2020 mid-year link clearance
Raymond Chen
Here we go again.
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These mundane Hallowe’en costumes are brilliantly creative.
Happy Halloween Eve! Its time for another year of my all-time favourite festivity, Tokyos mundane Halloween costume party, where folks dress up as an utterly normal and boring thing
Here are my favourite costumes from the 2019 event this past weekend
— Melissa Martin (@DoubleEmMartin) October 30, 2019
My favorites are the couple that just got into a fight at Disneyland and now have a tense atmosphere between them (the woman’s facial expression is perfect), and person who missed the garbage pick-up. I can only imagine how tiring it would be to be dressed as a person whose job is to make little kids smile for pictures all night. - Finally, A Practical Guide for Roadside Wildflower Viewing. You see, the problem with field guides is that they assume you are on foot and can stop to examine the minute details of each flow. But what if you’re whizzing past at highway speeds? Enter A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed.
- An analysis of the Lego City deep space rocket. Serious scientific analysis for a scientific age. The discussion on HN is also wonderful.
- I just spent 25 minutes watching somebody solve a Sudoku puzzle with just two starting squares. It is amazing.
- Never Surrender, the Galaxy Quest documentary is now streaming on Amazon Prime, if that’s your thing.
- How special register groups invaded computer dictionaries for decades.
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For #ThrowbackThursday, we have Raymond Chen talking about the Bedlam DL3 email storm that happened way back in October 1997.
(And yes, he mentions cat videos).#BedlamDL3#EmailStorm pic.twitter.com/6Tf3PODcMA— OneDevMinute Videos (@OneDevMinute) April 19, 2018
- A Little Order: Delving into the STL sorting algorithms: Fred Tingaud discovers that when asked to find the median of an array and sort the elements less than the median,
std::partial_sortis three times slower thanstd::nth_elementfollowed bystd::sort. So why doesstd::partial_sorteven exist if it sucks at its one job? - The Faces of Microsoft: The history of fonts at Microsoft.
- Thirty Years of TrueType Fonts: A retrospective by Greg Hitchcock, one of the key players in bringing TrueType to Windows (as you no doubt learned from the first article).
- In a comment to my earlier discussion of why MS-DOS puts an int 20h at byte 0 of the COM file program segment, I noted that at offset 5 is a jump instruction. Jim Nelson points out that this jump instruction deserves an entire article by itself, and fortunately he also provided a link to that article. It’s a wild tale of deception, lies, and the A20 line.
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BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).You might also have noticed at the bottom of the announcement an internal Microsoft department name used in public communication, a mistake common to those who spend most of their time inside the Microsoft bubble. CELA stands for Corporate, External, & Legal Affairs. In other words, it’s the legal department. - I noted some time ago that the Windows 98 welcome music was commissioned to be 30 seconds long. A reddit user tracked down the author from a brief mention in the production notes for the movie Stick It: “Mike [Simpson] also composed the “Welcome to Windows 98″ theme for Microsoft.” Read on to find out what happened to the full version.
- How to share a PCH file among multiple Visual Studio projects.
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5 comments
I see that the YouTube algorithm has taken us to the same place.
Re Sudoku video – not just any guy, but Simon Anthony. His reaction to this puzzle and other comments throughout are great. It took my teenage daughter 2 days to solve this.
I know I wouldn’t have been able to solve it anywhere near that quickly, but my faculties have not completely left me, as I did at least spot a minor error where he had coloured a square adjacent to a 3 in as a potential 4. (The square was subsequently ruled out for unrelated reasons.)
I’m also subscriber for that channel.
There are many awesome Sudoku puzzles sent by viewers being solved there. Some of them involves no number but just rules additional to normal Sudoku rules.
That guy is amazing.
Wow at that Reddit investigation for the Windows 98 music! I never heard the 98 music, but the XP music I did, but only in virtual machines. Guess a lot of machines required specific audio drivers which if you clean installed, weren’t there yet so you never got to hear the music.