Viewing profile — tristramb

Reminds me of a 'mimoid' from Stanisław Lem's Solaris.

He learnt the hard way (as did all those who followed him into Russia)

A year ago I started sending postcards to my 91 year old father because he has difficulties with modern forms of communication. They do still exist but you have to search for them.…

Its so the monsters can't see you.

Or reading a forum populated only by bots.

He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.

"Kinda hard to find where Dijkstra praised something (except Algol 60)." Hamilton Richards, who was one of Dijkstra's colleagues at the University of Texas, told me in an email tha…

If the transients occur immediately following the nuclear explosions but not before them, then the correlation together with the earth shadow deficit suggests that the transients a…

Use the Tor browser

Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not nec…

But it was like this before. Its just that now the sewer that was keeping it all hidden has now broken and it is spewing out all over the world.

Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves.…

"To explain what I was doing in logic-driven software architecture I looked for a good metaphor and, on the spot, proposed that there was a kind of “contract” between caller and ca…

"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered in Brighton, England, with Peter Naur, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Peter Landin as tutors. I attended this course with my colleagu…

I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watch…

It's not unlikely that Donald Knuth looked at examples of 16th Century typesetting when he came to design TeX. Or looked at examples of typesetting that had been influenced by 16th…

I think it is a good general principle that, for any process that is likely to be a tempting target for scammers, you should require a non-electronic step to initiate that process.…

It doesn't have to prevent the scam completely, it just has to make harder for them to scam you than it would be to move on to scam someone else.

I seem to remember (but I can't find the source) that Wirth initially had three aims in designing Pascal: 1. To use it in teaching a structure programming course to new students. A…

Personal freedom includes not being manipulated by commercial interests.

The Empire was self-financing. Taxes on trade paid for the ships and sailors to protect the trade routes (with a fair bit left over).

Many years ago (or so it seems now), I was turned on to slime moulds by the photos of Kim Fleming on Flickr ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/myriorama/albums/1271006/ ). The undersi…

The Grothendieck method can be applied to implementing a new feature in a software system. You just refactor the existing code until the implementation of the new feature becomes t…

In 'Managing Technical People', 1997, page 199, Watts Humphrey says that, after several failed attempts to produce a PC by IBM procedures, they set up an independent team that coul…

I recently came to realise that my memories of my experiences of early childhood are probably greatly affected by seeing my younger siblings going through those same experiences a …