Computers, Audio, Video, Fun, Thoughts
In 2001, New Riders published a book called GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool by Gary Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor. They asked me, the originator of Autoconf and Automake, to write the Foreward, which I felt honored to do. I had handed off development of that software by then, so I [ ]
This is a repost of an interview with me for a web site called GNU Friends by the president of a Swedish foundation called FFKP, whose name means in English The Society for Free Culture and Software . The original article is only available now on the Wayback Machine. Jonas Öberg, the FFKP president, did a [ ]
In 1999, I had a DEC Celebris mini-tower for my desktop PC at UUNET. It had a Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPU, which was top of the line when the PC was purchased in 1996. But after several years, it had been far surpassed by newer PCs. PC hardware was advancing rapidly and the useful [ ]
From 1988 through 1992, I worked as a system administrator for the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC. As a nonprofit, it was too expensive for them to provide each employee with a PC, and Windows and PC networking were primitive back then, so their offices around the US used Wyse 50 terminals connected to [ ]
Around 1991, I was working as a student programmer and system administrator in the Hackers Pitt of the College of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. This story of how wiki entered our vocabularies via computers, 3-4 years before the first Web wiki, was recalled in November, 2007 over email by two other student [ ]
The Context It was the early 1990s. The Internet was beginning its transition from supporting only U.S. government and university research to supporting ordinary businesses. The main applications on the Internet so far were email, Usenet news, and anonymous FTP. The World Wide Web was still a primitive research project. Gopher and WAIS were obscure [ ]
Unexpectedly, I made the de-facto distribution tar files for source code releases of the Perl programming language for a year or two in the early 1990s. Up until sometime in the Perl 4 release cycle, its author Larry Wall distributed Perl by posting a set of several dozen shar (shell archive) files on the Usenet [ ]
Around 1990, Richard Stallman (RMS) and I were writing the GNU C library getopt() and he wanted to extend it to support long (multi-character) option names for user-friendliness. He considered Unix inferior in this regard to other operating systems such as TOPS-20 which supported long options (that could be abbreviated). He wanted GNU to be [ ]
Every few years I have to figure out a new way to share a Mac s printer with Windows PCs. The printer is connected to a Mac with USB and shared using System Preferences Sharing Printer Sharing. Apple provides Bonjour Print Services for Windows as a free download. It starts a service that discovers printers using the Zeroconf [ ]
Before and after restoration of a faded old photo. Notice in the top histogram, the peaks of the red, green, and blue channels aren t lined up and don t reach to the left and right edges. That results in a color cast and reduced contrast. If you have software that has individual R,G,B levels or curves [ ]
