I’ve been ill with influenza and bronchitis for the last week. Maybe this needs to happen more often, because I had a small but fundamental insight into network scaling theory a few minutes ago. I’m posting it here because I think my blog regulars cast a wide enough net to tell me if I’ve merely… Continue reading Odlyzko-Tilly-Raymond scaling
Month: March 2017
How to act like you’re bright
This blog post is brought to you by a recent bad experience I had watching a 5-minute clip from Big Bang Theory on the recommendation of a friend who thought I might find it amusing. Bleagh. This is supposed to be a show about geniuses? It’s not. It’s a show about a dimwit’s idea of… Continue reading How to act like you’re bright
src 1.13 is released
My exercise in how small you can make a version-control system and still have it be useful, src, does seem to have a significant if quiet fanbase out there. I can tell because patches land in my mailbox at a slow but steady rate. As the blurb says: Simple Revision Control is RCS/SCCS reloaded with… Continue reading src 1.13 is released
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
cvs-fast-export 1.43 is released
Maintaining cvs-fast-export is, frankly, a pain in the ass. Parts of the code I inherited are head-achingly opaque. CVS repositories are chronically prone to malformations that look like bugs in the tool and/or can’t be adapted to in any safe way. Its actual bugs are obscure and often difficult to fix – the experience is… Continue reading cvs-fast-export 1.43 is released
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.12
Latest version, as usual, here. New stuff: Note just how crazily heterogenous the six-bit character sets were. FTP. Ctrl-V on Unix systems. A correction about uu{de|en}code. Timeline updates for ’74 and ’77. The pace of submissions continues to slow.
An apologia for terminal games
Yes, to a certain segment of the population I suppose I define myself as a relic of ancient times when I insist that one can write good and absorbing computer games that don’t have a GUI – that throw down old-school in a terminal emulator. Today I’m shipping a new release of the game greed… Continue reading An apologia for terminal games
Semantic locality and the Way of Unix
An important part of the Way of Unix is to try to tackle large problems with small, composable tools. This goes with a tradition of using line-oriented textual streams to represent data. But…you can’t always do either. Some kinds of data don’t serialize to text streams well (example: databases). Some problems are only tractable to… Continue reading Semantic locality and the Way of Unix
Ones-complement arithmetic: it lives!
Most hackers know how the twos-complement representation of binary numbers works, and are at least aware that there was an older representation called “ones-complement” in which you negated a binary number by inverting each bit. This came up on the NTPsec development list recently, with a question about whether we might ever have to port… Continue reading Ones-complement arithmetic: it lives!
How to change the world in Zen easy lessons
This morning I stumbled over a comment from last September that I somehow missed replying to at the time. I suspect it’s something more than one of my readers has wondered about, so here goes… Edward Cree wrote: If I’m really smart enough to impress esr, I feel like I ought to be doing more… Continue reading How to change the world in Zen easy lessons
Reposturgeon recruits the CryptBitKeeper!
I haven’t announced a reposurgeon release on the blog in some time because recent releases have mostly been routine stuff and bugfixes. But today we have a feature that many will find interesting: reposurgeon can now read BitKeeper repositories. This is its first new version-control system since Monotone was added in mid-2015.
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.11
The newest version of Things Every Hacker Once Knew is only a minor update. There’s material on SIGHUP; six-bit characters on 36-bit machines; a correction that XMODEM required 8 bits; and why screensavers are called that. New submissions are ramping down; I don’t expect to need to issue another update of this for some time.