I ran across an engineering aphorism or principle called “Gall’s Law”:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

What an unbelievably stupid tie-in.

GPP is the General Purpose Preprocessor, a macro preprocessor for various forms of structured and unstructured text.

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. There’s usually a few conditions on what the program can do, like not reading it’s source code during execution.

I wrote what I believe to be the first non-vacuous quine ever in the GPP language.

The summer I was 17, 1978, I was the staff cook at Camp Thunderbird, a Boy Scout camp.

That’s a Verifone credit card terminal at the King Soopers #1 (13th and Speer in Denver, a.k.a. “Scary Soopers”) pharmacy, November 12, 2020.

What are all the packages?

What can we learn from this display?

I found a bunch of new and new-ish work on the end-Ordovician extinction

I’ve written before about how much I despise baby talk descriptions of operating system abstractions as promoted by Microsoft.

The use of “folder” is particularly pernicious.

Slylock Fox is one of those bogus “kid’s fun” things that appear in the Sunday Funnies. Slylock is kind of dumb, but it’s better than Uncle Art’s Funland, which is basically a store-brand Sunday funnies strip.

Bought a Compressed air Duster - 3 Gear Adjustable 100000RPM Electric air Duster with LED Light, Cordless air Blower for Computer Keyboard Car Cleaning Kit 9000mAh Rechargeable Dust Remover