The Graphing Calculator Story

Never knew this story before. Apparently two people that got laid off by Apple refused to accept it, and kept working on their project, getting it shipped. That's dedication.

The LOCUS Distributed System Architecture

Never heard of this, but it's an operating system that is built around being distributed across a cluster - similar to the way VMS clusters work, I imagine? Need to get this book and do some more reading.

Epoll via IOCP - Impossible?

I was looking at a Cygwin report about epoll issues and there was a recommendation from one of the devs to look at implementing it with native Windows mechanisms. So I looked at how IO Completion Ports work and, well, it's either impossible or not very easy since the IOCP architecture would require the library to aggressively pre-read data into buffers to serve up via a potential polling call, if I'm reading this all right. Seems unfortunate. Title link is a pros and cons of the two systems and a seeming confirmation of my analysis.

A Bounty of Netware drivers

Found a website that has an abundance of Netware drivers, and poking around a little, tons of nice old utilities for the DOS/Win 3.1/OS/2 era. Give it a look.

HP-UX is officially End of Life

The UNIX wars continue to come to a slow and sad end.

A brief history of TPF

A really good walkthrough of how IBM invented ACP for the airlines, then generalized it into TPF to make a ton of money on high volume transaction clients.

Galois Fields for programmers

A little spooky math for your Halloween, if you want to up your game. Particularly useful for cryptograpy.

Compiler backdoors!

If you remember the famous Ken Thompson Turing Award lecture where he demonstrated how easy it is to backdoor a C compiler, we have here the full code and an in depth look at how it works.

Volume 4, Fascicle 7

A new The Art of Computer Programming fascicle has just been released - let us begin to study it.

New features in Perl 5.40

Just in case you missed it, a list of new features in Perl 5.40. Nothing mind blowing but all appreciated.

Seeing Pi in a Pentium chip die

Amazingly, with the right microscope, you can see where Pi is encoded in a Pentium's internal ROM.

Writing a container from scratch

Great little intro to how Unix tools are used to construct containers, from Kevin Boone.

The end of print computer magazines

I'm a big reader of print - I honestly think my ability to keep up with technology changes has gone downhill as books and magazines have stopped covering techology.

Unless you worked at PC World in 2004, what’s most striking about this chart is Computer Shopper’s utter collapse—from something like 350,000 issues sold at the newsstand a month to fewer than 55,000. As the most catalog-like major computer magazine, it was the most vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by the web. Once a 1,000-page (!!!) monthly behemoth, it withered in more dramatic fashion than PC World or PC Magazine. When it didn’t feel like Computer Shopper anymore, readers lost interest.

I read a lot of Computer Shopper back in the day. We should return.

CodeProject woes

While reading an article about IntelliPort, a very neat HyperTerminal replacement, I noticed a link on the top of the page. Long story short, it looks like Code Project is going offline:

Shortly the site will be switched into read-only mode. Our hope with this change is to allow another party to maintain the site as an archive of great code, articles and technical advice. We are working hard to make that happen and while in no way guaranteed, things look very promising so far. However for the foreseeable future, and possibly permanently, new postings will be disabled, for articles, for forums, for QuickAnswers and the other portions of the site.

Hopefully we can come together and save the site. It has been a part of my professional life since I started coding for cash in 2006.

gmane NNTP is back online!

I was a big gmane.org NNTP user and was distraught when it stopped working. Turns out it just got converted to gmane.io for reasons linked above. I've subscribed to my lists again, very exciting.

Microsoft's UNIX System history

I was a big user of this back in the day, sad to see it die on the vine. I suppose the Linux subsystem has picked up most of the slack but the old system was pretty slick back in the day.

Adding default safety to C++

Many interesting options for making C++ code safer without having to change the code! I'm not maintaining any at the moment but I'm interested to follow these developments nonetheless.

Tribblix - a new Solaris distribution

Nice CD download with plugins to give you the entire environment you need. Well as much as anyone needs Solaris.

CPAN Testers 400k mark

Just hit 400k submitted test results on the CPAN Testers leaderboard, exciting times.

The good, the bad, and the ugly in systemd

An improvement for service management, but also an octopus taking over too much stuff, and not very well.