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You Asked For It – You Got It
I’m alone. Alone with one of the most legendary operating system of all times: ITS. You really should try it. It will be easy to setup on one of your spare PDP-10s. Just in case you don’t have a spare PDP-10 lying around: there’s an excellent historic machine simulator called simh (Free Software and runs…
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Google Chrome: Wasting Screen Estate
It’s crazy, but it’s true: The browser most recognised for its screen estate saving, sleek and minimal design is wasting the most of it. When I line up all the browsers on my main machine, it looks like this: That is, from left to right: Chromium 12, Firefox 5, SeaMonkey (aka Mozilla) 2 and links2…
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Pipes for Lisp
I have already blogged about the reading order of programming languages. Thinking about that, a stupid idea formed in my head: What if Lisp had pipes? You know, pipes, as in “|”. These fabulous little things known from such nice expressions like “grep whatever * | more” or “cat stuff | sort | uniq”. Now,…
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Arbitrary Limits, or “64 Bits ought to be enough for anybody”
Let’s talk about integers. Yes, I heard you – yes, there are more interesting things in the world, but let’s just stick to the good ‘ol integer for now. What is an integer? Easy, right? It’s a 16 32 64 Bit signed unsigned number with a maximum range of -2^32 -2^64 0 (or -2^30 or…
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Forwards, Backwards, or nil
Programming languages can be categorised into many, many – uh, categories. That’s no news. But, no matter if you write object-oriented, structured, functional, or brainfuck – someday someone will read your program. (Well, maybe not if you’re writing in Brainfuck… let’s better just keep that aside for now) Now, the first thing that I notice…