Most notably, the oldest list of UNIX licensees was produced from a form letter database.

Ken Thompson used form/fed to simplify mailing to early users: rather than hand- or typewriting messages, this fancy tool would substitute each recipient and the date. In 1975, when UNIX News was starting up, he used this form letter database to dump the list of contacts that served as the initial subscriber list.

The circumstances of the UNIX V4 tape found at the University of Utah are still somewhat unclear, as it was apparently not used for research and only sparse traces of its acquisition survived. But some letters to Martin Newell are in that form letter database and I hope to recover more information through forensic analysis.

2/6

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

I was rummaging through the garage for a plant pot for some cuttings my brother brought me and I found a paper bag full of dried peapods I was clearly saving to plant out sometime a few number of years ago.

Not sure if I should bother at this point, or if I should just boil them up for a soup....

You've heard of Y2K and the 2038 problem, but what about the 1975 problem?

The UNIX form letter generator converts the current date to a string, but it only handles 1974. Why isn't it more general?

Well, the form utility was written around 1971 when UNIX used an a different unit for time, jiffies (60ths of a second) since the epoch instead of seconds since 1970. This 60× precision caused times to overflow a signed 32-bit integer every 13.6 months, so the epoch was bumped yearly. This yearly ritual of modifying the kernel meant it wasn't worth generalizing to support any year.

An earlier version of form uses jiffies since a 1972 epoch. The version from UNIX V4–V6 does the bare minimum to update it to the new system of seconds since 1970, while keeping the yearly overflow.

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

E: Many people have replied comparing this to the Reddit “hug of death” or “The Slashdot effect”. This is not the same at all. Those are legitimate site visits from humans that happen over the course of several hours. This is the result of several thousand servers all automatically fetching the same image simultaneously , and without any human involvement, and potentially next to zero human traffic to the site, which is why I compared it to a botnet or DDOS attack.

looking at a bigoted Steam Curator and I've discovered a new sentence that I don't think anyone has ever said before:

Deliberately uses the gender inclusive term ''bachelors and bachelorettes''

#Today’s shirt, for @Lorraine

Someone is trying to pretend they're a responsible adult, and will try to go to bed in time, because they're visiting parents tomorrow, and nodding off during the visit would be impolite. We will carefully observe, and report on the success of their quest.

what if I just post a neat little luxe thing every day/hour/whatever #createwithluxe #gamedev

(after having been offline for ages for a variety of reasons)

thread of neat luxe game engine things

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@ruby0x1/117478535275847752

@shauna *gentle boop*

You've heard of Y2K and the 2038 problem, but what about the 1975 problem?

The UNIX form letter generator converts the current date to a string, but it only handles 1974. Why isn't it more general?

Well, the form utility was written around 1971 when UNIX used an a different unit for time, jiffies (60ths of a second) since the epoch instead of seconds since 1970. This 60× precision caused times to overflow a signed 32-bit integer every 13.6 months, so the epoch was bumped yearly. This yearly ritual of modifying the kernel meant it wasn't worth generalizing to support any year.

An earlier version of form uses jiffies since a 1972 epoch. The version from UNIX V4–V6 does the bare minimum to update it to the new system of seconds since 1970, while keeping the yearly overflow.

#unix #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

recorded this during storm eowyn. had been wanting to dedicate something to joe cassidy for a while and it seemed appropriate https://robertdallasgray.bandcamp.com/track/ave-joe

@martin_t @mattsheffield
This post has been approved by Steven Miller

Didn't spot any of the butcherbird chicks this morning, but I did spy one sitting alone in their tree. I wonder what they thought of the first rain since they hatched
#photography #birds