In reply to this criticism one is normally reminded that Unix was invented for a PDP7, which had about as much memory as an earthworm and CPU power to match. That is, the user interface was designed to minimize the time required to decode a command. That meant short, fixed-case, commands, and no minimum matching. But 1969 is a long time ago, and both memory and speed have improved a thousandfold since then. — A Requiem for a Dying Operating System

Still, I like short command names like rm or ls.

Massacring C Pointers. You may also like Geoff Wozniak’s Gopher-like blog. #clang

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git. Get started. It looks like a nice and free alternative to Webfaction.

Having so much fun with Kitty and Amethyst! (But see my recent post.)

Unix Wars.

Just playing with Amethyst again. It looks like there’s been some improvements since the last time I tested it.

cmus is a small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.

An increasing number of command-line software programs output text with ANSI color escape codes by default. While some developers and users obviously prefer seeing these colors, many users don’t. Unfortunately, every new piece of software seems to have a different way of disabling colored text output and some software has no way at all. — NO_COLOR

The Great Tree-List Recursion Problem. #clang

I intended to write a brief post some years ago after he retired. I didn’t, but there’s this Festschrift for Jan de Leeuw on the JSS. It was great to meet him at Rennes, even if I was too shy (which I believe is just my latent Asperger’s syndrome) to engage in a conversation with him. I remember the time where I subscribed to his mailing list on statistical computing (“StatCompute Digest”), and the .mac shared point he used for his /usr/local resources. That was a great time. I learned a lot from the man. He’s definitively not retired. Thank youi, Jan.