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

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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

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loccount: A faster SLOC utility

Here’s my first new project in a while – loccount, inspired by David A. Wheeler’s sloccount tool but much faster and with broader language coverage. I actually wrote this as a learning exercise in the Go language. You can find more details in my NTPsec blog post on Grappling With Go. If you like it,… Continue reading loccount: A faster SLOC utility

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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

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

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Spelunking the alt-right

Recently, on a mailing list I frequent, one of the regulars uttered the following sentence: “I’m told Breitbart is the preferred news source for the ‘alt-right’ (KKK and neo-nazis)”. That was a pretty glaring error, there. I was interviewed on Breitbart Tech once. I visit the site occasionally. I am not affiliated with the alt-right,… Continue reading Spelunking the alt-right

Some of my blogging has moved

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, other than short posts on G+, because I’ve been grinding hard on NTPsec. We’re coming up on a 1.0 release and, although things are going very well technically, it’s been a shit-ton of work. One consequence is the NTPsec Project Blog. My first major post there expands on some of… Continue reading Some of my blogging has moved

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