Martin Luther King Jr. Day
January 21st, 2008As we in the U.S. observe a holiday in honor of Rev. King, I recall the night I stood a few feet from him and listened in awe.
XO musing 1.0
January 14th, 20083+ weeks ago my give one get one XO arrived. I’ve been trying to grok it and show it off. This is a summary of observations, ponderings and usage.
A brief history of Dell UNIX
January 10th, 2008[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at https://technologists.com/DellUnix2.2.1/
update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking using emulated VGA and NIC.”
update March 2012: Antoni Sawicki has Dell SVR4 running
under Qemu/Bochs, and subsequently reports that he has
Dell Unix “working correctly” under VirtualBox. CHS]
“Dell UNIX? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
A couple of weeks ago I had my new XO with me for breakfast at a nearby bakery café. Other patrons were drawn to seeing an XO for the first time, including a Linux person from Dell. I mentioned Dell UNIX and we talked a little about the people who had worked on Dell UNIX. He expressed surprise that mention of Dell UNIX evokes the above quote so often and pointed out that Emacs source still has #ifdef for Dell UNIX.
Quick Googling doesn’t reveal useful history of Dell UNIX, so here’s my version, a summary of the three major development releases.
Eulogizing MP3.com
November 29th, 2007The other day I discovered that Amazon would conveniently sell me an MP3 of the “Three Stripped Gears” 1931 rendition of “Black Bottom Strut” for $0.89. What a find! I’d been inspired by Mike Seeger’s version for nearly forty years but only knew of the T.S.G. version through Seeger’s liner notes. (I attempted my own recording for the soundtrack for Jack Moore‘s Sandscript in 1975.)
CSS: "A man's got to know his limitations"
November 2nd, 2007In several senses.
In 1997, when the concept of CSS was in its infancy (see Celebrating 10 Years with Style), I knew I should pay attention. I bought the first edition of Lie and Bos. But for my purposes, CSS wasn’t ready for prime time. Most web people didn’t understand it. Worse, most browsers didn’t implement CSS properly. (Unfortunately, most browsers are still in the “almost good enough” stage with regard to CSS.)