<p>I don’t usually do Happy New Year posts, but given how “well” 2020 went I thought it was appropriate to start 2021 with a whimsy post.  This post is probably going to date me since it’s been a few years - OK, decades - since these were current.</p>

<p>Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how <a href="http://www.blogbyben.com/2018/04/a-little-scheme-setup-and-development.html">he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone</a>. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!</p>

<p>A problem archivists have been bringing up for a while now is that with the majority of content going digital and the pace of change in storage mechanisms and formats, it’s becoming harder to preserve content even when it is not what would be considered old by the standards of other historic documents created by humanity.</p>

<p>I still use the <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt email client</a> when I’m remoted into some of my FreeBSD servers. It might not be the most eye pleasing email client ever, but it’s powerful, lightweight and fast.</p>

<p>It might sound paradoxical, but in general, writing more code is easier than writing less code that accomplishes the same goals. Even if your code starts out clean, compact and beautiful, the code that is added later to cover the corner cases nobody thought of usually takes care of the code being well designed, elegant and beautiful. Agile programming offers a solution, namely constant refactoring, but who has time for that? That’s why I occasionally give myself the 10% code reduction…

<p>… I’ll just point them to <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/grumpy-people-get-the-details-right.html?mid=facebook_nymag">this article</a> and explain that I’m just sweating the details. If you’re a programmer, that is a lot more important than most people and most programmers would believe.</p>

<p><a href="http://blog.regehr.org/archives/199">A</a> <a href="http://blog.regehr.org/archives/208">couple</a> of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so…

<p>For those of us who remember when the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro">BBC Micro</a> was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29">Elite</a>. <a…

<p>My hardware “scrap pile” contained a Dell Inspiron 530 - not the most glamorous of machines and rather out of date and old, too, but it works and it runs a few pieces of software that I don’t want to reboot my Mac for regularly. Problem was, I had to rebuild it because it had multiple OSs installed and none of them worked. Note to self - don’t mix 32 and 64 bit Windows on the same partition and expect it to work flawlessly.</p>

<p>Ah, a meta blogging post. Sorry, I try to keep these to a minimum…</p>