A Tinkertoy Computer That Plays Tic-Tac-Toe

I came across this reproduction of an article by A. K. Dewdney in his "Computer Recreations" series in Scientific American. I am not exaggerating when I say that this was the series that fundamentally altered the way I looked at computers and programming. I long to read such articles now... ~sigh~
Of course, I already own copies of "Armchair Universe" and "The Computational Beauty of Nature", but a regular series like this would be quite welcome.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Making Room for Linux

Without ntfsresize to help us out, we could not have made room for a Linux installation on an unfortunate PC that had a complete Windows 2000 infestation on its entire hard disc. All hail Free software!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Hosting Zero

For some reason, the guys at Hosting Zero suddenly offered to host my site for free! So I moved my web site there. They seem to have far more facilities than Tripod where I used to host my site and have no irritating advertisements and popup windows.

Let us see how this works out. A big thanks to the guys at Hosting Zero - do check them out.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

S5

As a standards-based slide presentation framework for browsers, S5 is quite impressive!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

The Great GCJ Binary Compatibility Merge

Tom merged in the GCJ Binary Compatibility branch. Time to explore this with the help of the paper by Tom and Andrew.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Running Kernel's Image

Can anyone tell me of a reliable way of finding out the actual image (program file) that was used to launch the currently running Linux kernel?

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Reality Bytes

While trying to help a friend's Mom with sending emails, I realised how much we programmers assume of the ordinary user's ability to think of computers the way we do and how unhelpful computers really are even today. It also provided me with a couple of amusing exchanges that I thought I'd share.

I asked her if she uses Netscape to check her mail. She said: "No, I use VSNL to check mails!" (VSNL is the ISP she uses and the corresponding Dial-up connection icon has the same name.)

She said: "Who is this 'SMTP' and why is he bothering me?" After a while, I figured out that she was saying this because her mail client used to show an error message like "smtp.vsnl.net responded: Please enter your correct username/password". For someone who only knows about "The Internet" and nothing of mail protocols or server hostnames, I think her indignation was somewhat justified. ;-)

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Linux Kernel Headers

Hey, I didn't know that you were no longer supposed to maintain a "/usr/src/linux" symlink for the kernel headers!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

New GCC C Parser

Lesser mortals take significantly longer than the mere week that Joseph Myers took to write a new recursive-descent C parser for GCC that accepts the same C language plus GNU extensions (a.k.a. "GNU C") as the existing one that uses Bison. :-/

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Jacks Migrated

Jacks has migrated to its new home within Mauve! Thank you Tom and Mark.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)