 4 channel stereo sound on a 68k that could do the reverb in software. This is a simple waveform generating SID chip which is what makes it co
39.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Back in my childhood in the 70-80's era lets say there was a question on an IQ test about just this problem. A ship carrying a bunch of barrels of oil or whatnot is in a lock and needs to be unloaded. There is no crane and people are
40.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Probably part of a media campaign. The Royal Institution just put up a talk by Mark Solms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmuYrnOVmfk "The Source of Consciousness". As pretty usual for Royal Institution talks,
41.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
That makes it Shell Friendly Interactive Shell which is redundant. Then there would be Shell Korn Shell, and Shell C shell. The 'sh' for Shell goes at the end as like a grammatical marker. It's postfix. Sh-FI-sh is awkward
42.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Because it went Shell, then like C Shell, then like Korn Shell, then like Bourne Again Shell, and then there's like TCL shell. The 'sh' goes at the end. Shhhhhhhhh.
43.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Heh, I remember VideoLan from early 2k research university days and using it to play multicast video streams out of places like JPL and other uni test things. The LOL let's do something to justify better network rings so, so true.
44.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
My favorite perl -ne '$l=$_ if rand()<(1/$.); END{print $l}' To pick a random line from a stream of unknown length in a single pass while only storing one line. With some more options it will handle a fortune fil
45.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
There used to be a magazine or book that had this one BASIC program that you had to type in really carefully. That program let you type in a bunch of hex characters with a CRC and would tell you if you typed a line wrong. The rest of the
46.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
This is a good way to blow out your laptop's speakers. One simple `cat /vmlinuz > /dev/dsp` and poof.
47.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
My first hacking as it were was loading the Apple ][ game Lemonade and then writing my own programs. Because Lemonade loaded a bit of code that played music and I could figure out how to play notes and durations once the magic code was loa
48.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Yes and No. PHP (Perl for Home Pages) main starting point for popularity was that it was easy to make into an Apache module that could be used on shared hosting. Perl's Apache module was a single interpreter for the whole server. Gre
49.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
If they were smart, they would throw up some torrents themselves. One for each category, one for the whole library. Make use of the people who would leave up their p2p client to spread the load. Everybody wins!
50.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
I didn't give Ruby a second thought after hearing Matz say something along the lines of being a bit sad that people were using it because it meant that he couldn't change it anymore. It was his toy language that escaped his contr
51.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Back in the 1970's my father worked at a steel fabrication plant building bridges and other humongous things. They would custom order some gigantic socket from Craftsman, use it on some high torque wrench until it shattered, take it b
52.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Yeah, not even only farm kids driving tractors. I was riding a motorcycle in first grade and not long after came the era of go-karts (my dad and friends build the local go-kart track). When dad broke his right arm, I learned to shift left-
53.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Of course if the multiplex stalls or goes down so do all of the connections you have running through it. It's like screwing up Gnome Terminal or similar that uses a main server and multiple clients. Screw one pooch and you're wh
54.
by zengargoyle 6y ago
Oh wow, I think I learned Pascal via Turbo Pascal. When I was 14 in 1984 I went to a Computer Camp at Virginia Tech and we used Pascal in this monolithic IDE sort of thing. Maybe it was actually UCSD Pascal.... We made a simple 16 room 4x4
55.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
My problem with Anki was years ago and was how hard it was to programmatically create/modify decks. The database was a pain and not documented anywhere I could find. Took some work and just digging through it the hard way. I just wa
56.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
Ha, that's how I originally wrote it, but I thought I should get rid of -n and END{} in an attempt to ward of the eww Perl comments. Sigh. But at least now I know that it's called Reservoir Sampling. I had wondered how to genera
57.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
Pick a random line from a file / stream without knowing how many lines there are to choose from in one pass without storing the lines that have been seen. perl -e 'while(<>){$x=$_ if rand()<=(1/$.)}print $x'
58.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
I typed in and saved a disk editor program so I could use it to modify the directory information and skip one of the directory blocks. That's where I hid my secret stuff. And put an invisible control character in the name of the disk e
59.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
On another hand, imagine the original computers on which unix commands were designed for weren't restricted to 300 baud teletype terminals. Are you really willing to wait 3x or 4x the time to read something as the print head goes WHAC
60.
by zengargoyle 7y ago
Leo Brodie's Starting FORTH book. Thirty years ago, sixteen year old me learned to use that FORTH thing found on a public domain Fred Fish disk. https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/

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