As the Dr. Dobb’s website continues its decline, I’ve gathered a full set of it’s online articles for the year 2008 (these are different from the print journal articles from the same year in the set from 1988-2009).
You can search through them:
Or browse them here:
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(Originally posted on LinkedIn on Jan 30, 2024)
Every year, I buy a new car.
It started in 2010 when I moved out on my own: a black Dodge Caliber. Second hand.
This year’s purchase was a new 2023 Kia Forte that I picked up from a dealer in St. Catharines.
And so on, every year in between, I’ve spent my after-tax money to purchase a car.
You must be thinking “where does he store these cars?” or maybe “why would anyone do this?”
Well, you see… I don’t buy these cars for myself.
I buy them for Susan, my landlord’s niece. For Rajiv, another landlord’s cousin. In 2016, I bought a real treat – a new 2016 Toyota Prius C – for Carrie. She was my landlord’s second wife.
As a renter I have to hand over a car’s-worth of cash every year. For the privilege of living indoors.
I know, I know. “Nothing in life is free”. We all have to pay.
But it’s a whopper, isn’t it? When you really think about the sums involved…
And it’s a doozy when you picture the alternative to having a roof over your head (I ❤️ love you Mom, but me and the fam aren’t moving back into the spare bedroom )
My landlords have changed over the years: I started with Briarlane, a large holding company here in Toronto.
Then my landlord was Akelius – a Swedish real estate firm who’s main trick is to perform unnecessary “improvements” to jack up your rent.
In 2016 my landlord was CAP REIT – a REIT is a special scam that charges real-estate businesses way less tax than other businesses. Because… they’re a sort of elaborate hobby rather than a for-profit entity!?
One day you – yes you – will have a chance to lighten the burden for renters like me.
Your chance will look like voting for politicians who support denser housing, more multi-storey, more “container” or “prefab” housing.
Your chance might be filling a city-run survey where you say you’re ok with more schools in your neighbourhood & more 3-bedroom units in new buildings.
Your chance might look like expressing support for an ombudsman who’s investigating corruption in the construction industry, and corruption in your Province’s housing ministry (this is how you know I’m from Ontario 😆 ).
Come join me in pushing for housing options that make sense for renters.
And maybe – one day – I’ll be able to give you a lift in a real car!
This tool performs multiple find-and-replace operations at once on a piece of text that you supply. Create a CSV file with the strings you want to replace in the first column, and the substitution text in the second column:
Notes:
targettext = targettext.replaceAll(data[currentrule][0], data[currentrule][1]);var regEx = new RegExp(data[currentrule][0]);targettext = targettext.replaceAll(regEx, data[currentrule][1]);Use this basic in-depth search to get a max of 20 documents that have your term:
Or press CTRL + F in your browser to search for specific keywords. Click on the links to read articles. These are Dr. Dobbs article headings from 1988 to 2009 (from oldest to newest).
If you want to hook me up with a real search engine, you’re welcome to it 😅
(more…)We all know how eating works:
The food goes in your mouth hole. It slides down the neck tube. Gets pummelled by the stomach muscles. Then it galumphs down the small intestine, spelunks through your large intestine, and PAPOW! that brown, gooey goodness – yes ladies and gentlemen – today I am munching on that Cream Collon.
This Cream Collon snack starts out promising.
On November 25, 2023 I started research for this article about ArVid, a Russian-developed device for storing data on VHS tapes. I finally hit “publish” on Jan 21, 2024, almost 2 months later.
This post is a “behind the scenes” look at my research methods, and some general observations that didn’t make it into the article itself.
I’ve seen the ArVid mentioned before in forum comments. It is a neat device and it comes up reliably when someone has the neat idea to store data on VHS tape. Turns out that many people had the same idea.
The last time I saw it mentioned, I went ahead and visited the English Wikipedia page for ArVid to learn more. There was remarkably little information on that page. I decided to go a little further and Google it – that was more fruitful because it brought up documents in Russian. Luckily, I can read Russian and saw an opportunity to collate information about this device into one spot.
(more…)Computerra (Компьютерр) was a Russian weekly computer magazine. It began publication in 1992, stopped print publication in December 2009, and appears to have published online until 2013.
There is an archive of content from 1997 – 2013 at old.computerra.ru but earlier content is impossible to find online.
You can browse articles from 1995-2004 on my site here:
A full .iso file with all the articles and images is available on the RuTracker Torrent site, or directly from my site here.
The collection above has text and some photos that accompanied the articles, but we also have scans of several print issues. Invaluable if you’re looking for graphic design from the time, hardware prices (from ads – something I needed for a research writeup) and other elements that are only visible in print:
Computerra issues 37 and 38 from 1995 (pdf)
Computerra issue 42 from 1995 (pdf)
Computerra issue 45 from 1996 (djvu). To read a .djvu file, I recommend Sumatra PDF Reader.
We even have a scan of Computerra “issue 0” from 1992!
The scans are courtesy of the amazing archive at MagzDB (update – this site is defunct, but some of it was saved to Anna’s Archive). If you have more scans of Computerra magazine, comment or email me at jacob at this site.com. I’d love to host them!
This is content from the DDJ Developer Library DVD-ROM 6 that was published in 2010. Publications included:
There are articles are in HTML format, along with source code, podcasts and videos.
The year is 1995 and you live in post-Soviet Russia.
It’s a hellish time: prices for basic consumer goods are triple what they were last year. Your employer just paid your salary in eggs instead of money. There are daily shootouts between rival gangs. 🎵Your love life’s DOA…🎵
It’s a wonderful time: Russia is awash in Western computers, TVs, VCRs, cassette players and dialup modems. Technology that was strictly off-limits in 1989 is suddenly within reach.
As one of the lucky Russians to have a computer at home, you are facing a challenge: your 500MB hard drive is overflowing with software, games, and documents. You must find an affordable way to get more digital storage.
You could store files on cheap and plentiful floppy disks. But each floppy only stores 1.44MB and is known to randomly lose data. Your second option is to buy another hard drive. But that costs about $200 USD – as much as a Russian’s entire monthly salary…
You head over to the local computer store in a gray mood. The store is cramped with bootlegged computer games, peripherals and hardware. Inside, you ask Yevgeni the proprietor whether there might be a cheap solution to your storage problem.
This is Yevgeni:
Fortunately, Yevgeni does have a 3rd option for you! It’s a truly innovative Russian-made product called the “ArVid” card. It comes in a package like this:
It is an ISA expansion card for your computer and will allow you to use your home-VCR to store 4 hard-drives’ worth of data on a single VHS tape. The same tape you use to watch movies at home.
For 60 days, I monitored the top 7 Email Automation vendors to learn how well they manage the mailer reputation of their systems.
Come along as I spend $340 of my own money to monitor 3,735 IP addresses and rank the vendors. Discover Pardot and MailChimp‘s tricks for staying off email spam lists, Eloqua’s surprising spot in the rankings (not at the top!) and learn whether Adobe’s Marketo is actually The Worst™ at avoiding blocklists. Oh, and HubSpot, Act-On and Campaign Monitor are also here.
Read on for the full story, listen to it on Mike MacFarlane’s podcast (archive link) or go straight to the vendor rankings!
I am a Marketing Operations Manager who’s been in Marketing Ops since 2013. In late November 2022, I was having a normal day at Auvik when an urgent message popped up on my screen.
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