Viewing profile — ataylor284_

It is definitely possible on the C64. Here's a video exploring the technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX3rVIIaVQk .

Yup. If you call a function with the C calling convention with the incorrect number of parameters, your cleanup code still does the right thing. With the Pascal calling convention,…

As much as I love emacs, I think cut and paste is better metaphor for text editing than kill and yank. Once the key combos are part of muscle memory, the value of mnemonics goes do…

There were no words for this stuff. People just made it up, and it took years for something to emerge as the de facto standard term for a collection of data persistently stored. Th…

One of the great things about C64 BASIC and similar MS BASIC derivatives is it's extensibility. It defines a bunch of pointers, including $0033 this article uses, that control the …

Did some development for a server application that supported RS/6000 among other platforms. AIX on RS/6000 was a nice enough Unix but, being used to Solaris, everything seems just …

This is exactly how I feel about Dune. The invented words and world-building are overwhelming at first, but once you absorb them it makes the narrative richer.

Two of my favorites, too, although I'd go with Anti-Fragile from Taleb. I think Anathem is Stephenson's best. The Diamond Age is also really good. For every one of his books, I jus…

The core of this a library called nsync. It appears most of the improvements by Justine are upstreamed into nsync itself which doesn't have any of the baggage of cosmopolitan. What…

The writeup suggests this implementation is optimized for the not-locked case: > uses an optimistic CAS (compare and swap) immediately, so that locking happens quickly when there's…

I second this. OIDC is much nicer and my experience using it with federated identity sources through AWS Cognito was smooth. The sad reality is that SAML is already entrenched in m…

When I had to figure out how to add SAML authentication to a custom application, I built a barebones, no-framework Java application[1] just to understand the webflow. A good way to…

More than half of Canada's coal production is metallurgical coal, suited for steel production. Most of that is mined in BC and exported. The grandparent comment and the above respo…

Playing cards in some parts of Europe have alternate suit symbols. Spain and Portugal use clubs, swords, coins and cups. My favorite aspect of this deck is that the clubs symbol is…

You're probably right. There's a lot of code for those processors that's not going away. Too bad though, the 6809 is the pinnacle of 8-bit CPU architecture. It's the result of anal…

I own a Gakken GMC-4 microcomputer, which appears to be a remake of the FX-System. It's a fun little 4-bit computer with a hex keypad for input. For output, there's 7 LEDs, 1 7 seg…

It's been a while since I've run with that configuration, but setting the variable server-use-tcp to non-nil enables it. On startup, the server creates a file with the connection d…

I don't run emacs in a terminal emulator. Emacs is my terminal emulator. All my terminal programs get run in a (graphical) emacs shell-mode buffer. The rare program that needs full…

You could do something like this to get dependencies almost for free: .depends: $(SRCS) $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -MM $(SRCS) -o .depends -include .depends

Make's killer feature was conditionally rebuilding based on changed dependencies. Back in the day, it was easy for a medium to largish software project to take many hours, or even …

I never used WordStar itself, but the integrated editor in Turbo Pascal used the same key bindings. I haven't used anything related in many years but I'll never forget ^kb and ^kk …

Posix systems, at least, allow a file's timestamps to be set with utime(2) and related system calls, but a problem with this is that utime with an arbitrary time is not permitted i…

Moving files to backup instead of copying is better. First, the file modification dates remain meaningful. When a backup is made, the backup file has a last modified date of when i…

Yeah, it's a seamless experience to run a program in shell-mode that invokes $EDITOR and it just pops into a new buffer. Edit, hit C-x #, and you're back at the shell.

This is great, but I think a detail about the Commodore 64 wrong. While the VIC-II is indeed bank switched and can only see a window of 16k, the character ROM is only mapped into 2…