Kilobytes in a hurricane

Popping up out of retirement to celebrate Grove's newly-launched support for text-only news sites for member stations, as reported by Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab.

Union strong

Congratulations to Digital Media United, part of NABET-CWA Local 31 and representing tech workers at NPR, on the ratification of its first contract!

Still holding some secrets

The Antikythera Mechanism visits the Astronomy Picture of the Day once again.

Undergrads

An excellent documentary on the genesis of BASIC (with just a touch of chest-thumping on the part of Dartmouth College).

Is anyone reading the literature?

Joseph Weizenbaum didn't expect his secretary to take ELIZA so seriously, either. Sheesh. "The new Bing & Edge – Learning from our first week."

One area where we are learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment. This is a great example of where new technology is finding product-market-fit for something we didn’t fully envision.

Arena.js

Oh, dear sweet Fox, yes (see JavaScript file browser, below).

End of the sprint

Friday I retired, after eight great years at NPR. According to Matt Welsh, not a moment too soon. I hope I haven't left any howlers like this one behind, although the clunky JavaScript-only file browser that I built as my first project for NPR has resisted refactoring for 14 years.

Mini-rant

Looking forward to the day when I no longer hear, without definition, the phrase "on prem." Ugly, jargony, and unecessarily obscure.

Extensions

As of 04:05 this morning, the PHP refactoring and language level upgrade that I started working on in July, is finally released.

Plink

Flashbacks of the year that I spent as a consultant with a cadre of operations researchers.

...well over a hundred parameters for one function call, with a mix of literal values and pointers being passed in.

Some of the parameter and type names are particularly frightening. a1alleles is not a name you want to read in Arial. And what of Oblig_missing_info* om_ip?

CHUNK

Matt Parker breaks down his supporters' efforts to optimize the Jotto Problem. Rust and Julia are two of the languages used, but C++ was a favorite of the record holders.

BWK

Brian Kernighan, who put the K in awk, is still patching it, in this case to provide Unicode and CSV support.

Recycling

Not obsolete quite yet: there is still a market for floppy disks, including 5.25- and 8-inch disks, which really were floppy. Well, flexible.

Results-oriented

A cartoon from Amy Hwang.

Archives

The Association for Computing Machinery is rolling out open access to its back catalog, as Ernie Smith reports.

Ring of fire eclipse

Still more reveals for the Antikythera Mechanism. A preprint suggests a zero point for the gizmo of 22 December 178 BCE.

Care for a game?

Betsy Golden Kellem reminds us that Elektro wasn't the only box of electronics and blinking lights on display at the 1939 New York World's Fair. There was also The Nimatron.

Slugs...

...are one of the terms that have acquired multiple meanings in my shop. Beyond the traditional journalism meaning—a short, reusable, almost arbitrary, traditionally ALL CAPS handle for a story making its way through the editing process—we've also used "slug" to refer to the friendly label above the headline that sets some context for the reader. In What's making us happy, it's the "SPECIAL SERIES" tag. The main topic of the story is often used as the slug, unless we're on the landing page for that topic... and that's a long story. To avoid confusion, we're introducing the jaunty term "eyebrow" as a replacement. The new CMS that we're on the long road to adoption uses "slug" for the semi-legible part of a semantic URL, the "whats-in-a-slug" bit in the case of the Times article linked above. "Permalink text" is the suggested replacement, but I think we'll still have to slug it out.

191

I had a small hand, back in 2020, in this phase of bringing NPR and its member stations to its new CMS, Grove. It's nice to have a project phase come to completion. The last station site to come aboard was KDLL in the the Kenai peninsula of Alaska. More work to come!

Glide path

Certainly the next stage in my professional development: recently, doing some hard drive housekeeping, I moved my professional résumé into an /Archives folder. Not gonna need it anymore.

And, thank Fox, I haven't had a bid résumé for consulting work in seven years. Bid résumés sit somewhere on the lies-damn lies-statistics continuum.