I don’t usually do Happy New Year posts, but given how “well” 2020 went I thought it was appropriate to start 2021 with a whimsy post.  This post is probably going to date me since it’s been a few years - OK, decades - since these were current.

Well, it’s not the actual computer, but the same model. I was first exposed to computers during the personal computer heyday of the early 1980s. Back then, my school had two computers, one TRS 80 Model 3 and one Sinclair ZX81. The ZX81 was used to teach pupils rudimentary programming. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the teachers actually built it from a kit as that was the cheapest way to get into one.

Keep in mind that I grew up in Europe where computers like the Apple ][ were very expensive and didn’t gain much traction in the educational field. Or with hobbists, either. Yes, there were some around but you saw a lot more VIC20s, C64s or Ataris. A lot of schools including mine bought European manufactured computers like Sinclairs and later, Amstrad/Schneider CPC 464s.

Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!

And no, I didn’t put a bid on that Quadra - not quite feeling this flush at the moment.

A problem archivists have been bringing up for a while now is that with the majority of content going digital and the pace of change in storage mechanisms and formats, it’s becoming harder to preserve content even when it is not what would be considered old by the standards of other historic documents created by humanity.

Case in point - the efforts required to preserve even recent movies as described in this article on IEEE Spectrum. As the article mentions, we’ve already lost access to 90% of US movies made during the silent area and about 50% of movies made before 1950. I suspect that the numbers for the European film industry might be even worse thanks to World War 2. However, keep in mind that those are numbers for movies stored on a more durable medium (and yes, I know that the early nitrate film is about as flammable as they come).

I still use the mutt email client when I’m remoted into some of my FreeBSD servers. It might not be the most eye pleasing email client ever, but it’s powerful, lightweight and fast.

Mutt has a very powerful feature that allows you to tag messages via regular expressions. It has a couple of special pattern modifiers that allow you to apply the regex to certain mail headers only. I can never remember so I’m starting a list of the ones I tend to use most in the hope that I’ll either remember them eventually or can refer back to this post. The full documentation can be found here, so this is only a cheat sheet that reflects my personal usage of the mutt regex pattern modifiers.

It might sound paradoxical, but in general, writing more code is easier than writing less code that accomplishes the same goals. Even if your code starts out clean, compact and beautiful, the code that is added later to cover the corner cases nobody thought of usually takes care of the code being well designed, elegant and beautiful. Agile programming offers a solution, namely constant refactoring, but who has time for that? That’s why I occasionally give myself the 10% code reduction challenge and I encourage you to do the same.

… I’ll just point them to this article and explain that I’m just sweating the details. If you’re a programmer, that is a lot more important than most people and most programmers would believe.

A couple of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so productive ones.

Why I’m Productive in Clojure. I’ve long been a fan of Lisp and Lisp-like languages, even though I wasn’t originally that happy with having Lisp inflicted on me when I was at university. Because it was weird and back then I didn’t much appreciate non-mainstream languages. These days I do because that’s where you usually find better expressiveness and ideas supposedly too strange for mainstream languages. I guess that makes me a language hipster.

For those of us who remember when the BBC Micro was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of Elite. Matt Godbolt is building an emulator in JavaScript. First post of his series can be found here.

My hardware “scrap pile” contained a Dell Inspiron 530 - not the most glamorous of machines and rather out of date and old, too, but it works and it runs a few pieces of software that I don’t want to reboot my Mac for regularly. Problem was, I had to rebuild it because it had multiple OSs installed and none of them worked. Note to self - don’t mix 32 and 64 bit Windows on the same partition and expect it to work flawlessly.

Ah, a meta blogging post. Sorry, I try to keep these to a minimum…

For those who haven’t been caught up in the hype yet, Ghost is a new blogging system that is much more minimal than WordPress and the other more popular systems. It’s designed to be much smaller and faster (plus it uses a lot of cool tools like node.js, handlebars etc).

I recently tried to set up the 0.3.3 release on FreeBSD and overall it was straight forward. Node.js is available as a port - just make sure that you’re installing the regular node port instead of the node-devel port as the latter will install node 0.11 and Ghost wants to use 0.10.