I spent almost a decade covering Iraq, first arriving in 2002 when the country was still under Mr. Hussein. It has now been 20 years since the start of the war, with all of its shock and awe. But on this anniversary, instead of thinking about how the war began, I’ve been contemplating whether wars end for the people who lived through them.
Something I wrote at the time (February 2003):
I think that peace should be given more of a chance, and that a multi-lateral inspections process, like the one we have, should be allowed some more time. It’s like watching impatient kids who just want to jump on the war bandwagon. Yes, we may have probably given Iraq more time than they deserved already (11+ years or what have you), but that doesn’t mean that Step 2 is to annihilate the country since inspections “haven’t worked yet”. I think all this pressure on Iraq is good, however I think it has moved past the point of military pressure to have become military preparation.
Instead of Raspberry Pi OS, one can now use CircuitPython instead. CircuitPython running without another operating system (OS) is typically known as “bare metal”. This greatly simplifies system maintenance and makes it easier to treat the Raspberry Pi like a microcontroller. In addition, running CircuitPython on the Raspberry Pi increases the amount of flash and RAM available to CircuitPython programs. Finally, it also adds the ability to use displayio on HDMI displays.
Mountain Duck lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS and the File Explorer on Windows. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume.
Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician? A Photoshop clone written by someone who has never used Photoshop professionally? But I don’t want to dwell on the negative side of this.
Here’s my advice to people who make these queries:
Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of them.
🌀 Config-free text editor and IDE limited to VT100. Suitable for writing git commit messages, editing Markdown, config files, source code, viewing man pages and for quick edit-compile cycles when programming. Incl. syntax highlighting, jump-to-error, rainbow parentheses, macros, tab compl., cut/paste portals, a gdb front-end & ChatGPT supp.
Suddenly I am able to walk normally. There are no tremors. The annoying signs of dyskinesia — those involuntary movements I described above — seem to disappear.
[…]
I have been able to cut my medication in half and I recently returned to work after four months away. I sleep soundly and, while I still tire easily, my mood has brightened.
I will have my own series of questions to understand the client’s current situation, what they are looking for, and if it’s a good fit for my interests.
Personal computing is one of the most important things humanity has ever built.
Personal computers — in all forms: desktops, smartphones, tablets, and so forth — are capable of helping you:
Connect with resources to learn virtually anything already known;
Connect and collaborate with others, across the globe;
Create new things and share creations with others;
Visualize, reconsider, and reconfigure your thinking, information, and processes;
Develop and explore your own thinking.
That last one is an incredible thought: plenty of things let you explore someone else’s thinking, but personal computers can help you explore your own thinking, giving you living spaces to externalize, review, expand, and refine your thoughts on the things that matter most to you.
So, what is the “essence” of computing then? I’d say universality. The universality of computing makes it possible to bend it to reflect and amplify just about any kind of ideology or cultural construct. In the recent decades, some ideas have just been so overwhelming that they feel very essential even though they are not. In an alternate timeline, other ideas might be dominant.
Checked C is an extension to C that lets programmers write C code that is guaranteed by the compiler to be type-safe. The goal is to let people easily make their existing C code type-safe and eliminate entire classes of errors. Checked C does not address use-after-free errors. This repo has a wiki for Checked C, sample code, the specification, and test code.
My thirtieth anniversary is coming up this November. I’m crazy about the job. I love the creativity of puzzle editing. I feel I’m always learning stuff. I laugh a lot. And I love puzzle people, because they are interesting, smart, creative, witty people.
The reason why this doesn’t happen is because of the Lisp Curse. Large numbers of Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. Look more closely: Large numbers of the kind of people who become Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. And they would have to cooperate with each other on a design which was not already a given from the beginning. And there wouldn’t be any external discipline, such as a venture capitalist or other corporate master, to keep them on track.
I feel discouraged spending more time developing apps for Apple platforms, when there is no guarantee that I can distribute my creations. It takes a lot of time to get an app into a state where it’s ready for review. Besides the actual coding, Apple requires developers to work on marketing materials like screenshots, copy, and a website before submitting the app. It’s even more frustrating considering all the trash apps that they not only offer, but advertise in their store today.