Technicalities
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Tattoos?
I need to first establish that I do not have any tattoos, and I do not anticipate ever wanting to get one. I entirely lack whatever it is that motivates people to get tattoos. Nevertheless I respect it quite a lot. It strikes me as a very human thing, and in a way a sort Continue reading
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Simple tools
There are certain things I very much like about old-school unix software. I’m talking about the command-line utilities that were each designed to do one thing very well. To accomplish a more complex task, or in modern lingo, “workflow,” you could easily combine several programs, sending the output of one to the input of another, Continue reading
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It figures
There is a competition called the International Math Olympiad (IMO). It’s an international competition for high school students. It consists of six questions that competitors have to answer within a time limit. There are only six questions, but these are extremely difficult questions, of course. At least at the level of excellent, but pre-university mathematicians. Continue reading
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Back to the future
I was recently struggling with Yet Another bloated, unwieldy commercial application when I suddenly remembered the Unix “philosophy.” It’s been codified lots of times, but maybe most succinctly by Peter Salus: – Write programs that do one thing and do it well. – Write programs to work together. – Write programs to handle text streams, Continue reading
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Dispatch from nerdland
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has just released (or re-released, sort of) the MS-DOS Editor that shipped in 1991 with MS-DOS 5.0. I used that version of MS-DOS, and remember it pretty fondly, even though by then I was mostly using Macs. And I even remember the editor, which in those days was just called Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.