Posts

Halloween Memories!

Bruce Ediger

Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.

Gall's Law

Bruce Ediger

I ran across an engineering aphorism or principle called “Gall’s Law”:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

GPP Quine

GPP Quine

Bruce Ediger

GPP is the General Purpose Preprocessor, a macro preprocessor for various forms of structured and unstructured text.

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. There’s usually a few conditions on what the program can do, like not reading it’s source code during execution.

I wrote what I believe to be the first non-vacuous quine ever in the GPP language.

Verifone Terminals Run Linux

Verifone Terminals Run Linux

Bruce Ediger

That’s a Verifone credit card terminal at the King Soopers #1 (13th and Speer in Denver, a.k.a. “Scary Soopers”) pharmacy, November 12, 2020.

What are all the packages?

What can we learn from this display?

Folders Are Bad

Folders Are Bad

Bruce Ediger

I’ve written before about how much I despise baby talk descriptions of operating system abstractions as promoted by Microsoft.

The use of “folder” is particularly pernicious.