I need to work on this. After living and working in this town
for fifteen years, one gathers up quite a treasure trove.
Eventually I want to make this a bit of a museum. For now, just
call it tidbits and miscellany.
- Take the Unix Trivia Quiz. Don't feel
bad; I only scored about 35%.
- Here are some
radio frequencies to listen in on if you have a scanner.
If you're listening to the police, you might find this list of
"Ten-codes" useful.
If you're listening to amateur radio, you might find this list of
procedural signals (Q signals) useful.
- Tired of what the Internet has become? Here's a pretty good
rant.
- What's on TV tonight?
I actually stole the material from an Onion article, but it
was a good excuse to learn Frontpage Express.
- Ever wanted to be a home scientist like Mr. Wizard? A couple of
fun experiments are
Grape Pyrotechnics
and
Fun with Poptarts.
- I've never worked for a vendor, but
this document
has been floating around for a long time (my hardcopy says 1982).
I guess you have to have been a Control Data customer to know how
archaic that operating system was.
On top of it all, CSO ran the same patchlevel
of the same operating system (
NOS 1.4 - 501/498)
from the day I arrived on campus as a freshman in 1980 to the day the
Cybers were retired in 1988.
Where's that damn green card anyway? No
IBM 360 programmer was ever without one of these. In one handy card was
everything you'd need to know about programming one of these beasts,
including the machine instructions, instruction formats (RR, RX, RS, etc),
CNOP alignment (never mind!), assembler pseudo-ops, low memory (which was
very magical to the 360 hardware), various channel commands for various IBM
peripherals, and of course an EBCDIC chart and a decimal-hexadecimal
conversion chart. Printed on 7 double-sided panels, only the
front
and
back
are shown here.
- I took a camera around CCSO's computer room late one night
and got
some images
of some stuff that I figured people would be
interested in seeing. I could explain some of the images a little
better, but for now you can deal with the one-liners. Actually, as
rapidly as the computer room evolves, a lot of these pictures are
out of date already. For instance, uxa is now gone (we were going to
scrap it but someone frigging stole it off our loading dock).
- CSO used to be a lot cooler, as evidenced from this
telephone message pad,
courtesy Sandy Moy, circa 1981.
-
Instant Band Names!
- Now, I don't eat red meat and try to avoid meat altogether when I
can, but nevertheless,
this flame
against a militant vegetarian (who claims
that people who eat meat are harmful even to those who don't, among a lot of
other crap) showed up in rec.food.veg one day, and it's one of the most
priceless tidbits I think I've ever seen on netnews.
- Three examples of very obfuscated C that have caught my fancy over
the years are a
program to print anagrams of its arguments from a given list
of words,
a rather clever method of graphically computing the value of
PI, and
this thing,
which looks for all the world like line noise but when run with no arguments
produces some surprising output.
Previous page
