- tmux — GNU Screen-alike, with vertical splits and other goodies. (via Hacker News)
- Gamifying Education (Escapist) — a more thoughtful and reasoned approach than crude badgification, but I’d still feel happier meddling with kids’ minds if there was research to show efficacy and distribution of results. (via Ed Yong)
- Rule of 72 (Terry Jones) — common piece of financial mental math, but useful outside finance when you’re calculating any kind of exponential growth (e.g., bad algorithms). (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Spam Hits the Kindle Bookstore (Reuters) — create a system of incentives and it will be gamed, whether it’s tax law, search engines, or ebook stores. Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word. (via Clive Thompson)
ENTRIES TAGGED "unix"
The stories behind a few O'Reilly "classics"
A look back at "Unix Power Tools," "DNS and Bind," and other O'Reilly titles.
Tim O'Reilly: "It's amazing to me how books I first published more than 20 years ago are still creating value for readers."
On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan discusses Dennis Ritchie.
I talked on Friday with Brian Kernighan about Dennis Ritchie, who sadly passed away two weeks ago at the age of 70. To a large extent, Ritchie completed what he started.
Dennis Ritchie's legacy of elegantly useful tools
We need more people who share Dennis Ritchie's spirit.
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity," Dennis Ritchie once said. It's true, and we need more geniuses who share his spirit.
Dennis Ritchie Day
On 10/30/11 let's remember the contributions of computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie.
I don't have the convening power of a governor, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day.
Developer Week in Review: Two giants fall
Steve Jobs and the App Store, goodbye to Dennis Ritchie, and an internal Google critique goes public.
Better late than never, a few thoughts on Steve Jobs. Also, a Unix pioneer leaves us, and Google's dirty laundry is accidentally hung out to dry.
Four short links: 21 June 2011
Terminal Tool, Gamifying Education, Exponential Shortcut, and Kindle Spam
Four short links: 10 May 2011
Car Monitoring with iPhone, Multitasking, Privacy, and Cool Unix Tools
- ODB to iPhone Converter — hardware to connect to your car’s onboard computer and display it on an iPhone app. (via Imran Ali)
- Multitasking Brains (Wired) — interesting pair of studies: old brains have trouble recovering from distractions; hardcore multitaskers have trouble focusing. (via Stormy Peters)
- Social Privacy — Danah Boyd draft paper on teens’ attitudes to online privacy. Interesting take on privacy as about power: This incident does not reveal that teens don’t understand privacy, but rather that they lack the agency to assert social norms and expect that others will respect them. (via Maha Shaikh)
- Cool but Obscure Unix Tools — there were some new tricks for this old dog (iftop, socat). (via Andy Baio)
Four short links: 20 April 2011
PDP-11 Emulated, Crowdsourcing Culture, Deep Knowing, and Scientific Method
- PDP-11 Emulator in Javascript, Running V6 UNIX — blast from the past, and quite a readable emulator (heads up: cd was chdir back then). See also the 1st edition UNIX source on github. (via Hacker News)
- 2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription — hasn’t finished yet, as NY Public Library shows. Cultural institutions are huge data sets that need human sensors to process, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in years to come as we light up thousands of years of written culture. (via Liza Daley)
- Programming the Commodore 64 — the loss of the total control that we had over our computers back when they were small enough that everything you needed to know would fit inside your head. It’s left me with a taste for grokking systems deeply and intimately, and that tendency is probably not a good fit for most modern programming, where you really don’t have time to go in an learn, say, Hibernate or Rails in detail: you just have to have the knack of skimming through a tutorial or two and picking up enough to get the current job done, more or less. I don’t mean to denigrate that: it’s an important and valuable skill. But it’s not one that moves my soul as Deep Knowing does. This is the kind of deep knowledge of TCP/IP and OS that devops is all about.
- Kids do Science — scientists lets kids invent an experiment, write it up, and it’s published in Biology Letters. Teaching the method of science, not the facts currently in vogue, will give us a generation capable of making data-based decisions.
Data hand tools
A data task illustrates the importance of simple and flexible tools.
While we have an extraordinary wealth of power data tools at our disposal, we'll be the
poorer if we forget the basics. Here's an example of how simple data tools can be put to use.
Developer Week in Review
Unix IP on the block, AT&T can't keep a secret, and take one tablet and call me in the morning
This week, Unix was for sale, then it wasn't, then it was again. AT&T announced the most poorly kept secret in the history of secrets. And the tablet was all the rage at CES.
Radar 
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