Dan Piponi
Revisiting a book I read when I was a kid. Published in 1971, when computers could "make nearly a million additions every second" and presumably intended for young children, it has a surprising amount of detail - eg. on how instructions are encoded in a word.
Aug 22, 2023 at 12:27amWeb
Show threadDan PiponiAug 22, 2023
Hoping to be promoted to businessman so I can have a machine like this
Show threadDan PiponiAug 22, 2023
I've spent much of the last week trying to figure out how a simple recv() operation can corrupt data nowhere near the address provided as an argument. But this page - and I vaguely remember reading this as a kid - may have been the moment in my life when I first learnt that debugging was a thing.
Show threadDan PiponiAug 23, 2023
BTW Having reduced the problem to having a random corruption as a result of a system call I have no idea how to proceed with debugging which is not a feeling I'm used to. Pretty sure it's not a kernel bug. Fairly sure it's not a compiler bug. I'm going to have to start considering supernatural explanations soon...
Show threadSimon FrankauAug 23, 2023
@dpiponi My sympathy! No luck from the usual meta-advice ("rubber duck it" and "do something else for a while")?
Show threadBart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸Aug 22, 2023
@dpiponi I don't know what is more painful here - old-time sexism (and yes, I know it wasn't considered sexism back then!) or the bad sitting posture :)
Show threadTristram BrelstaffAug 22, 2023
@dpiponi https://ladybirdflyawayhome.com/ladybird-books-and-the-ministry-of-defence/
Ladybird books and the Ministry of Defence • Ladybird Fly Away Home

the history of Ladybird Books I have known the story of the Ladybird book commissioned by the M.o.D. The story goes that the book was published with plain boards before being issued to staff

Ladybird Fly Away Home
Show threadDan PiponiAug 22, 2023
@tristrambrelstaff This is amazing!
Show threadDan PiponiAug 22, 2023
@tristrambrelstaff Also https://ladybirdflyawayhome.com/ladybird-and-the-m-o-d-the-plot-thickens/