Dav3xor

This illustration is missing a layer. Buried down in the silt, under the abyssal plane at the bottom of the ocean.. Ken Thompson.

Just yesterday I was working with a data storage system that uses 6 bit bytes organized into 12 bit words.

Haha, this is one of many 6 bit byte systems still used in aviation every day.

It's still around, they just changed the name. And it's still a boondoggle.

It is. The story of modern GIS systems is mostly about figuring out who dumped what <choose your own chlorinated organic compound> into a river.

His book Insanely Great has more info on PARC, although only through the lens of the development of the Macintosh.

This is very good advice, even though 95% of the people who hear it will still think they're special and don't need to learn their craft before jumping into cool stuff.

The thing I always remember from reading Feynman's various autobiographical essays -- he would always try to figure out something from first principles.

If you don't know the 'simple, always true' laws of what you're working with, you're going to be afloat on a sea of conjecture and fuzzy thinking.

A cable winch like they use with sailplanes would work really well for this.

From a 30s plan, or something more modern?

There's something about the moving starfield in that game...

Oh man... Derek is an interesting guy. He hired me to do encoding and distribution -- both the business and software sides. I did ok with the software (except for ~2006 Ruby GC unknowingly causing me problems), but my business/people skills weren't up to it at the time. The business side was very very difficult though -- it was really difficult to get the retailers to take more music after the initial load.

The day I got georeferenced, shaded, 3d terrain working for a synthetic vision system, singlehanded, in bare OpenGL ES 2.0.

Friend of mine at work took my picture seconds after I got it working, you can see the crazed look in my eye.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/24025582@N03/4150935582/in/dat...

The worst day of my professional life was probably the day Derek Sivers canned me because, "I want to do your job myself."

I've worked on safety critical software, for a couple different companies. Code quality is a very real problem.

One company, the guy in charge of software was a CE, who would have been fine as long as the hardware was at the level of sophistication as what he was taught at school (He knew 8051 microcontrollers really well). He was really good at giant switch-case statements. Function pointers were a little newfangled and suspect.

Basically, he knew enough software engineering to get the hardware working.

That's one big problem that needs to be addressed -- there aren't a lot of people being trained in the software side of embedded systems. You have CS grads who for the most part aren't given much training on the low end of the abstraction spectrum, and the opposite for CE people, so there tends to be a very fuzzy area in the middle that causes arguments between the two camps.

The other company I worked for literally had crazy coding standards that basically dictated 20,000 line functions and a bizarre sort of anti-DRY mindset that I will never understand. You were encouraged to c-c c-v a block of code, change one line, move on!

Given what most of those machines were used for, and their scarcity, this has to be the holy grail of data recovery.

Heinlein's 'Year of the Jackpot' is a rumination on this topic.

I've worked at a couple different companies that made safety critical software, and I have to agree with joezedeco.

Dav3xor's Law -- Code Quality is Inversely Proportional to Risk.

Some of the break rooms where I work have a computer you can do searches on. There are some Google image searches that just shine like diamonds. Most of them are somehow PBS related for some reason. "Bob Ross" "Fred Rogers" "Ernie and Bert", etc. I started an odd little game of people leaving google image searches on the break room machines.

You'd walk in and.. "Hedgehogs!"

One could say Alan Kay is still around, much like one could say giant redwood and sequoia trees are 'still around'.

Always glad to see someone discover one of the greats. :)

(edit) Oh wait, you probably already knew he existed. Tried to read too much into your post.

Not every architecture has an FPU, and doing floating point in software is obviously pretty slow.

Sure, absolutely. Just wanted to point out that the article isn't very sophisticated.

If you're iterating over all your points calculating distances, you are going about this the wrong way.

(edit) The author could use my handy python quad tree if he so wishes -- https://github.com/Dav3xor/pyquadtree, and if he asks nicely, I could even add support for simple approximation of spherical coordinates.

And for people who've never been to San Francisco -- this bridge is a huge huge thing, and any problems with it are a very big deal.

Hehe, more suited to my chaotic (yet very mild) local weather. A pictograph doesn't show the forecaster's confidence in what it portrays.

curl http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/PQR/AFDPQR | less

I wrote one too -- putting all that clutter under the primary flight instruments (airspeed/altitude/heading/etc) was always a compromise, and probably not terribly helpful. Looks super cool though. Sells boxes.

Decent article full of good information. One exception -- the C standard is vague on how bitfields are implemented and the compiler can rearrange them in any way it pleases. You are not guaranteed efficient packing, placement order, or size.

Aha! he at least spent a summer there at one point...

Hmmm, some of the files in [Ivy]<Poppy> are owned by Rivest -- did he work at PARC? His own Biography and Wikipedia don't say much.

It's difficult to do, but these guys did it -- http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

eskimo.com in Seattle ran on a Model 16 for several years. It was definitely Microsoft Xenix. My brother wrote the multiuser chat system on there, nice piece of software.

Mc Frontalot has quite a few fans, he's got the biggest name in his genre -- plays PAX ever year...