Author Archives: Jason

About Jason

Jason has worked in IT since 2006. He started as a student employee manning the University IT Helpdesk and is currently the Engineering Manager embedded in a highly ranked department at an R1 research university.

ircII — chat like it’s 1991

In previous posts, I mentioned that I was able to build and use an IRC client and wanted to dive a little more deeply into that. I built ircII 2.8.2, the final release of the classic Unix irc client from … Continue reading

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Ultrix Gaming

So with a working Ultrix machine on which I can chat on irc, send and receive email, and read and respond to newsgroups, I needed something idle to do to pass the time once there were no more messages to … Continue reading

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The DecStation Saga

I came across this machine a year or two ago in the “free pile” of our monthly meeting of local Retro Computing enthusiasts. At the meeting, we hooked up a serial line to it , turned it on and found … Continue reading

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Sometimes the project finds you…(part 2)

I intended to write this just after the events took place, but never go around to it.  Now that Soylent News is coming up on it’s third birthday, I finally put together a little bit of the back-history.  The following can … Continue reading

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Retro Data Structures

One of the more fun things I do with my spare time is to play around with old computers. Specifically, I enjoy my Atari 800. I recently started thinking about a small game to write on the machine, something with … Continue reading

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Gitlab Upgrade: Postmortem

This is an article I drafted and forgot about. It dates from January 2016 This week at work we had an upgrade fiasco. If we want to lay some blame out there, I’ll take 50% for inadequate testing procedures, and … Continue reading

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A Matter of Perspective

Over the last two weeks, I saw two talks. One was from RMS, yes THE Richard Stallman. The other was a panel of industry professionals on Cloud Computing, with representatives from Universities, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. I found Stallman’s talk … Continue reading

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Computer Scientists — The Next Generation

I’ve just had the privilege of teaching an Intro to Computer Science class for the last two Semesters at the University where I work.  The class covered basic first semester programming topics, such as functions, loops, conditionals, arrays and hash … Continue reading

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Sometimes the project finds you…(part 1)

I have been, for years, an unabashed Slashdot.org fanboy.  I’ve been accused of being a Slashdot apologist by friends who feel that Slashdot hasn’t been relevant for 10 years.   To them, I say, its relevant to me and one of … Continue reading

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Config files

I’m working on setting up a test system at work. The system is a test environment for a major upgrade of an existing Web Application used across campus. As such, we’re testing all the fiddly bits, getting it hooked up … Continue reading

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