neilwebber

Author: neilwebber

  • Revamping the site

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    neilwebber
    in

    Over the next few weeks I will be revamping this site; starting with resurrecting it off of whatever yahoo hosting became (Turbify???) where it was being quite neglected. Hosted on wordpress now and will work on refreshing it hopefully by the end of this year (2023 – let’s see if this actually happens!)

  • Solving an arithmagon

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    neilwebber
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    One of my nephews was working on an “arithmagon” puzzle. Here’s an example puzzle: The idea is to solve for a, b, and c such that: a + b = 26 a + c = 33 b + c = 35 and, I guess, the idea at his young age is to try different numbers…

  • Totality report: Salem Oregon for the Eclipse

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    neilwebber
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    Just a short note – was in Salem Oregon for the Eclipse on August 21 2017. Most surprising (and awesome) to me was the stark difference between totality and 99%. If you weren’t in the totality, you missed something special, regardless of how “close to total” you were. With even just a sliver of the…

  • Ordered replacement for my last Soekris router

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    neilwebber
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    I am down to my last (and largest configuration) www.soekris.com net 6501 pfsense router, and just ordered a replacement for it from netgate. I’ve already replaced two other routers in my world (at other locations) with netgate products. The nice thing about them is they are directly supported with pfsense, so it’s just an easy…

  • Amazon AWS Route53 Region: us-east-1

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    neilwebber
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    This is one of those things that seems hard to find even though it is in fact documented, so I thought I’d post this note in the hope that someday it will pop up on someone’s google and be helpful. So, here are some keywords of note: This is about Route53, the DNS service in…

  • Oldest “Neil Webber” reference

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    neilwebber
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    Inspired by finding some thirty-year-old code of mine online, I wondered if there were any even older references… and I found one! In the summer of 1979, having just graduated high school, I worked on a macro intepreter for the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification while I was a summer intern at the National Bureau of…

  • Thirty year old code almost still compiles (and does still work!)

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    neilwebber
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    Thirty years ago, in February of 1987, I published some code of mine on net.sources:                 There is so much deliciousness in this old post, including evidence that my affinity for the word “actually” goes a long way back. Because I was a hardcore Amiga nerd back then…

  • The Random Grant

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    neilwebber
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    The Webber Family Foundation makes grants to 501(c)(3) organizations focused on education. We started with a broad definition of “education” but that quickly led to a problem: too many organizations competing for a limited grant budget. Even after filtering out “bad” requests, and selecting for “best in class”, the aggregate amount requested was often four times (or…

  • Motorola MC68020 Processor Board from 1987

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    neilwebber
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    In 1987 a company I worked for (Epoch Systems; it no longer exists) designed and built this custom 68020-based processor board for a file server. I did the Unix port (4.2bsd from vax) for this system. A few notes for the hard core nerds. Bring up the full resolution version to see some of these…

  • Making a simple systemd file for Raspberry Pi jessie

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    neilwebber
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    I wanted to write a systemd service file for a daemon I wanted started automatically at boot on my Raspberry Pi running Debian Jessie. This used to be a lot simpler in the old hardcore Unix days. Well, no, actually, it’s simpler now. But figuring out how to do it was anything but simple and…