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The Dev Dispatch

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The Back Pages

reads, oddities & one from the vault · 326 articles

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A GUID test turned randomness into a CI failure

A flaky CI/CD build led Nikolai M to a test that rejected any GUID string containing “000”. The check was meant to catch GUID.Empty, but three consecutive zeroes are common in UUID text: Nikolai measured them in 0.5527% …

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A 1993 Stratus server reaches its final uptime cycle

In 1993, Phil Hogan put a Stratus fault-tolerant server into service at Great Lakes Works in Dearborn, Michigan. Twenty-four years later, it had suffered no unplanned shutdown, with about 80% of its hardware still origin…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Heathrow screens expose a Windows archaeology exhibit

Heathrow’s departure displays recently exposed more than flight times. One showed a Windows activation notice alongside flights to Milan and Cairo, while another carried dates from September 21 and September 12. A later …

HTTP 418 · Oddities

COMETLINK online chat spans two retro desktop simulations

COMETLINK relaunches as a dial-up-style online service with six chat rooms and a sign-on screen. A screen name is enough to join. The same rooms appear inside 56k.rip's Windows 95 desktop and dialup.rip's Macintosh deskt…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

fakecloud gives AWS integration tests a localhost target

fakecloud is a standalone local emulator for AWS integration tests. Applications keep using standard AWS clients, while test code can inspect state and control asynchronous processors through SDKs for TypeScript, Python,…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Floci brings four cloud APIs to localhost

Floci packages AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI emulators as local MIT-licensed binaries. Its pitch is a credential-free development loop, with startup claims as low as 24 ms and an AWS endpoint on port 4566. The cloud stays remo…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A Video About Ideas That Did Not Survive

This Lobsters /t/historical link points to a YouTube video titled “The Graveyard of Good Ideas.” The available source provides no description, speaker name, publication date, or list of examples. Its subject can therefor…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

When software names stop naming things

An essay by mmagueta connects Cato the Younger’s warning about corrupted political language with software’s growing appetite for plausible labels. It argues that business systems, engineering practice and machine-generat…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

What Made Amiga Screens Different

An illustrated primer explains why Amiga users still defend screens: independent display areas could vary in resolution, colour depth and palette, overlap, scroll and slide across one another. The article covers OCS-era …

PHP · Reads

JetBrains Air brings AI agents to PhpStorm

JetBrains has introduced Air, a product family for running and managing AI coding agents. Its free public-preview IDE plugin brings Claude Agent, Codex, Junie, Copilot, and OpenCode to PhpStorm and other JetBrains IDEs. …

HTTP 418 · Oddities

M6 Mac Mini holds 600 MHz Pentium II emulation in 86Box

A Mac Mini M6 running a modified 86Box 6.0 build holds a Windows 98 SE machine at 600 MHz Pentium II speed. A base M4 reaches 500 MHz. The test includes emulated Voodoo 3 graphics, Winamp audio, Cinebench 2000 and 3DMark…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A Legacy Formatter Misses a Zero for Early Years

Tim inherited a Visual Basic application from before 2000, written before VB .Net, that adds one leading zero to years below 1000. For Caesar Augustus's death in 14 AD, the output becomes "014". The four-digit form would…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A cold can steadies the iPhone 18 Pro benchmark

Matt Birchler found that a chilled La Croix can keep an iPhone 18 Pro out of iOS’s serious thermal state during a 20-run transcription benchmark. The phone sustained 400.4 words per second on the final run, while the tes…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Yeo Kheng Meng Extends Windows 98 to xHCI USB

Yeo Kheng Meng has built an xHCI host driver that lets Windows 98 talk to modern USB controllers, including the hardware in a 2020 ThinkPad. The LLM-assisted project is available as xhci98 on GitHub and still has bugs. I…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

The brain keeps changing its favorite machine

Metaphors make unfamiliar ideas accessible, but they also hide what they leave out. Evan Meagher uses the familiar claim that consciousness is computation to question how much we understand about the brain. He traces ear…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

When drum memory met hand-tuned blackjack

Ed Nather’s 1983 USENET account about programmer Mel follows the construction of a blackjack demo for Royal McBee’s drum computers. Mel hand-coded hexadecimal, placed instructions by rotational timing, and exploited arit…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

RAIBO2 turns battery efficiency into a marathon finish

KAIST's RAIBO2 quadruped covered 42.195 km at South Korea's Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon in 4:19:52 on one battery charge. A Nature paper published nearly two years later credits lightweight construction, efficient mo…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Discord turns its social graph into an age gate

Discord has started deploying age estimation after shelving the rollout for more than six months amid user backlash. The model studies account behavior and social connections, while message and call content stay outside …

HTTP 418 · Oddities

PDP-11/83 puts its Unix processes live on the web

Dave Plummer has connected his upgraded PDP-11/83 to pdp1173.com, where visitors can watch 2.11BSD processes refresh every five seconds. The site accepts no commands and shields the machine with a cache. Its four megabyt…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A Weekend Module Brings the Gantt Chart to a Halt

An early-2000s trading-systems project treated documentation and schedule control as the product. A developer at a stock-market surveillance startup built a needed reporting module over one weekend and revealed it on Mon…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A 128-byte Atari 2600 takes on Myst

An Atari 2600 project has squeezed a demake of the 1990s PC adventure Myst onto original hardware. The console offers only 128 bytes of RAM, so Vince built a specialized cartridge from a BurgerTime donor and used E7 bank…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

How

James Gosling's account settles the origin story behind Java's 0xCAFEBABE marker. The value grew out of

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A Variable Name With a Built-In Index

An animation script contains a C++ call with a parameter named `length4_3_3`. Remy Porter treats the identifier as a disguised range expression, probably equivalent to `length4[3]`, and connects its shape to John Cage’s …

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