Tag: Unix

UNIX Magic poster

On By Paul HubbardIn Computer science, Humor, recommendationsLeave a comment

I went looking today for mounting options for my new! signed! Effin’ Birds poster and my first thought was how much I like the aluminum dibond on my UNIX Magic poster:

then I realized that I had never blogged it! So back in 2021, I read this story via Hacker News about a legendary 1970s conference poster full of inside Unix jokes and references, was instantly smitten and ordered one:

Anyway, the Unix poster is all that and continues to occupy a place of honor, right in the corner of my eye, because frankly my entire career has been Unix in various forms: Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD, Irix, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and others that I can’t recall any more. I’m counting MacOS since yeah, it’s Unix with a professional makeup, and so are Android and IOS.

(The time spent on OS/2, BeOS, Windows flavors, Desqview, GeoWorks, DOS… well, ahh well)

Now its time to add my signed EB poster – my better half bought this for me at ComiCon 2025:

but you can’t buy the dibond sans a print, so I’ll probably cheap out and get this locally from Blicks.

So this is a mixed post – yeah, you should totally get a unix poster, you can DIY it for much less than the fancy print. Secondly, Effin Birds is awesome, I also have his wall calendar and some conference tchotchkes.

Auto build your code on save with entr

On By Paul HubbardIn Computer science, recommendationsLeave a comment

So I’m working on a project at work where I want to rebuild my code whenever I save a source code file. Today I found the tool ‘entr’ and it’s a great thing to learn about. (I should totally send this to Julia Evans!)

All I needed to do is run

ls *.src | entr make

And that’s it. It’ll re-run make every time I save from the editor. Simple, helpful, open source.

It’s 2018 and I still need fsck

On By Paul HubbardIn RandomLeave a comment

File this under “Really?”

That’s my wife’s laptop, spending an hour rebuilding the file system after it got corrupted. I had to know the command-v boot trick and video record it booting (!) to see the error fly by before it auto rebooted, then boot recovery, open a terminal and run fsck with a -r.

Ain’t no way a random user could manage it. Apple! Bash some bugs would ya?