Assorted geeky stuff
Hey, remember VisiCalc, the precursor to Lotus 1-2-3? Well, maybe you don’t. I do, mostly as a “business” app that I couldn’t afford (on a platform I couldn’t afford–the Apple ][). And I wasn’t that interested in that kind of software at the time, mostly games caught my fancy when I was trying to get a VIC-20 of my own.
Anyhow, what’s really cool, is that you can download the reference card and a working executable of VisiCalc (for the PC), from Dan Bricklin’s site. And great reading for the geeks is some of the design/programming notes from Bob Frankston’s pages. If you’ve never coded in a memory-limited environment, or in assembly, or for performance, it’ll be eye-opening reading. Lots of stuff that has been ingrained into my habits throws back to those days–including a few habits I’ve had to break to avoid premature optimization. I often think about students who learn Java as their first (does this happen?) programming language, are missing so much of the coding landscape, context which is entirely necessary to building quality systems. Sigh.
Got my my first issue of “ACM Queue” in the mail the other day. I was shocked they actually sent it to me in Spain, for the free intro offer, and supposedly at the same subscription rate as for US orders. Anyhow, it’s decent. A little bummed the first issue I got was the June (maybe the mail is just that slow), but content-wise there’s some really interesting stuff. The focus of this issue is ’storage’ and the interview with Jim Gray was pretty interesting; the article (primary) on physical disk stuff from a Seagate guy (Dave Anderson) was not that thrilling, nothing too new there. But the overall level of the articles is good, not quite up to some of the orther ACM pubs but worth the time. In the end, I doubt I’ll subscribe–I’ll just read the interesting-sounding articles on their free site. As much as for any other reason, I don’t feel the need to have trees destroyed and stuff mailed around the globe, for me to receive this info. On the other hand, I’m not giving up my New Yorker subscription anytime soon 
I forgot whose blog I found this link on originally (sorry), but I’ll link to this here too, ‘cuz it’s high on the geek factor: not quite a DIY project, but a nice one-off: a homebrew Segway clone.
Tool links: URL Bandit watched the clipboard and snatches out URLs it sees, handy, especially for blogging…