Tag: tech

Dissecting the Fallacies of the COBOL Programmer “Crisis”

I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:

  • COVID-19 pandemic hits
  • World recession (if not depression) hits
  • An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
  • US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
  • IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!

This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.

“Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims!” screams CNN.

“Government systems written in the old COBOL computer language are blocking us from our cash!” gurgles ZDNet, the FOX News of tech media.

“Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows!” valley-girls The Verge.

“An ancient programming language is suddenly in demand thanks to the pandemic!” derps Salon.

It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?

So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…

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Zoom backgrounds : the Penguin Pete way!

So Zoom is the latest and hottest thing in teleconferencing apps, and it’s become the official video conferencing interface of the 2020 CoronaVirus pandemic. Isn’t that a cheerful backdrop for your company to get famous?

Lately I see a few people having fun with Zoom backgrounds. There’s the burning house meme which went viral. Others have picked backgrounds from The Office or Star Trek: The Next Generation. I figured I’d join in the fun, because if there’s one thing you all need right now to cope with the epidemic, it’s my deep-fried dark sense of humor.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Unix!

DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.

In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.

We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.

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Our Continuously Evolving Relationship With AI

DISCLAIMER: This was originally posted for another tech blog which has since gone long defunct. It is reposted here with permission.

You can’t deny that we live in exciting times for technology progress. Between IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant (formerly OK Google and Google Now), we are well into the dawn of AI personal assistants which can carry on a minor conversation with you, albeit a limited one resembling a customer service call. Just for some context, here’s what science fiction imagined AI assistants to be like only a few decades ago:

Not only does the Star Trek computer speak in a harsh monotone, but it has wimpy access times too. You’d think a civilization with faster-than-light space travel would have figured out how to cut network latency.

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A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

 

An Affectionate Look Back at the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post from my previous geeky technology blog. It is reposted here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

People from about Generation X or so today cut their milk teeth on these classic platforms, and today they’ll be all too ready to shake their cane at you and tell you about how it was in the good old days. Their memories of their first BASIC program or first addictive game are tied in with their first love and first beer. Amiga, Apple ][, NeXTSTEP, and the ZX Sinclair still have their cult following going strong today. But it is the ZX Sinclair Spectrum that is particularly remarkable, and foreign to the rest of the English-speaking world.

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What is Internet Filtering?

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.

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A Homage to the Typo Fairy

As texting on mobile devices continues to take the world by storm, more and more people are confronted with the complications of using an interface to communicate. And of course, cursing themselves for the mistakes they make.

Is this typed correctly so far? Let’s run a spellcheck: No, the word “texting” hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, nor has the word “speelcheck” for that matter. Whoops, we mean “spellcheck”. See, now how do we tell the difference between an omission in the dictionary and a fumble on the part of our fat, clumsy fingers? Continue reading “A Homage to the Typo Fairy”

Entertainment you might have missed at Geeky Domain

I’ve been a busy little penguin, inspired by this early spring.

First off, it’s the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word “robot,” in a Czechoslovakian stage play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” written in 1920, in which robots take over the world.

To mark the anniversary, I pick out the villain AIs from film, gaming, and one Harlan Ellison short story that nobody’s forgetting anytime soon. While I am still rolling my eyes at predictions of AI taking over and shaking my fist at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel for leading doomsday cults, I have to acknowledge that when evil AI is done right in fiction, it makes for an especially chilling villain.

And then…

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A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser

Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.

But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…

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