Mike Schaeffer's Blog

I've lately run across several interesting small computer history sites. If you have any interest in small computing's emergence from 1980 to 1990 or so, these are worth a look.

In no particular order:

• OS/2 Museum - Covers OS/2, but also gets into detail around PC architecture. Among other interesting bits, this is just one of several articles on A20 gate handling, and here's something on the IBM 8514/A.
• DTACK Grounded - A newsletter written to promote Hal Hardbergh's side business of attached Motorola 68000 processor boards. Mostly interesting for his commentary on then-crurent events leading up to the emergence and use of 32-bit microprocessors. Notably, this was written at the time of Intel's pivot from the iAPX 432 to the 80386. The commentary on the relative unreliability of DRAM is amusing too.
• CRPG Addict - Not sure how he has the time, but the author of this blog has set himself the challenge of playing through and documenting every early CRPG game from the late 70's and well into the 90's.
• The Digital Antiquarian - Critical commentary on early small computer gaming. Lots of details about how games came to be made and their content.
• Retrocomputing Stack Exchange site - This is currently more like Netflix than anything else. Coverage is spotty, but that doesn't mean you can't find something interesting to read.

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally replaced blosxom with a custom CMS I've been writing called Rhinowiki. More than a serious attempt at a CMS, this is mainly a fun little side project to write some Clojure, experiment a bit with JGit, and hopefully make it easier to implement a few of my longer term plans that might have been tricky to do in straight Perl.

Full source in the link above, a high level summary here:

• Everything is in Clojure.
• Backend format is Markdown as interpreted by markdown-clj.
• Source code is highlighted using highlight.js.
• Markdown rendering is done entirely on the server, with syntax highlighting on the client. (I'm looking into Nashorn to run highlight.js server side too, but don't know if that's possible within my time constraints.)
• Back end storage is managed using and retrieved via JGit.
• All requests are served out of memory.
• There's a hand rolled (and conformant) Atom feed.
• Also RSS 2.0.

This is a bash function definition that takes you to the top level directory of a git project.

function cdtop() {
    local git_root;

    git_root=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`;

    if [ $? -eq 0 ]
    then
        cd ${git_root}
    else
        return 1
    fi
}

Here's a git alias that does serves a similar purpose. What this does is define a new alias, exec, that executes a shell command in the current project's root.

git config --global alias.exec '!exec '

With this alias defined, you can say the following and it will take you to the project root.

cd `git exec pwd`

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/957928/is-there-a-way-to-get-the-git-root-directory-in-one-command

Since my last post, I dropped by an Apple Store to take a look at the 2015 MacBook. It is difficult to overstate how startlingly small the new machine is in person. I may be biased by the internal specifications, but the impression is much more 'big tablet' than 'small laptop'. The other standout feature was the touchpad. It continues Apple's tradition of high-quality touchpad implementations, removes the mechanicical switch and hinge, and adds force sensititivy and haptic feedback. The mechanical simplifications alone are a worthwhile improvement.

I also spent some time typing on the keyboard. It's as shallow as you'd think, but the keys are very direct have a positive feel. There's none of the subtle rattling found on most small keyboards and it registered every keypress. I'm not completely convinced yet, but it at least seems possible that this type of keyboard could become the preferred keyboard for some typists.

The performance of the machine is also a point of interest. Even the lightly loaded demo machine on the showroom floor had a few hiccups paging the display around from one virtual desktop to the next. Maybe it's nothing, but it does make me wonder if the machine can keep up with daily use, particuarly after a few OSX updates have been released. (For me, I think it'd be fine, but I spend most my time in Terminal, Emacs, and Safari, none of which are exactly heavy-hitters.)