Technicalities
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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 newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!