I’m back from vacation – World Boardgaming Championships, where this year I earned laurels in Ticket To Ride and Terra Mystica.. Catching up on some releases I needed to do: * Open Adventure 1.3: Only minor bugfixes in this one, it’s pretty stable now. We gave 100% coverage in the test suite now, an achievement… Continue reading Three easy pieces
Category: General
Managing modafinil
For the last year or so I have been deliberately experimenting with a psychoactive, nootropic drug. You have to know me personally (much better than most of my blog audience does) to realize what a surprising admission this is. I’ve been a non-smoking teetotaller since I was old enough to form the decision. I went… Continue reading Managing modafinil
Open Adventure ships
Colossal Cave Adventure, that venerable classic, is back and better than ever! The page for downloads is here. The game is fully playable. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise, since it has been stable since 1995. One minor cosmetic change a lot of people used to the non-mainline variants will appreciate is that… Continue reading Open Adventure ships
Correction to: “Set the WABAC machine…”
Henry Spencer, upon reading my previous post, had this to say by email: I won’t argue with Eric about the significance of that little event, but I do have to interject a few corrections about the historical details. For this, I’ve got a couple of advantages over him. First, being somewhat of a packrat, I… Continue reading Correction to: “Set the WABAC machine…”
Set the WABAC to 1984: Henry Spencer getopt, and the roots of open source
I excavated a bit of hacker history from old memories today. Not dead history either, but an important beginning of some large good things.
You shall judge by the code alone
I support the open letter by Drupal developers protesting the attempted expulsion of Larry Garfield from the Drupal commmunity. As a Drupal contributor who has never in any respect attempted to tie the project to his beliefs or lifestyle, Garfield deserves the right to be judged by his code alone. That is the hacker way;… Continue reading You shall judge by the code alone
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: the *science* version
My last G+ post reported this: Something out there kills about one oceangoing ship a week. It is probably freakishly large waves – well outside the ranges predicted by simple modeling of fluid dynamics and used to set required force-tolerance levels in ship design. Turns out these can be produced by nonlinear interactions in which… Continue reading The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: the *science* version
From molly-guard to moggy-guard
In ancient lore, a molly-guard was a shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day The Great Beast of Malvern, the computer… Continue reading From molly-guard to moggy-guard
Four modes of creole formation
A ‘pidgin’ is a language formed by contact between speakers of different languages. A ‘creole’ is what happens when a pidgin becomes a birth language for children raised where a pidgin is spoken. Pidgins are simple languages, stripped to the running gears, Often creoles re-complexify in later generations, retaining grammar mostly from one parent language… Continue reading Four modes of creole formation
When ancient-history geeks go bad
A few minutes ago here at chez Raymond, my friend John Desmond says: “So, have you heard about the new Iraqi national anthem?” I said “Uh, OK, I’m braced for this. What about it?” He said “In the good old Sumer time.” I pointed a finger at him and said “You’re Akkad!” Yes. Yes, we… Continue reading When ancient-history geeks go bad
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.10
And the latest revision: Things Every Hacker Once Knew. This time: The Break key. uuencode/uudecode. Why older Internet protocols only assume a 7-bit link. The original meanings of SO/SI. WRU and station ID on teletypes. BITNET and other pre-Internets. There is one respect in which working on this is changing my historical perspective. The section… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.10
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.9
I’ve shipped another revision of Things Every Hacker Once Knew The pace of suggested additions and corrections has slowed down a lot; I think this thing is stabilizing. I gave in and added the one bit of paper-tape lore people have been bugging me to include, about why DEL is 0xb1111111. Learning that the NSA… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.9
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8
Heritage games. The legacy of all-uppercase terminals. Where README came from. What “core” is. The ARPANET. Monitoring your computer with a radio. And more… Things Every Hacker Once Knew The response to this document has been nothing short of astonishing. More than half of my non-spam mail over the last three weeks has been people… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.7
Did I say Things Every Hacker Once Knew was stabilizing? Silly me… Here’s the 1.7 version. Substantial new material on the BBS scene – this is my answer to the people who have been bugging me to at least mention XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM. The expository approach I’m taking is to bin all of UUCP, the BBS scene,… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.7
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6
The newest version is here. I think it’s stabilizing. The rate of comments and submissions has been dropping. Changelog: How VDTs explain some heritage programs, and how bitmapped displays eventually obsolesced them. Explain why the ADM-3 was called “dumb” even though it was smart. There’s also a mention of RS-323 on network gear. Still nothing… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6
In which, alas, I must rattle a tin cup
The work on NTPsec is going very well. Unfortunately, since we lost our CII funding in September, my personal situation isn’t.
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.5
The 1.5 revision of Things Every Hacker Once Knew is out. Alas, I had to drop the reference to the Space Cadet keyboard. Turns out it shipped a 32-bit status word and this had nothing to do with 9-bit bytes at all. The indirect reference to the SAIL extended ASCII keyboard is still in. Patrick… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.5
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4
New version 1.4 at: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ New content in this one is an expanded section about outboard modems, their descendants in today’s technology, and the curious survival of the Hayes AT command set. I had actually received a couple of previous requests to add material on the Hayes AT convention, but rejected them on the grounds… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.2
The response to this piece has been remarkably broad and positive. I have to note, though, that I didn’t write it as a nostalgia trip – I don’t miss underpowered computers, primitive tools, and tiny low-resolution displays. At least people did notice that it isn’t a you-kids-get-off-my-lawn grumble. I think it’s good for younger hackers… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.2
How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community
Every once in a while I post something just to have it handy as a reference for the next time I have to deal with a galloping case of some particular kind of sloppy thinking. That way I don’t have to generate an individual explanation, but can simply point at my general standards of evidence.… Continue reading How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community