Posts tagged computer

MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, seems like a good idea: what’s not to like about being able to send arbitrary data by email? In 1996, when I wrote the below, I didn’t think it was.

Duplicacy is a backup tool. It may possibly have good uses, but if you are using it on a Mac it is probably not actually making backups.

Or: the Cummings-Johnson effect.

I thought it would be interesting to get an idea of how many people will die because Dominic Cummings thought it was fine to ignore the lockdown rules, and Boris Johnson agreed with him. So I wrote a program to explore this Cummings-Johnson effect.

Anyone who says that the facts show that men are innately better than women in computing either does not know the facts, does not understand them, or is lying.

The U combinator allows you to define recursive functions and I think it is simpler to understand than the Y combinator.

What polkit is, why you should worry about it, some ways to defang it.

An attempt to describe three well-known function calling conventions in terms of bindings.

I find the best way to think about this is to think in terms of bindings, rather than environments or frames, which are simply containers for bindings.

In 1990, Richard Gabriel gave a talk from which Jamie Zawinski later extracted a section called ‘worse is better’ which he distributed widely. It’s strange but, perhaps, interesting, how prescient this idea was.

The UK keeps its laws on vellum: this seems to be a ludicrously archaic thing to do: is it?