I’ve generally been happy with my Epson Stylus R300 printer.  I chose it because of its ability to print onto printable CD-R/DVD-R media, which wasn’t common at the time.  As with all inkjet printers, though, it subjects the owner to the Inkjet Conspiracy.

The most recent release of my Bare Bones interpreter made identifiers case-insensitive, and added an optional peephole optimizer that recognizes a common idiom:

while N not 0 do;
  decr N;
  incr X;
end;

Such a loop adds N to X, clearing N in the process. Without the optimizer, this is has time complexity [...]

In 1990, Bob Pease of National Semiconductor published a “design idea” in the June 14, 1990 issue of Electronic Design for the use of a FET for reverse-polarity protection, with the advantage that it will typically have much lower forward voltage drop than a diode.   Pease mentions this on page 164 of his book Troubleshooting [...]

AMD announced last year that they would publish the programming specs for their graphics chips.  Last September they started that, with register-level documentation on several chips.  While that was a good start, today they have made many of their customers who use Linux (and BSD) very happy by publishing the 3D programming specs for the [...]

Over the weekend I finished the homework assignment for the “Theory of Computation” chapter of Computer Science: An Overview, Ninth Edition, by J. Glenn Brookshear. Brookshear defines a very minimal programming language called Bare Bones, in which variables may contain arbitrarily large non-negative integers. The only operations available are:

clear var; — set a [...]

AT&T’s EDGE network is down in the midwest U.S. today.  They seem to think that it might be back today, or might take until February 5.
In the old days, back when there was just The Phone Company, they maintained better than five nine’s reliability.  Nothing would cause a widespread outage, and local outages didn’t last [...]

University of East Anglia researchers have received a grant of half a million dollars to develop lip reading software.  [h/t Slashdot Science]

Lately I’ve been getting more spam for internet gambling, promising that just for signing up I’ll get $2400 free.  If there was any doubt in my mind that many internet gambling operations are completely fraudulent, this has removed it.  Assuming for the sake of argument that such an operation was legitimate, if it had so [...]

On Friday, I needed to add disk space to the RAID 5 array on my server. I’m using a 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID controller, which I’ve generally been very happy with. It has support for online capacity expansion, so I decided to reconfigure it to drop the hot spare drive, then add that drive [...]

(Sounds like a program the Fox network would air…)
Some time between 2 AM and 11 AM PDT, both my server machines in the colo dropped off the network.  It seems implausible that both would fail for any reason other than a power failure, so I drove over to the colo to have a look.  Both [...]