In my forty-odd years of employment, I kept a list of things I wanted to do, but for reasons of expense or time, I had to put off. “Fly an airplane” was one of them. “Write a novel” was another. … Continue reading
Category Archives: Software
Computers Lie and Cheat
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In the 70s, we had a Scrabble game where I worked, probably on an IBM 360 mainframe running VM1 or similar. The program may have come from what is called netnews, a very early and nerdy-type of what is now … Continue reading
Cooking Up Plutonium-238
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Somewhere between 1995 and 2000, I was sent to teach a pSOS+ class to Westinghouse engineers in Savannah, Georgia. At the time, the debate between Assembler-language versus C for application programming was still hot and heavy. Programs written in Assembler … Continue reading
Things That Go Bump in the Night
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Welcome This is an overview of threads and processes from an old-timer. Historical comments are included to help illuminate the whys and wherefores. While primarily focused on Unix-like realms such as Linux, most of what’s here applies to all contemporary … Continue reading
What’s a DNS, and Who Cares?
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On the web, we use the names of computers or providers such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Even when you’re using Facebook’s app, it is also using a computer’s name. This is because we remember names much better than numbers. … Continue reading
Houston, We Have A Problem
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The log in our family firewall caught one of our home computers assaulting another one with three packets. It’s called a “Denial of Service” attack and it comes from a virus, affectionately named as you can see in the snippet … Continue reading
It’s 1984 Again
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Big Brother is watching you. Or to be precise, he’s watching your Android phone. Specifically, if you have an Android cell phone and have shopped for any new app, then you’ll have a Google account. There, you can find all sorts … Continue reading
Binary
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Lots of things come in twos. Here are three (!) examples. Everything in your computer is, at its lowest level, remembered as a set of binary “bits” each of which can be either a “1” or a “0” and if … Continue reading
Four
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Work days remaining: Today, Friday, and then next Monday and Tuesday Professional History 1968-1972, American Express, Programmer – This is stint #1 of 2 with American Express. It started as “Space Bank” and did computerized hotel and motel reservations. I started … Continue reading
Doing It The Right Way
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Six work-days to go. In school, I learned that good engineering can be done once but to consistently build things well, you need to write down the process you are following, and then repeat that process each time. Of course, … Continue reading