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tniemi

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How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf] 3 years ago

Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-Hist...

5.3 Early Formatters

The problem was that there was no interactive computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi- nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.

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Methane might be made by all living organisms 4 years ago

This could explain the Mars methane mystery.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/first-you-see-it-t...

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...

Methane on Mars is expected to have a rather short lifetime – around 400 years – because it is broken down by ultraviolet light. Atmospheric mixing (for example, by winds) should quickly lead to a more or less uniform background concentration. But previous observations hint at seasonal variations in methane abundance, with concentrations varying with location and time. If this is correct, there must be an active source to replenish the supply and, at the same time, a relatively quick way of removing it in order to account for the apparent rise and fall in the measurements.

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Z.lua – A new cd command that navigates faster by learning your habits 7 years ago

Hopefully they have read the Jargon File:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html

Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for 'Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.

In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete * $ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported * $ not found, assuming you meant 'delete * '. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.

The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete * $ twice.

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From macOS to Windows and WSL 8 years ago

For me the main problem with NTFS is the file locking.

With Unix you can pretty much delete any file at any time (sudo ftw!) but not with WSL. Opening a file in an editor on the Windows side is often enough to lock things up.

(The case sensitivity is another sore point, but that can be averted by using only lowercase.)

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Solving Sol 8 years ago

This reminds me of the description texts in heraldry.

For example, the coat of arms of Finland: "Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man's arm vambraced and embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper."

And somehow from this emerges a special lion with a sword through it's head: https://satwcomic.com/coat-of-arms

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Show HN: A raytracer to shade topographic maps in R, Part 2 8 years ago

Because that would be cheating. ;) People like to create things from scratch.

Also, I like that quote: > Ask the internet how to do something and you’re likely to get a bunch of digital shrugs and maybe—if you’re lucky—a passive aggressive link to a Wikipedia page. Tell the internet you’ve done something—and they’ll tell you exactly what you can do to improve it.

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