Viewing profile — whartung

Living here in So Cal, where the mountains are a constant presence. Yet, I still stare and wonder. Despite people having been here for thousands of years, I look at a ridge, or a s…

I'm curious how much of the AS/400 architecture leaks out to the application developers. In the end, the vast majority of the work done on these machines was done in RPG and COBOL.…

Most interesting hotel elevator system I’ve seen was in Washington DC. Instead of hitting the call button, you started the request with your floor. Then the system would assign you…

Not just that, but, as I understand it, with some of the modern digital phone systems, they won’t work properly even if you did have someplace to call. And 2400 baud was quite usef…

Funny thing about Shays. When you see a photo of them, you almost always see the right side of the locomotive, as that's where the pistons and the drive train are. You almost never…

Well thats the crux. While the display may seem simple (a grid, a few controls), a Web UI CRUD app, while routine today, is NOT simple. While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with…

A favorite developing a debugger story was from a friend of mine. They were working on a debugger for OS/2, which was quite notable at the time for being multitasking. And at one p…

Is the Foley/Van Dam book still a go to resource for this? It seems it was updated in 2013, but, honestly, I’m more familiar with the ‘82 edition that was dedicated to 2D. Back in …

As I understand it, they done this in simulation, and the human pilots did not fare well. I don't know of the computer aircraft were able to fly beyond human limits (i.e. they don'…

Well, this will be fun. I already have one of these (I'm sure I'm not alone). It's about 500 lines. I found I'm not a huge fan of the JAX-B-ish style serialization of Java objects …

I have Jim Ladds book, autographed. My friend went to a book signing and got it for me. It’s signed “They say it’s your birthday — Jim Ladd”. I also saw him when he toured with Rog…

Are there other computers that run off of SD cards long term successfully that are not Raspberry Pi’s?

Two of my favorite Z80 anecdotes. First, my Father wanted to try to add some peripherals to the original TRS-80 Model 1. So, what he was interested in doing was asserting the BUSRE…

That's pretty neat! God help me if I fell down a hole like that. I must say, however, that e.g. code like (compile-compound) is something only an AI can love!

> I find a procedural style of programming so much easier to reason about, both when writing and reading. Then do that. There's nothing stopping you from using pretty much any styl…

How are (can) datacenters be taxed? Mind, I don't know, but normally you put in a business, or factory, etc. the state can tax the economic output of the factory. The factory build…

I never realized that when chatting with the bot, the entirety of the session was sent each time. I guess I just figured there was some state maintained Out There, rather than simp…

What’s interesting to me is how today, something like Avatar 3 has seemingly no traction or notable impact. Perhaps it’s generational. It clearly did well in the box office, so som…

The T2 nuclear destruction of LA was done by Electric Image. Small software house doing 3D rendering on the Mac.

I just want to quibble that the 100% Postgres regression tests do not test the threaded aspect of this project, and that is a pretty fundamental architecture change.

Maybe you can sew a patch into it?

I appreciate the potential power of AOP, but I'm grateful I never had to use it directly. Rather, I got to rely on the special handling within, notably at the time, the Java JEE ec…

As I understand it, if you want to use domains internally for your home ("home") network, there's some DNS support for "home.arpa"[0]. 0 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.ht…

Favorite story I heard about voting was an anecdote relating to the flight computers on one of the Boing 7xx jets (probably the 757, but I don't know). The story was that they were…

Boy, I can hardly wait for this to open. I got to visit the Shuttle just before they closed it down to make this change, and it's a wonder to behold. They had it on display, about …