kiwidrew

7 ms·

1.
by kiwidrew 2y ago
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 configuration files of C&C/RA.
2.
by kiwidrew 2y ago
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 knitr (with matplotlib support), letting you use
3.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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.
4.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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 decode/execute are already overlapped. What really slows d
5.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
> 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) diacritical marks, specifically the tilde/caret&#x
6.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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.
7.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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 / checking the user's inbox?
8.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
Shame that the shell script is so concise compared to the "G-expression" mess that's meant to replace it.
9.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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 required work would be implementing the database backend wh
10.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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 brilliantly awful hack!
11.
by kiwidrew 3y ago
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 of the "get approval to use RealMe on your website&quo
12.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 needed to finally grok the s
13.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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
14.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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, copy APPEND.EXE to the floppy, and copy as
15.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 that MS-DOS 2.0 was a nearly complete rewrite of the 1.x co
16.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 Paterson, its author, wrote an 8086 assembler a
17.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 different OEMs.
18.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 basic HTML form if you squint hard enough: the screen is di
19.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
Originally HTML just had the <isindex> element, which was very similar to Gopher's primitive "search" functionality. Adding the <form> element with named input fields was a pretty obvious next step, and the fact
20.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
Ah, that makes sense!
21.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
> 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 with a similar design? (I'm aware that ma
22.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 code on a genuine IBM XT: http://www.reenigne.or
23.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 in the application's code, but it's al
24.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 choice, generally for writing small scripts (no framewor
25.
by kiwidrew 4y ago
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 discharging the battery. The car doesn't n
26.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
2nd this. In addition, it's easy to obtain the service manuals for the older Leaf models (up to around 2018). The design of the Leaf is very similar to other Nissan vehicles, so working on the car's non-drivetrain components is
27.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Mozilla (the org) never supported any of the "make Gecko embeddable" initiatives.
28.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Unfortunately it's not possible, because TLS negotiates a symmetric key which is then used to encrypt and authenticate the rest of the session. If you post the transcript of a TLS session in an attempt to "prove" that you re
29.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Oh boy, give it a few more years and the RISC-V architecture is going to have as many extensions as XMPP! Yay for interoperability!
30.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
I didn't encounter DSE until the mid 2000s when I moved to NZ, but the Jaycar of today stocks way more components than did the DSE of 20 years ago. Jaycar even keeps a stock of 74LS TTL chips behind the counter!

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