Alf Lacis — My Minimalist Web Site

White papers & other documents by Alf Lacis & others

- An Optimized Binary Search where Accessing a Record is 'Expensive'

- A Discourse on Indexed Lists Used as Queues

- Discovering MAC Addresses Through Binary Tree Requests

- A description on how to use and modify libpng

- Names in C & C++ Code

- There Are Only Three Ways To Learn About Something

- Alien's Bash Tutorial

- The Seven Sins of the Specifier; Risks & Implementation

- Programming in C++, Rules and Recommendations

- Motorola S-Records

- <more>

Alf Lacis' Resume.

This is Alf's resume in LibreOffice, MS Word and PDF formats.

Source Code

- Alf's Ezi EEPROM File System for Embedded CPUs

- ALFLB - Alf's Function Library

- Number Bases Converter (Javascript)

- Percentage Availability & Downtime Calculator

- Pseudo File I/O library

- <more>

Discontinued & Hard-to-Find Documentation

- ByteBos Real-Time Multitasking Operating System - Programmer's Reference Manual

- Philips Car Radio Cassette Player Wiring Pin Outs Diagram, Model DC600/70

Contact:

Jottings & Quotes

All the gold* that you will ever touch in your life was "made" inside a star as it exploded.

It was blasted into space, became part of our planet around 4½ billion years ago, was found and ended up in your hand.

— Dr K Kruszelnicki 2010

*In fact includes all elements atomically "heavier" than iron.  Some more well-known ones are:

copper, zinc, silver, tin, iodine, tungsten, platinum, lead, mercury and uranium.

— Alf Lacis 2010

"High-level source code is meant to be created, read, understood and maintained by human engineers.

If we were only interested in the way that computers did things, we'd still be programming in machine code."

— Alf Lacis 2006  

" '... there seemed to be no conceivable way for this to happen.'

We use the word 'conceivable' because a number of very bright and very reputable [people] were busily making one of the ... worst, and commonest, errors.

They were confusing 'I can't see a way for this to happen' with 'There is no way for this to happen.'"

— Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen, 2000  

"Remember, there is a great deal of difference between ignorance and stupidity.

Ignorance can be cured by education.

The only cure for stupidity is a bullet."

— Original source unknown (and not found on the web!)

"I have finally learnt what the one, main, distilled distinction is, between people who like dogs, and people who like cats:

Dogs need masters.

Cats want slaves.

So... are you a master or a slave?"

— Alf Lacis 2007  

    "Natural selection sounds like a very straightforward idea, but words like 'competition' and 'win' are loaded.  It's easy to get the wrong impression of just how subtle evolution must be.  When a baby bird falls out of the nest and gets gobbled up by a passing cat, it is easy to see the battle for survival as being fought between bird and cat.  But if that is the competition, then cats are clear winners — so why haven't birds evolved away altogether?  Why aren't there just cats?

    Because cats and birds long ago came, unwittingly, to a mutual accommodation in which both can survive.  If birds could breed unchecked, there would soon be far too many birds for their food supply to support them. ...

    And that's where the cat comes in, along with all the other things that make it tough to be a bird, especially a young one. ...

    So what stops it getting out of hand is that if a group of greedy cats happens to evolve somewhere, they rapidly eat themselves out of existence again.  The more restrained cats next door survive to breed, and quickly take over the vacated territory.  So those cats that eat just enough birds to maintain their food supply will win a competition against the greedy cats.

    Cats and birds aren't competing because they're not playing the same game.  The real competitions are between cats and other cats, and between birds and other birds.

— Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen, 2000  

"We trained hard to meet our challenges but it seemed as if every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation."

— Gaius Petronius (20-66 AD), writing at a time of rapid change in the Roman Empire, succinctly captured the frustration that re-organisation brings in its wake.

"Any system which relies on human reliability is unreliable."

— Source unknown, but had to do with safety-critical systems, e.g., train control.

"People build something that works.  Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances.  But to an outsider, the idea is obvious."

— Pratchett, T, 2003.

"Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness."

— Pratchett, T, 1993.