"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.

It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

Just beautiful: an implementation of a Turing Machine, as described by Turing; not only is it ingenious - reading characters written on tape with pen via OCR - but it's also a beautiful piece of hardware; it feels as elegant as the point it is illustrating.

"To state that another way, given a function f and input x, determine if f(x) will halt." AlanT puts out a tender on GetACoder for Turing's Halting Problem. The responses are entertaining.

"...the discipline is entirely about cheapness. The glory goes to parsimony, to the algorithms that invest the fewest CPU cycles for the greatest return... What scientists saved programmers squander." Paul Ford is a man after my own heart.

Entertaining parable of the ways computer scientists and electrical engineers differ.

A talk by Matt Webb from Reboot7 - he referenced it in his playsh talk, and it's very much worth going over again.