On the "Quilt" activity
Sometime last year, we were at a restaurant where they were nice enough to provide paper and crayons for my daughter, but the paper didn’t have the usual “shapes to color in”, and the crayons were an…
On metric time
About a decade ago, I thought briefly, about how the day would feel, if we had some sort of metric units instead of hours & minutes, then forgot about it. About six years ago, I had an Android ph…
Random note: 917486
On debugging Elisp
Was playing around with Elixir, installed elixir-mode, but indentation wasn't working. About to give up, but took it as an opportunity to learn how to debug Elisp, and ... whoa, it was effortless…
On the shortened blog name
In the beginning, “ Abacus Noir Form ” was a play-on-words for ” A Backus-Naur-Form ”, which I soon realized was funny in my head, but not necessarily meaningful to anyone else. General inertia k…
Monthly Curations: April 2020
* On the differences in dynamic linking between Swift and Rust * Fascinating account on what it took for the PS2 (yes, for old-timers) to have the backward compatibility that made it popular * Anot…
Interesting links: March 2020
* Fascinating account of the series whose artwork inspired Star Wars: Valerian * A catalog of various “spreadsheet-based screw-ups” * I was shocked I’ve never heard of “the mother of Chinese comput…
Monthly recap (March 2020)
Major updates: * WFH !! 😞 * Discovered Comixology 😀 Minor updates: * Bunch of “virtual playdates”(what a concept!) * Lots of Playmobil sets * Tara finally got the hang of Lego, so … yeah…
Monthly recap (February 2020)
Major updates: * (none ?) Minor updates: * I forgot to write this last month, and … I’m already a little vague on the details, which is … why these are so important! * Took Tara climbing at…
Random Note: 878132
I was reading Cixin Liu’s books and not only do I like them, but they also reminded me of the different ”waves” of SF/Fantasy reading I’ve had in my life. Come to think of it, I have a strong impress…
On the post-COVID world
The effect of this virus has been to give “Hell is other people” a whole new literal meaning. The maxim of “avoiding other people” only heightens the various people-divides that had been developing s…
Monthly Curations: March 2020
* Can you believe this talk was delivered in 1995? 1995?! We’ll get there soon… * One person’s scientific method to improving as a programmer. Impressive. Don’t think I could do it. * Either hilari…