John Siracusa talked about his two favourite textbooks on Rec Diffs #233: Modern Operation Systems, and Computer Networks, both by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. I had those textbooks at uni as well. I still do, actually. They’re fantastic. If I were to recommend something on either subject, it would be those two. The two Tanenbaums. I will add that my favourite textbook I had during my degree was Compilers: Principal, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V.

Manual Moreale wrote an interesting post about self promotion, where he reflects on whether closing out all his People and Blogs post with a line pointing to his Ko-Fi page is too much: And so I added that single line. But adding that single line was a struggle. Because in my head, it’s obvious that if you do enjoy something and are willing to support it, you’d probably go look for a way to do it.

Okay, maybe not “crashing”, a.la Hey Dingus. But some thoughts did come to me while listening to Hemispheric Views #109: HAZCHEM that I’d though I share with others. Haircuts I’m sorry but I cannot disagree more. I don’t really want to talk while I’m getting a haircut. I mean I will if they’re striking up a conversation with me, but I’m generally not there to make new friends; just to get my hair cut quickly and go about my day.

I’ve been ask why I’m using Scribbles given that I’m here on Micro.blog. Honestly I wish I could say I’ve got a great answer. I like both services very much, and I have no plans of abandoning Micro.blog for Scribbles, or visa-versa. But I am planning to use both for writing stuff online, at least for now, and I suppose the best answer I can give is a combination of various emotions and hang-ups I have about what I want to write about, and where it should go.

I love coding and anything computers. I’ve spent, and continue to spend, a significant amount of my life writing code. And on the whole, it’s been a magical experience. But not always. Sometimes I encounter something that makes me wonder why? Why was that designed that way? Why doesn’t it work? Why couldn’t this be easier? You encounter something that blocks you or puzzles you, maybe even questions how anything in computers can work at all.

This page documents the extra commands from Small Calculator. These were taken from source code, pretty much as is, but styled to suite the web, and any spelling mistakes fixed. These were retrievable from the application itself by typing “help” follow by the command. Available Commands The list of available commands are as follows BLOCK <statements> Executes a block of statements HELP [topic] Display help on topic DEFFNC <function> Defines a new function ECHO <text> Displays text on the line ECHOEXPR <cmd> Executes a command and displays the result EXEC <file> Executes a file of commands FUNCTIONS Displays all predefined functions IF <pred> Does a command on condition RETURN <val> Sets the return value RETURNEXPR <cmd> Sets the return value to the result of <cmd> Type "HELP <command>" to see infomation on a command BLOCK BLOCK {<cmd1>} {<cmd2>} .

Date: Unknown, but probably around 2005 Status: Retired Give me Delphi 7, a terminal control, and an expression parser, and of course I’m going to build a silly little REPL program. I can’t really remember why I though this was worth spending time on, but I was always interested in little languages (still am), and I guess I though having a desk calculator that used one was worth having. I was using a parser library I found on Torry’s Delphi Pages (the best site at the time to get free controls for Delphi) for something else, and after getting a control which simulated a terminal, I wrote a very simple REPL loop which used the two.

While listening to the Stratchery interview with Hugo Berra, a thought occurred to me. Berra mentioned that Xaomi was building an EV. Not a self-driving one, mind you: this one has a steering wheel and peddles. He made the comment that were Apple to actually go through with releasing a car, it would look a lot like what Xaomi has built. I haven’t seen either car project myself so I’ll take his word for it.

My answer to @mandaris question: How many of you are using headers in your blogging? Are you using anything that denotes different sections? I generally don’t use headers, unless the post is so long it needs them to break it up a little. When I do, I tend to start with H2, then step down to H3, H4, etc. I’d love to start with H1, but most themes I encounter, including those from software like Confluence, style H1 to be almost the same size as the page title.

Word of caution for anyone passing Go slices to a function which will sort them. Doing so as is will modify the original slice. If you were to write this, for example: package main import ( "fmt" "sort" ) func printSorted(ys []int) { sort.Slice(ys, func(i, j int) bool { return ys[i] < ys[j] }) fmt.Println(ys) } func main() { xs := []int{3, 1, 2} printSorted(xs) fmt.Println(xs) } You will find, when you run it, that both xs and ys will be sorted: