Viewing profile — kiwidrew

The game engines for C&C and Red Alert are full of Dune II references; as just one example, the factions (GDI/Nod or Allies/Soviets) are still called "houses" in the internal confi…

There's also the 'reticulate' package for R, which allows you to import Python libraries and exchange objects between the two languages. It includes a proper Python engine for knit…

excellent! I'm tired of search engines that optimize for natural language queries because the inevitable trade-off is that they become useless at keyword/exact queries.

The 8088 has a four-byte instruction queue, and at times when the data bus would otherwise be idle the bus interface unit will prefetch the next instruction byte. So fetch and deco…

> it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics fun fact: some of the symbols included in ASCII were intended to be used as (non-spacing) diac…

When implementing the decoding in silicon, each bit you want to compare requires one or more transistors; but no transistors are required for the "don't care" bits.

What are your thoughts on handling the authenticated portions of the API? For example, retrieving the list of subreddits a user is currently subscribed to? Or posting a comment / c…

Shame that the shell script is so concise compared to the "G-expression" mess that's meant to replace it.

Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only r…

This is fascinating, I really did not think it was possible to implement even a tiny subset of C in just 512 bytes of x86 code. Using atoi() as a generic hash function is a brillia…

I miss the days when NZ was truly innovative. RealMe was very promising when first introduced. Of course it was never going to be adopted en masse by the private sector since part …

Norman Wildberger's "Wild Linear Algebra" series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIljB45xT85BhzJ-oWNug... His geometry-centric approach to linear algebra was exactly what I …

You think this is bad, check out the default Windows 1.0 colour scheme! Here's some screenshots to whet your appetite: http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html

If you have a "stock" IBM PC, just the standard dual 360K floppy drives without a hard drive, it's actually possible to run this demo! Use DOS 3.30 and FORMAT /S a blank floppy, co…

Yep, there was a (brief) period of time -- before MS-DOS became wildly popular -- when Microsoft was pitching Xenix as the future operating system for the PC. (Also worth noting is…

CP/M was (mostly) written in the PL/M language and ran on the 8-bit 8080/Z80 processors. 86-DOS was written in pure assembly language and ran on the 16-bit 8086 processor. Tim Pate…

There's a good chance that all of the components in the car have similar/identical command sets for test/debug operations, even if the individual components have been produced by d…

Did any terminal ever implement the ANSI escape codes for block mode (i.e. form) fields? The block mode terminals on IBM mainframes (e.g. the 3270) have all the functionality of a …

Originally HTML just had the element, which was very similar to Gopher's primitive "search" functionality. Adding the element with named input fields was a pretty obvious next step…

Ah, that makes sense!

> the 'whitespace operator' for concatenating two strings with a space Very interesting, awk(1) also does this style of string concatenation; does anyone know of other languages wi…

And the award for most innovative use of the manufacturing test mode goes to reenigne (of 8088MPH fame), who used it to make a web service that runs user-submitted snippets of 8086…

Actually the cross-platform Tk widgets use an internal "option database" which is essentially just Tcl-flavoured X11 resources. The typical usage is to just set the various options…

I used to look down on PHP, but after being forced to use it for a while I begrudgingly came to admire it for all the reasons that you've pointed out. And I started using PHP by ch…

On the Nissan Leaf, the CHAdeMO fast charging port connector exposes (one of) the car's CAN busses (a little in-car network). It's unauthenticated and has commands for charging and…