About the site

Except when otherwise noted or when I am not the original author, I grant a license to all content on https://brendanzagaeski.appspot.com/ under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file.

Links

Devio.us

Free OpenBSD shell accounts. Good stuff. My thanks to the server admins!

Propping Open the Document Trapdoor (Google Tech Talk)

An ideal document format would retain elegant typesetting on a variety of display sizes while remaining computationally efficient. Neither PDF nor XHTML satisfy this ideal. Discussed in the talk: COG PDFs add more structure to plain PDFs while staying within the confines of the PDF specification.

Dan's Domain Site

History about top level domain names and suggestions for more consistent domain names.

cat-v.org, especially harmful.cat-v.org/software/

Related: Plan 9 from Bell Labs

suckless.org

dwm

Tiling window manager in one .c file

tabbed

Stand-alone tab-style window management utility

stali

Statically linked Linux system. Related: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

Chuck Moore and Forth

…everyone should have a custom editor for editing their program files… An editor is so easy to write that why not? (Presentation to SVFIG [around 21:16])

That is if a small group of people got together and decided to challenge Microsoft, we could replicate their software in 1/10^th of 1% of the code… But again, why destroy an industry? That is probably not a wise thing to do. (Presentation to SVFIG [around 52:10])

First the software problems were solved. It was easy to write applications, trivial to write applications. (transcript)

Richard Stallman on user-modifiable software

Users must have the freedom to change their programs to do what they need.

Smalltalk and Self (Self)

Turtles all the way down or in this case objects all the way down. Apparently not Logo (Logo) turtles.

Alan Kay, for example The computer revolution hasn't happened yet

With some paraphrasing between [ ] brackets:

[If you try to blow up a dog house by a factor of 100, it gets weaker by a factor of 100. In fact, what will happen is that the dog house will collapse. There are two choices when that happens.] The most popular one is to say, Well, that was what we were trying to do all along, put more garbage on it, plaster it over with limestone, and say, Yes, we were really trying to do pyramids, not Gothic cathedrals. That in fact accounts for much of the structure of modern operating systems today.

From the 1997 OOPSLA conference (thanks for the transcription!).

Scheme

Almost everything is an S-expression.

Updates