Colin's Notes

Today I was trying to recall how C and C++ pack struct members. It’s important if you really need to use as little memory as possible. When you have 150 million records at 64 bytes each, it starts to matter that half of that is wasted space. It’s annoying to have to figure this out. Didn’t Turbo Pascal do a better job? Why the difference on modern systems and languages? This called for a little research. [Read More]

I was thinking that out of the three big upcoming IPOs: Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX that SpaceX would be the most promising one, since it does real things without a lot of competition. Their customers don’t have good alternatives, and their biggest customer is the U.S. government. Sounds reasonable. [Read More]

From a recent New York times article [Read More]

The war against Iran is the most poorly planned, least legal and most chaotic large military operation perhaps ever done by the U.S. The President hasn’t offered consistent reasons or objectives either, so we can’t even argue with him. Was the war necessary? Was it necessary in the minuscule time between characterizing it as a tough negotiation and launching the planes and missiles? Obviously they made preparations for months, but that’s not how the administration presented the situation. We got no campaign to sway public opinion or anything like that. [Read More]

What if you want to know the number of digits needed to represent an integer variable in base 10? You may want to know before printing if it will fit within a printed field. Furthermore, you’d like it to be done pretty efficiently. [Read More]

The other day I tried out a Z80 emulator Z80 Pack, and had the idea to make some software for the Z80, which I’ve never done. [Read More]

Sometimes I like to saute sliced sweet potatos with some kale for lunch when working from home. Add a little vinegar and seasoning, maybe a bit of cheese and you’re done. This meal turns out great using typical orange sweet potatos, but fails badly using purple sweet potatos – they’re too pasty and crumbly. They’re almost inedible cooked this way, but I don’t want to waste them. So what to do with the purple variety? Make them into fries. [Read More]

Much like our modern food and environment have made it hard to eat healthily without effort, and our modern transportation and farming and automated manufacturing have made exercise an optional activity, extreme wealth and power make difficult thinking an optional activity for the super rich. The billionaires can’t help it; they’re victims of their own success. [Read More]

The economics of the software business has been really good for developers since the 1980s at least. By developers I mean anyone in the business of making software, not just individual engineers – developers in the Apple App Store sense. Before the 1980s software was mostly a consulting style of business (think IBM.) [Read More]

Here are a few of the best (most disturbing) short stories I’ve read, ordered from newest to oldest. They’re squarely science fiction (maybe the Quickening is a slight exception here,) which only adds to the horror. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural – there’s an explanation, however unlikely. [Read More]