IEEE Spectrum article on The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.
This was an interesting read, especially for the cloak-and-dagger tactics they had to resort to not only to create the OS in the first place, but to do things like distribute bugfixes (because management was afraid that distributing bugfixes would be considered “support”). Literally on the level of “go to the mailbox on such-and-such street after 2pm.”
(Rescued from my Google+ archive)
You’ve probably seen it: comments that say something entirely vague and either flattering or condescending, that could apply to just about any article. And then they link to an “escort” site, or a pill seller…or some small-town insurance office in the middle of nowhere who hired a black hat “SEO expert” who promised he’d get them backlinks and doesn’t care about the site’s reputation.
I got a great one last week: Somehow instead of getting one randomly-chosen message from a set, I got all of them in one comment: Continue reading
After looking through zillions of bounce messages for patterns, I’ve got to say:
“unknown or illegal alias” is now my official favorite way of saying that an email address doesn’t exist.
I’m 90% certain that I managed to (barely) spot Mercury below and to the left of Venus from the grocery store parking lot just after sunset. Appropriately enough, the one other time I think I spotted Mercury, it was also from a grocery store parking lot.
It was like trying to spot one slightly brighter pixel on a high-resolution display in the middle of a gradient. Faint enough that if I hadn’t seen it in the same place each time I looked, I would have dismissed it as something in my eye, or part of an after-image. I couldn’t really see much more than the fact that there was something there where Google Sky Map said Mercury should be.
It’s really neat that Jupiter and Venus sort of bracketed the twilight sky!
You know you’re a programmer when you misspell “cash” as “cache.”
Blast from the past. Doing some email testing & dredged up my old netscape.net address. Had to re-activate it, and the handful of messages I probably saved way back in the day were gone, and now it’s aim.com instead…but it’s still got my years-outdated contact list, including people I haven’t interacted with in a decade.
As near as I can tell, I put together the list when I was in college, and never updated it. It’s still got all the old uci.edu and geocities.com addresses.
Oh, wow…there’s a pager number in there! (Remember those?)
Originally posted on Google+
Some interesting technology articles I’ve found over the last few weeks.
