The Long Road to Linux
I don’t remember the first time I installed linux. The earliest memories I can still call on are of installing a version of RedHat on the Dell laptop I used for the last year of undergrad. I was using...
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NCSA Mosaic and the Truly Vintage Web
Note: This post is the second part in a two-part “comprehensive history of computing” series, begun here. These folks offer us “the Vintage Web”, websites that look like they haven’t noticed the last...
View ArticleRoll You Own Supercomputing Cluster
Amazon has activated a beta version of a new “Elastic MapReduce” service. The naming is a little obscure, but it looks like it’s essentially the Hadoop distributed computing framework running on their...
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At the Height of My Programming Renown
I’ve submitted this photo to the Dork Yearbook: “By the weight of honours strewn about me and my dad’s Franklin ACE 1000 (including, yes, the IBM Regional Computer Techonology Award) you can tell I had...
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Jason Scott Is In Your Geocities, Rescuing Your Sh*t
Some time back, Jason Scott — the computing documentarian who hughstimson.org readers may remember from King of Kong controversy — “got angry like a fire gets burning” because AOL hometown was shutting...
View ArticleI Want a Personal Cloud
I seem to like computing in clouds. I don’t want to: I don’t like the idea of putting my business or academic data into someone else’s for-profit servers, and I think it’s nutty in a special way to put...
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Visualizing the New York Times, for Example
I wanted to post about these amazing visualizations of links between people and organizations in the New York Times. But in the course of looking up their author I discovered that almost everything he...
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PetSynth: A Superior Synthesizer for the Commodore Pet
Today I got to try PetSynth v0.006, by Chiron Bramberger. Chiron owns several Commodore Pet personal computers, and was dissapointed by the quality of the music-making software available for them, so...
View ArticleYour Computer Screen May Need To Be Colour Calibrated
Your computer screen may need to be colour calibrated. Mine sure did. I bought a new laptop which seems to have a nice enough screen, but I could tell by looking that it suffered from a blue cast. It’s...
View ArticleAn Adware Programmer on the Resilient Goodness of Humans
From the end of this extraordinary interview with a retired writer of programs to screw up your computer irretrievably: “S: Do you think that in our society we delude ourselves into thinking we have...
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Broken Happiness Machines Are Go
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Petsynth, Chiron Bramberger’s novel synthesizer software for the Commodore Pet. But Chiron doesn’t just write music on the Pet, he also blasts 8-bit rythmic weirdness...
View Article“The finest in 1-bit sound on the Commodore PET”
And now the Petsynth project has a website: petsynth.org You have to record the program to an audio cassette tape to load it onto your Pet. But this home copying is fully legal: Petsynth has gone open...
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Artificial Intelligence in Flash
This guy appears to be doing some work on network-based artificial intelligence… in flash. I wouldn’t have thought flash would be a first choice of programming language if you’re into experimental...
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Retro Computing Jam Session
Have you ever had that feeling that somewhere out there, people are jamming on a Vic-20, a PET and a Commodore 64, possibly in some kind of classroom setting? The middle computer would be Petsnyth’s...
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Google Massively Automates Tropical Deforestation Detection
Landcover change analysis has been an active area of research in the remote sensing community for many years. The idea is to make computational protocols and algorithms that take a couple of digital...
View ArticleEnhance
Forgive me for saying so, but I know a thing or two about enhancing photographs. I’ve put some time in as a satellite and aerial imagery analyst, and as a hobby photographer I make no apologies about...
View ArticleR^2
Roughly a year ago, I made some noises on this blog about wanting to learn R. Not surprisingly, I didn’t do it. A year later I’m a government scientist with some statistics to do, and I’m once again...
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