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10505

Generating the Alphabet

My current generative artwork-in-progress includes text, but I don’t want to use a font. In browser based art work, using a “web safe” font could produce inconsistent results, while including a font file would mean a large file size. Additionally, I don’t want a visual element of the project to be s

10508

Care

My tech posts often come from kind of a negative place. I wish it wasn't like that, but we all know how the mind works: writing with nuance and positivity is a lot harder than fired-up screeds of the "someone is wrong on the Internet" variety.

10514

Simplicity of IRC (2022)

During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…

10516

40 Years of Programming

In April, 1984, my father bought a computer for his home office, a Luxor ABC-802 , with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a yellow-on-black screen with 80 by 25 text mode, or about 160 by 75 pixels in graphics mode, and two floppy drives. It had BASIC in its ROM, and came with absolutely no games. If I wanted to play…

10520

YX Problem

Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they're really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I've seen...

10523

Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP

Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier . I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop…

10525

Breaking down tasks

Something missing from this series on estimation, until now, has been a discussion of how to “break down” a project into a well-defined task list. I’d not previously written about this because, to me, it’s largely intuitive. But it isn’t for everyone, so this post fills the gap, and explains in detail how I break down…