Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Book Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol. 1: Second Contact by Ryan North

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Comic book cover.

I can confidently declare that Lower Decks is the second best Star Trek series after The Orville. Lower Decks has always been bags of fun with a good emotional core. Now your favourite sci-fi capers are available in handy comic book form! Second Contact is a compilation of Lower Decks issues #1–6. You get a bunch of stories spread out over 145 pages. The great thing about a comic of a cartoon i…

40 years later, are Bentley's "Programming Pearls" still relevant?

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Gnarly monochrome scan of Programming Pearls.

In September 1985, Jon Bentley published Programming Pearls. A collection of aphorisms designed to reveal truths about the field of programming. It's 40 years later - long enough to see several revolutions in the field - so surely these are obsolete, right? They belong in the same category as "always carry a bundle of hay for the horses" or "you won't always have a pocket calculator with you" or …

A little oddity in the way curl deals with old dates

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The curl logo.

For boring technical reasons, computers think the world began on 1st of January 1970. To keep track of the future, they count the number of seconds since that momentous date. So zero seconds represents midnight on that day. So how do computers deal with dates before The Beatles' Abbey Road was top of the UK album charts? Negative numbers! Most modern computers can deal with dates far in the…