Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
A few years back I tweeted [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”
It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek reaction (with a way better picture below) to a very valuable post by b0rk (Julia Evans) on both Twitter and Mastodon [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “bases” / [Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans: “bases title: bases # we usually…” – Mastodon for two reasons:
- There are various interpretations of bases
- Octal is very important to educate as errors introduced by its support are hard to spot even if you do know about octal.
Back to Julia’s post:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, 68k, 8086, Assembly Language, bash, bash, C, C++, Chemistry, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, EPS/PostScript, Event, Haskell, History, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Jon Skeet, LifeHacker, Mathematics, PDP-11, Perl, PHP, Power User, Python, science, Scripting, Software Development, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/20
Edit 20260221: the below WDR 2 link has been renamed into [Wayback/Archive] Artemis II – Launch with Launch T0: 2026-03-07 01:29:00 UTC (yup, that T0 is T-zero, not T-oh) which the Americans date as 206-03-06 as they use local EST time which is only valid at their east coast.
Artemis II testing and launch videos, including timeline, can be viewed from [Wayback/Archive] Artemis II – WDR 2.
Yesterday, as part of the launch vehicle system tests, the second wet dress rehearsal was performed.
Somewhere the next few weeks, a launch is anticipated.
Via: [Wayback/Archive] Post by @marijkelouise.bsky.social — Bluesky
--jeroen
Posted in LifeHacker, Physics, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/07
Ain’t history extra lovely when someone discovers the original drawings of what her dad had sent to space?
Back in the 1970s, Frank Drake did two memorable things: he helped design the Pioneer plaque (sent to space in 1972 on Pioneer 11) containing among other things pulsar map, and later helped design the 1977 Voyager Golden Record (sent to space in 1977 on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) again containing the pulsar map. In between, he helped designed Arecibo message broadcasted to space in 1974.
And guess what: today is the 50th anniversary of that message being broadcasted.
Almost 10 years ago, in 2016 his daughter Nadia Drake found back the original drawing of the pulsar map: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01
I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:
- the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
- infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.
In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.
But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.
On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in
I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:
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Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: 1, 7 | 4 Comments »
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 