Technicalities
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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 (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, 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. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!