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…
Interesting links: February 2020
* An excellent book review by Peter Thiel (okay, more than that) * Another thing universally felt, and then “discovered”: the polarization of reality * The “out-of-Africa” date has been pushed back…
Chapter books
The new thing for reading with Tara is books with (relatively) lots of words and a few pictures, with each book being part of a series, and each book divided into chapters. Some of what we've bee…
On the flow of text on the page
Ever since I’ve been doodling around on apps/tools like Notion1, Tinderbox2 and Roam3, I feel constrained when I look at the flow of text on a regular book. Of course, it had to be that way in the be…
Monthly Curations: February 2020
* Datomic overview * An attempt at Typed lisp * Another look at Guix * “Programming like Kent Beck” * Report on the 20th anniversary of SBCL * On tests as code * A humorous look at how programm…