I'm setting up a lightweight wiki for dumping notes on miscellaneous topics up to a website as a set of arbitrarily-linked pages. Here's my first pass solution, using the Eleventy/11ty static site generator. https://github.com/sackeyjason/mcwiki 11ty converts the markdown into HTML files (in folders too). It also does templating, which I've yet to get my head … Continue reading Simple static wiki [WIP]
Beginning development with function and a DB on Begin
I wrote about my impressions with this software development platform: https://medium.com/@jason.sackey/cors-and-request-parsing-in-begin-com-functions-4b5cee3139d6 I expressed some confusion about certain obstacles and described some workarounds. Ryan from the project replied on Twitter and helped me towards figuring out the issues, and I'm quite satisfied with proper solutions. I amended my post with the answers. But I think it'd … Continue reading Beginning development with function and a DB on Begin
Forum
Presenting the newest part of the overflow.space/Operating Space publishing infrastructure: a forum! Keep an eye on it for new content from me. It'll integrate with the blog in yet-to-be-determined ways. You could also join... it's in beta.
Software crisis
The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, … Continue reading Software crisis
Computers and socialism
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex … Continue reading Computers and socialism
Draft: Article 13
Note: I wanted to get this article finished and published before the protests, and before the vote. Oh well. Last Saturday across Europe there were demonstrations and protests against proposed new EU copyright legislation. The concerning legislation concerns 'online content-sharing service providers', which means sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and regular web hosting companies. Right … Continue reading Draft: Article 13
Repost: The end of software development
Computers, to be useful for any particular task, need software. The practice of creating that software, developing it, programming it, happens to be considered as a specialised one. That wasn’t always the case.
On hypertext, its origins, as it is, and as it could be
Ideas about non-linear ways of representing information [...] precede the invention of the computer. But it was computer technology that enabled a blossoming of competing hypertext projects, various network protocols and commercial software products.
Non-hierarchical file system
Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I'm not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on).Rob Pike -- https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp … Continue reading Non-hierarchical file system
Low-friction publishing
Many years ago (in 2015!) I published this listicle: Apps for super fast Web publishing. I became interested in Pastebin-like web services, and thought it'd be cool to list the ones I'd discovered, with some commentary. That's 9 of them. Now, in late 2018, 5 of them have disappeared from the face of the web. … Continue reading Low-friction publishing
