Expert Computer Programmers know how to deliver professional software systems.
Master Computer Programmers know how to deliver and support professional software systems.
Tag: Software
Keeping Your Computer Safe and Usable by Verifying Downloads
When you install or upgrade software on your computer, try to make it safer.
It only takes a little effort and pays off big rewards in privacy and ease of mind. Although this example is on a Mac, it is general enough to translate to Windows or Linux easily.
Vintage Computer Programming Book Market About To Explode!
Last week I was day-dreaming about Forth and vintage computers again. Same old day-dreams. The TI-99/4A with TurboForth seems like the perfect place to start learning about both. TurboForth has lots of features and it runs in emulators and “on the metal”. Cool.
The best way to learn Forth is interactively. How do you do it with Org Mode, though? Can we have the same features you would expect with any other programming language even though it is running inside of an emulator? There must be an easy way to run at the command line, redirect input and output, or maybe telnet into the machine.
V9t9 is a Java-based and open-sourced emulator there on GitHub. If it doesn’t have telnet into it, then it can be added. That got me thinking (daydreaming?) again about the fun of simple computers. Whatever approach you use to access them, using Org seems like a great way to write new books about them.
They are simpler. They are a great place to start. There is tons of great literature out there already. Now add Emacs and Org-Mode to the mix to practice Literate Programming.
It seems like there is a huge opportunity for great new books about old computers and programming languages. Export to LaTeX and publish, and there you go. Very fun and very cool.
Mastery, Questions, Hardware, Software, LISP, Forth, TI-99/4A
Over the last two years a few questions and ideas have visited me and the following is my attempt to piece them together…
Continue reading “Mastery, Questions, Hardware, Software, LISP, Forth, TI-99/4A”
People who are really serious about software
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
— Alan Kay
Understanding Technical Debt
3 Essential Privacy Plugins
3 essential privacy plugins:
Microsoft AntiVirus is Free for Windows XP
Microsoft AntiVirus is free and it works for Windows XP:
Yes. You can install Microsoft Security Essentials on XP and Win 7.
—RickImAPC
Awesome.
ImgBurn for Windows is Excellent
Here is a great disc-burning application for MS Windows called ImgBurn. Works great “out of the box” and is free, which doesn’t reflect its utility or value at all.
I will only share additionally that I’ve tried two free and two commercial application, which I won’t name for fear of any publicity that it would generate for them, that ultimately would fail due to pretty simple scenarios like a disc not being loaded in the disc-drive.
Using VirtualBox for OCaml
I would like to try out OCaml. From what I have read, though, it is only happy running on UNIX. Without a UNIX box at the moment I decided to try out Sun’s VirtualBox with Ubuntu.
Setup, configuration, and installation took less than an hour. Directories can easily be shared between the host and the guest (Windows XP and Ubuntu in this case), which is convenient for me because I share my Bazaar checkout folder. The NAT network adapter is configured “out of the box”. Everything “just worked”; it was a really pleasant experience.
These days there really aren’t many obstacles to running, or even just trying out, Linux.