It's a snow day!

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 10/01/2020 at 09:58 • Filed to: None

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Round Rock ISD is currently experiencing a district-wide internet outage. We are working on resolving the issue and will let families know when it has been resolved.

Aremmes > ttyymmnn 10/01/2020 at 10:14

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One would think that a school district in close proximity to so many technology companies would have its IT solidly sorted out.

Ell oh ell.

ttyymmnn > Aremmes 10/01/2020 at 10:16

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It’s actually back online now. It was down for about 10 minutes. Somebody probably had to cycle the modem. 

Aremmes > ttyymmnn 10/01/2020 at 11:11

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Ah, probably got more than one pair of eyes to look at the problem. Which reminds me of an old story.

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

ttyymmnn > Aremmes 10/01/2020 at 11:20

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Restart fixes 98% of computer problems. 

barnie > Aremmes 10/01/2020 at 11:54

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Lisp was one of my favorite languages to write in. All those parens! And I could generate code in data space and then execute it. Brought the college PDP-11 780 to it’s knees a couple times with mistakes.

First money I ever made writing code was in Lisp. My brother had a PC Jr. and an Okidata 320 printer. AutoCAD 2.1 had no drivers for it. I was in college learning Lisp so researched and wrote a driver that mostly worked. Graphics on a dot-matrix was primative. Sent the code to AutoDesk and didn’t hear anything for a few months. Then a check for, I think, $175 arrived with a thank you note. At that time, AutoCAD was written in Lisp.

Aremmes > barnie 10/01/2020 at 13:00

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I haven’t tried Lisp or Scheme, though if I were to start now I’d go with Scheme just for the lexical scoping. My first properly learned language was C, and all those parens look like a pile of nail clippings to me.

Old AutoCAD is best AutoCAD. Although I’m surprised no one has tried to run it in Emacs.

Nothing > ttyymmnn 10/01/2020 at 13:09

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We had a 17 hour Comcast outage on Tuesday. Quite odd when school is canceled due to no internet.

barnie > Aremmes 10/01/2020 at 13:24

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Heh, nail clippings. Had n’t heard that before. With paren-matching editors, it would be much easier today. And the languages have evolved. Bet we can’t exec data space anymore. :) Worked with Lisp only in college, ‘~82. First real job was bal360, a dream job. Made learning c a breeze.