Odlyzko-Tilly-Raymond scaling

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

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

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.

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.