mturk · HackerTrans

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.

mturk

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I am genuinely delighted that `dcc` (the system I play with my friends) is in the list of systems currently supported: https://rpg.actor/systems and I might participate as a result. Very cool.

mturk

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Ghidra is a very impressive piece of software with a deep bench of functionality. The recent couple major releases that move to a more integrated Python experience have been very nice to use.

mturk

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

Kaitai is absolutely one of my favorite projects. I use it for work (parsing scientific formats, prototyping and exploring those formats, etc) as well as for fun (reverse engineering games, formats for DOSbox core dumps, etc).

I gave a guest lecture in a friend's class last week where we used Kaitai to back out the file format used in "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego" and it was a total blast. (For me. Not sure that the class agreed? Maybe.) The Web IDE made this super easy -- https://ide.kaitai.io/ .

(On my youtube page I've got recordings of streams where I work with Kaitai to do projects like these, but somehow I am not able to work up the courage to link them here.)

mturk

letztes Jahrdiscuss

Larry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/

It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.

The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.

mturk

letztes Jahrdiscuss

That's the one! And all this time I'd been holding on to something I read on a mailing list or website back then, attributing the reading to Brian May "just because he liked that book."

mturk

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I read this in high school, but not because it was assigned. At the time I was really into "rare" Queen MP3s, and there's a studio recording of the fast version of "We Will Rock You" where Brian May reads a passage from this book before the music starts. An odd way to be inspired to read a book, but I still think I got a fair bit out of it.

mturk

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I do so love the TI-99/4A. I've been going through some TI-99/4A disk archives from the Chicago Texas Instruments User Group (which streams its meetings every month) and one of my favorite finds so far was this fun demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejGlI0yxqGA

Over at https://js99er.net/ there's a fair bit of software available right from the web interface, as well.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I don't think that it's fair to compare the rendering to what is currently in use in the scientific community, for two main reasons:

The first is that different types of rendering have different uses; typically in scientific visualization this is broken down into essentially "viz for self, viz for peers, viz for others" and oftentimes the most well-used rendering engines are targeted squarely at the first and second categories. The visual language in those categories is qualitatively different than that used for more "outward facing" renderings.

The second reason is that I disagree with your assertion about the quality of the visualization techniques in use within science. There are some truly spectacular visualization engines for cosmology and galaxy formation -- just to pick two examples off the top of my head, the work done by Ralf Kaehler or that by Dylan Nelson. (There are many really good examples, however, and I feel guilty not mentioning more.)

As I said in another, rather terse and unelaborated comment, though, this is really, really impressive work. I think it's important that in praising it, however, we don't discount the work that's been done elsewhere. This need not be zero-sum.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

This is really impressive.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Not a dumb question! Markwhen has a CLI: https://docs.markwhen.com/cli that I used.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I used Markwhen recently to make an interactive Gantt chart for a proposal to a collaborator and it went swimmingly. (We got the gig!) So, thank you!

For the record, I used the Obsidian plugin to develop, then deployed as static HTML.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

One feature of DOSBox-X I've come to really appreciate when reverse engineering is that you can toggle the debug log on and off. Additionally, it can display the current VGA palette in the main window.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:

"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."

What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end just before submitting it and finalizing it.

But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite of tools being developed around that time. Many had a deep focus on collaboration, but none took off quite as much as Mosaic. A few are harder to find out about -- like the XCMD extension to HyperCard that added support for animations right off the Cray, or Contours, or PalEdit, or Montage for collaborative environments -- and others, like Habanero a few years later ( https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-ba... ) left comparatively bigger footprints.

mturk

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The TI-99/4A community is really (and somewhat surprisingly) still very active. Among other things, the monthly stream from the CTIUG on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/@chicagotiug5404 ) of their monthly meetings at the Evanston Library is actually quite fun, and the js99er.net (somewhat recently rewritten in Angular) emulator is just amazing.