Thinking about Algol 68
I took my first computer science course in my second year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The course was a full year, starting in September 1974, and we programmed in Waterloo FORTRAN IV, which if memory serves was called Watfor or maybe Watfiv at the time. We also had a brief session with IBM 360 / 370 Assembler language. Both languages were available to us in the form of batch timeshare services where we wrote our programs on IBM 029 key punches and submitted the card decks to be run, generating printouts which were almost entirely compilation or execution failures interspersed with the occasional output of a program that generated the hoped-for results.
Open Source and Music Playback
For me at least, music is an indispensable part of my day; much more so than streaming video or television. I tend to be an...
Use rclone to put your files in the cloud
There are lots of third party applications out there that purport to solve my sharing-with-the-cloud problem. I chose Rclone – an open source command-line program that can be used to copy files between computer file systems and the cloud, providing backup, restore, duplication, one-way and bi-directional synchronization and even “file streaming” – making a folder appear virtually in your physical filesystem. Not just with Google Drive, but with all sorts of cloud providers, both proprietary and open source.