Viewing profile — johnhattan

Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand. There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended…

Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I cou…

Ahh, thanks for the link. The webcam covers I'd seen in the past were just removable plastic stickers, and I was having a hard time visualizing what counts as "thin". One of the ph…

I remember a conversation I had with my daughter in the car when she was starting out with algebra... Me: Is 9.999... the same as 10, or is it just really close to 10? Kid: Really …

According to the blog post, one of their tasks is to release a version of the build tool that will work locally.

If it's a "correct" maze with exactly one way to get from any one square to any other square (as Eller's mazes are), then it doesn't matter where your entry and exit points are -- …

It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure. According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer si…

Yes I did. I just wanted to relate my personal experience with it. Sometimes I'll see an article about something new just to discover that it's actually for an update that's a coup…

Just tried it. Looks like the latest Windows update installs a stub that sends the Windows app-store to the Python installer page if you type "Python" from the command line. FWIW, …

There's a good free audiobook version on librivox.org

Also the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I'd love to try out some old 16-bit and/or MS-DOS games on it. But I don't see a way to copy files into its sandbox. Anyone had any luck doing this?

That's always my problem when I look at lisp for game programming. If I say "I want to write a standalone 3D iPhone game using C#", there are plenty of sites that'll show me exactl…

Actually not having a fully rendered environment worked for Myst. If you were looking out a window or at a door, it was a good bet that there was something important to the plot th…

Rather odd that they're only showing the video as a downloadable MP4 file. I didn't see a copyright notice, so I put it up on YouTube. https://youtu.be/R3Ax7U5dvbc Note that the vi…

I just tried today's daily Windows x64 installer, and Windows Defender is blocking it, reporting that it's infected with "Trojan:Win32/Fuerboos.D!cl" Might be a false positive, but…

Yeah, I'd been using the Chromecast support in the earlier 3.0 betas. Seemed to be working just fine, although it wasn't getting the "friendly" name that I'd set for the device. So…

HaxeDevelop is a rebranded version of FlashDevelop. While it's built in .NET, apparently enough of it was built with Windows-only code that porting wasn't in the cards. HaxeDevelop…

My personal theory is that they're trying to improve the JS engine in Electron so they can improve VSCode. The VSCode people have posted some performance complaints in the past. I …

IIRC, you can use either. Whatever quote you used to start the string is the one that will end the string. var foo:String = "foo"; // foo var bar:String = 'bar'; // bar var fooquot…

A bunch of years ago, there was a "Menuet" product that was a cross-platform C++ UI library for Mac/Windows/Whatever. Did they expand the underpinnings into a complete OS, or is th…

Yeah, a WHOIS shows that it's owned by Andrew Anglin (the original owner) until 2020. I assume that the registrars (GoDaddy and Google) just aren't letting it point to anything.