081508.txt « sugardeath

081508.txt

Posted on August 15, 2008

9:28

Got to work fifteen minutes late (technically an hour fifteen, as I originally planned to be here by eight), will be leaving an hour early (which would be the normal time if I did get here at eight, though). Whatever. It's my last day and I need to tidy my room a bit before Jacki gets here.

I've got a cricket in my room. I think this also happened first semester last year? It's pretty annoying when you're trying to sleep from 6:15 to 7:30 and the thing just keeps going and going and going. It was kind of ridiculous.

I wonder what good stuff I shall find on Wikipedia today.

I hate these v-neck undershirts... They feel funny, plus I have exposed skin. I am either going to go shirtless if I want to expose skin, or wear a full shirt if I don't want to. Nothing in between thank you. I don't have cleavage to show off or anything. Plus a white undershirt collar looks a bit better beneath a blue dress shirt than skin does.

I am so majorly screwed for classes right now, this is going to be fun.

The ubiquity of BASIC interpreters on personal computers was such that textbooks once included simple "Try It In BASIC" exercises that encouraged students to experiment with mathematical and computational concepts on classroom or home computers.

So true. My math books in junior high (and maybe highschool?) always had BASIC code in the back. It was pretty cool.

Dijkstra believed that computer science was more abstract than programming; he once said, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

Hence why I got out of CS... It's all.. sciencey with it's theories and math. I don't want to spend days figuring out the quickest algorithm for something, I want to spend days programming something useful or fun.

Recently, a set of TCP/IP routines[3] for QuickBASIC 4.x and 7.1 has revitalized some interest in the software. In particular, the vintage computer hobbyist community has been able to write software for old computers that run the DOS operating system that allows them to access other computers such as on a LAN or the internet. This has allowed systems even as old as an 8088 to serve interesting functions, such as acting as a web server among other things.

Neat.

rubbermallet.org - for all your.. um.. web/irc server needs for DOS. Really neat stuff. I like that he's gotten an IRC server written in QuickBASIC to run with "acceptable" performance on a 4.77MHZ 8088... with 640KB of RAM. Why? Why not. Nothing like good ol' minimalistic programming. More programmers need to realize that..

The TSR has now almost disappeared completely, as multitasking operating systems such as Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux provide the facilities for multiple programs and device drivers to run simultaneously without the need for special programming tricks, and the modern notion of protected memory makes the kernel and its modules exclusively responsible for modifying an interrupt table.

Oh TSRs, you really were quite amazing.. even if the only TSRs I used were game trainers =P

10:17

Apparently daemon is a homonym of demon? I always thouhght it was DAY-men.. Hum.

"Random article" gives a lot of song and album related articles. Accept when it gives "Random (disabiguation)." How.. appropriate.

Hah. The bit bucket article contains funny phrases such as "write once read never," "First In Never Out," and "Write Only Memory."

Neat, I didn't realize there was a /dev/full device...

10:52

Did I just crash IE by trying to display a gigantic SVG from Wiki? Silly ActiveX controls..

12:01

Unix philosophy... unix wars...

Plan 9 has the cutest mascot.

12:14

WorldWideWeb (WWW) [the first web browser] was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993, thus making it free software. Some of the code still resides on Berners-Lee's NeXTcube in the CERN museum and has not been able to be recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact.

That is pretty awesome.

12:25

The 486DX2 66 MHz was the most widespread high-end 486 version. For many players of video games during the early and mid 1990s, towards the end of the MS-DOS gaming era, it was often coupled with 8 - 16 MB RAM and a VLB video card. This configuration was capable of running every title available for several years after its release, making it a "sweet spot" in CPU performance and longevity.

I think Dad had a 486DX? I remember reading 33MHz on the case sticker.. I could be wrong. He tossed the machine a few years back, I wonder did he kept the processor?

Windows 95 signaled the end of the 486 era due to its high memory requirements (16MB to perform as well as Windows 3.x with just 8MB). Many 486 users at that time were running eight 1MB 30-pin SIMMs leaving no available slots for expansion. As 4meg 30-pin SIMMs were still very expensive at that time, it made more sense to buy a Pentium rather than spend a premium on upgrading a system that was nearing the end of its service life.

Win95 WAS a bitch to run on that machine..

Huh.. Haiku, a free BeOS replacement, became self-hosting (the ability to be built from within itself) in April of this year. The project began in 2001. That's pretty good, I'd say, as being self-hosting is a major milestone. I can't find when linux became self-hosting, so it's kind of hard to compare...

Apparently there are releases of Opera, Firefox, SeaMonkey, VLC, and Quake II and Quake III for BeOS. And they run natively in Haiku.

It is kind of sad that Be Inc. died when they did. I remember being interested in running BeOS years ago, as it looked pretty neat and certainly different from Windows. I think the reason I never got around to it was no longer supported or something and I couldn't find any downloads (BeOS wasn't a free OS, which is probably why)? Be Inc shut their doors on November 15th, 2001. Not all that long ago.

The default browser for BeOS, NetPositive uses Haikus as error messages. More programmers need to be creative like that.

12:40

I'm trying to take my mind off of Jacki coming in today. The less I think about it, the sooner it will arrive.

Huh, there was a new release of WordPress today... and it's a month ahead of schedule?

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress's popularity.

Damn straight.