Remote Login: "A Lot Like Astral Projection"

I approve!

pic.twitter.com/PFBB90zs2Q

— Science Diagrams that Look Like Shitposts (@scienceshitpost) January 26, 2020

(Tip of the cap to Charles W. Clark.)

Alan Kay's 1972 Vision of the Personal Computer

This is very, very cool!

Alan Kay's 1972 vision of the personal computer: "Let's just do it!" Fundamental design principles of computation, robustness & evolvability, anticipates issues in augmented intelligence & AI-human cooperation (user just a process, too) ht @michael_nielsen https://t.co/8Wn3pXQNkl pic.twitter.com/BC1oW9883N

— Jessica Flack (@C4COMPUTATION) February 21, 2018

Blessing Computers with Holy Water

On Facebook, Jean Bellissard shared the following rather amusing article. Besides laughing, an immediate thing to do was to do a Google search and see if this was fake. That led me to this article, which notes among other things that a picture being circulated widely now is from 2013. However, the following quote also appears in the article:

"Apparently, it’s a common practice in Russia for Orthodox priests to bless server rooms and other technology equipment. So, it won’t be wrong to assume that priests might be really called in upcoming days to bless the computers once again. I just hope that priests would be careful enough to not get the water inside the PCs; I’m sure that computer suppliers won’t be enthusiastic to replace damage due to water."

I am amused.

Also, our printers could use some holy water.

Minimizing Windows to See a Desktop.

A sign that I am very tired: I didn't remember if my hotel room has a phone on the desk with my computer and I wanted to check if I can reach over and use that when the expected call comes, so in order to check to see what's behind my field of view (my laptop screen), I tried minimizing my browser window.

Augmented reality for the win? I did see one of my desktops as a result...

RIP Ray Tomlinson (1941–2016)

Today we lost Ray Tomlinson, credited as the creator of e-mail.

We also lost Nancy Reagan today.

Flirting with Danger

I am flirting with danger with the two parts of my new portable harddrive.

Error Message in the Sky

Well, it's not quite a wheel in the sky, but this error message in the sky is awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Guillermo Valle Pérez.)

RIP UGCS (1989–2016)

Well, from the e-mail today (forwarded to my current account from a chain that started with my UGCS account), it looks like (barring a miracle) Caltech's UGCS cluster is going to bite the dust in a few months. As Blake Jones wrote, "Alas, poor envy! I knew it well." To quote Steve Ginzburg, it's the "End of an era". Indeed it is.

UGCS has served the Caltech undergraduate and alumni communities for 26 years, but technology has moved on. Forwarding will still occur, but I assume that in a few months my "awesome" undergraduate website (from the days of "Oh, cool! I can put up a public page on this thing called the Web!") will go away. (Maybe it will be visible on an internet archive.)

Headline: Michigan School District's Air Conditioning Controlled by Amiga Computer for 28 Years

Yup, that's right: a Commodore Amiga has controlled the air conditioning in a Michigan school district since it was installed in the 1980s. That's pretty spectacular (and also "awesome").

(Tip of the cap to Myah Evers.)

Font Battles and a Childhood Fascination with Fonts

According to Sang Hoon Lee, the journal club for our collaborator Beom Jun Kim has devolved to include font battles in the slides that the speakers are employing. He posted a picture on Facebook to prove it. (I realize that most of you will not be able to access that picture; I am including it here for my own reference so that I don't need to go elsewhere to look it up.)

This reminds me of something: When I was a kid, I bought the program Fontastic so that I could design fonts without going into Resource Editor (aka: ResEdit) and destroying the systems on my disks (and needing to wipe them clean) in the process. I bought Fontastic as a toy. In short: I could totally win a font battle. You can read a bit about Fontastic in the Wikipedia entry about its sequel ("Fontographer"): "In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr founded the Altsys Corporation to develop graphics applications for personal computers. The first foray by Altsys into commercial font editing software was a bitmap font editor called Fontastic, released in the mid-1980s for the Apple Macintosh. The program, developed by Altsys founder Jim von Ehr, was able to edit the native bitmap font format of the Mac."

Yes, I really was editing fonts on my computer at the age of 8. It's really no wonder that I am still very anal about such things. (None of my fonts were any good, but that's a different issue.)

ASCII Art and its Ancestors

I mostly just looked at the pictures --- with only occasional forays into the accompanying text (partly because I am damn tired and have some other text that I want to read before I crash completely and partly because I think the pictures themselves are the best part) --- but this article on ASCII art and its ancestors is way cool. I enjoy both the art itself and the notion that people worked really hard to create it with whatever computational (or typing) medium that was available. Very nice!

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Update (2/07/14): Tom Prescott has sent me a link to an ASCIImation page.

Debugged!

What is old is new again: Last night, I extracted a stuck moth from between my laptop screen and its keyboard. My computer is now debugged.

1982 Study by Institute for the Future

Wow, this 1982 study by Institute for the Future is almost dead-on correct. Just wow.

They did get the bit about the N-party system wrong, however.

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Bletchhhhhhhhley Park

I took my second trip to Bletchley Park today. Here are some pictures. I imagine that some of you might convince me to take a third trip there when you visit me in the UK. :)

RIP Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Apple founder and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs died yesterday (or today, for those of you in earlier time zones, like in the USA). I can't say I expected to see that. I'm quite the Apple-phile, and (biased as I am) Jobs was quite the innovator.

(Tip of the cap to numerous people on my Facebook friends list.)

This one is for all of those programmers out there...

According to this comic strip from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, humans are part of the junk code. Well, maybe.

(Tip of the cap to Greg Fricke.)

Top Secret Rosies

Here is a cool article on CNN.com about the "Top Secret Rosies", who played a crucial role in the history of computers. (Here the word "computers" refers both to machines and to humans who do computation.)

Even more "awesomeness"

I made a brief pitstop at Tim and Christina's place to pick up my laptop (and other stuff in my laptop bag) for my meeting at Peet's Coffee at 4pm (so, imminently).

I wanted to make sure to put my computer to sleep. I noticed that it was asleep, so in order to put it to sleep, logic dictated that it would be necessary to wake up my computer.

And, therefore, I woke up my computer in order to put it to sleep... because I wanted to make sure to put it to sleep before putting it away to bring with me to my meeting.

I am awesome.

(Technically, my logic was impeccable, though I did manage to inadvertently rediscover the inverse operator in the process...)

My wireless printer/scanner/copier is set up!

I bought my first printer ever when I purchased my new computer last month. In my immense laziness, I only set it up today. The printer isn't exactly fast, but it is nice to finally have one at home. I'll also be upgrading my computer desk soon, as Somerville is putting some furniture into storage, and the items in question include a couple of desks that are better than mine. I used the ad hoc wireless network option to set up the printer. For now, I am calling the network "Astral" and the printer "Styx", though that goes better with previous themes than with current ones. (Back in the day, the airport network that I briefly set up was "Phlogiston"---that's for all you Spelljammer aficionados out there---but I haven't bothered setting up my airport base station for many years. Maybe one of these days, I'll bother putting my Wii online. :) )

$150,000 per song?

Um, isn't $150,000 per song just a little bit steep a price for music piracy?

(Tip of the cap to Christopher Voyce.)