TIL

BSDCan 2024​

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TIL: scent-free is a thing, although confusingly, the University page makes no mention of scent.

I had to Google:

scent-free barrier university​
 
On West Coast US, 'scent-free' has been a thing since well before the Covid - it started with medical offices, to be respectful of the fact that some patients may be allergic to perfumes. Recently, it spread to government offices. Oh, and don't forget commercial airliners - you don't want to be stuck on a 6-hour flight next to someone with incredibly offensive BO or stench of smoke or excessive garlic/fish. On at least a couple occasions (that I know of), commercial flights had to be turned around because this one passenger was just too smelly for everyone else on board.
 
TIL: security/pinentry REALLY should be compiled with GCC, not LLVM... I get error messages from LLVM about C99 and later not supporting implicit function calls. And those are supposedly warnings that get counted as errors by LLVM... I had to disable LLVM18 as default compiler in /etc/make.conffor the port to compile at all...
 
TIL:
  • tubularly is not a real word
  • cathodically is …
1728025940668.pngSuddenly I feel surrounded by diamonds, boron, environmental friendliness, multilingual technical knowledge of nuclear science, and much, much more, and last but not least: food.

This morning I shall try to think of such exotic and high-cost things whilst stumpily slurping on low-cost instant hot chocoloate foodstuff from Aldi. I strongly, cathodically, suspect that it's not possible to get much lower.

Cath O'Deray said:
quietly, methodically, stumpily, cathodically
Click to expand...
 
Cath O'Deray said:
TIL:
  • tubularly is not a real word
  • cathodically is …
View attachment 20567Suddenly I feel surrounded by diamonds, boron, environmental friendliness, multilingual technical knowledge of nuclear science, and much, much more, and last but not least: food.

This morning I shall try to think of such exotic and high-cost things whilst stumpily slurping on low-cost instant hot chocoloate foodstuff from Aldi. I strongly, cathodically, suspect that it's not possible to get much lower.
Click to expand...
Sometimes overuse of academically precise terms does get ridiculous. Being academically precise is appropriate when having conversations with other experts or writing a paper. But in this case:

Mesotrione is a pretty poisonous chemical found in herbicides used in agriculture. Traces of that chemical can and do work their way into your food. There needs to be a good way to test for mesotrione without ruining the food itself. That's where the cathodically pretreated electrode comes in. The very term 'cathodically' is about preventing corrosion of the said electrode. Why is that necessary? because that electrode comes in contact with food, of course. And the stuff that we eat - yep, it's good for our bodies, but chemically, it's the same stuff that corrodes metal.

I found all this out simply by googling the term 'cathodically':
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And TIL: After reading all that, the very design of CRT TVs and monitors, the 'Cathode' part is now making sense to me. But they use impressed current, rather than sacrificial. The cathodes in your example use sacrificial current, BTW.
 
blackbird9 said:
This famous, excellent book by R.G. Loeliger.

archive.org

R. G. Loeliger Threaded Interpretive Languages Their Design And Implementation Byte Books ( 1981) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Threaded Interpretive Languages
archive.org

The first mention of TIL is in the preface!

View attachment 20576
Click to expand...
Wow, Today I Learned about the very existence of a book about Threaded Interpretive Language!

But even from that one page, I realize that yeah, it does take a certain amount of talent to come up with something like a whole new language in a matter of months. I did take a class on Programming Language Fundamentals, a pre-requisite for Compiler Design, and realized that I can try stuff and play with it, and maybe build something useful based on it, but design of new stuff in that category is gonna be a challenge.
 
There was a lot of interest in FORTH and TIL's (the programming language version) in general back in the early 8-bit micro days, because they have a lot of advantages for small machines: powerful; fast execution (faster than BASIC); relatively simple to implement; and highly memory efficient, fitting into the small amounts of ROM and RAM that were available at the time, which would be considered tiny in comparison to modern hardware. For the same reasons, FORTH is still used today on some space systems (eg, some small satellites) that use older, RAD-hard CPU's and ROM/RAM chips.

A classic example is the multitasking FORTH ROM for the ZX81 by David Husband, which added a multi-tasking runtime system to the ZX81(!); and of course the Jupiter Ace micro that had FORTH as it's main ROM language and operating system. The LOGO educational language by Seymour Papert et al is another well-known example of a TIL. And the HP programmable calculators used many of the same kinds of ideas, eg RPN expression handling.

To get an idea of what a programming feat a multi-tasking FORTH was for the ZX81, here is a photo of the entire ZX81 system board, which was a computer built from just 4 chips. A r-pi is a huge machine by comparison. The FORTH ROM replaced the socketed Sinclair BASIC ROM on the board. Typically you would add a 16KB RAM pack via the expansion edge connector. This is a good example of the kind of thing that you can do with TIL's. That was in 1983. :cool:

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From wikipedia:-
"The Forth programming language was used in the production of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.[citation needed] Specifically, it was used to control the Dystraflex motion control system, which was created by John Dykstra and his team at Industrial Light & Magic. This system was instrumental in creating the complex and precise camera movements required for the space battle scenes and the trench run sequences on the Death Star."

Loeliger's book was great because it told you how to roll your own TIL. IMHO, still worth reading now. :)

en.wikipedia.org

Jupiter Ace - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
www.forth.com

Forth in Space Applications

Featured Forth Applications Also see: Space Shuttle Robot Arm Simulator Reprinted from the 14 April 2003 version of NASA staff's list of the uses of
www.forth.com www.forth.com
 
Today I learnt more about the difference between && and ;

Code: 
% pkg orphans | grep orphaned\:\ base && pkg orphans | wc -l
% pkg orphans | wc -l && pkg orphans | grep orphaned\:\ base
      54
% pkg orphans | grep orphaned\:\ base ; pkg orphans | wc -l
      54
% echo $SHELL
/bin/tcsh
%

Now I understand why there was nothing in response to the first of the three pairs of commands.
 
TIL: How to grep words in a manpage with the default pager less.

Use / key to enter a string then press n to find the next string including that string and use shift+n to go to the first string found.
 
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