orthogonal has challenged me:

As someone who greatly enjoyed GEB, and as someone who became a professional programmer without (much) of a standard Computer Science education, let me offer you a challenge: give those of us without the benefit of your education a chapter-by-chapter (or concept-by-concept) breakdown -- or, better since you complain of Hofstadter "dumbing down", a "wising up" -- of GEB as several entries on your Slashdot Journal.

Right now such a great procrastination device would be crippling, but in a few months I'll give it some thought. If you have any suggestions, requests, or comments, please post them here.

I'm curious whether Hakmem Item 154 works when not written in assembler. If you have access to a machine that you believe does not do twos-complement arithmetic, please run the following C99 program and report the results:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
#include <assert.h>
static char*char2bin(register char x){char*r=(char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*8);assert(r!=NULL);for(register int i=1;i<9;++i,x>>=1)if((bool)(x&1))r[8-i]='1'; else r[8-i]='0';return r;}int main(){char*x=char2bin((char)0xFF+(char)0xFF); assert(x!=NULL);printf("%s\n",x);free(x);return EXIT_SUCCESS;}

(There are no system calls in there, so I think you should trust me even if you don't know exactly what it's doing.)

20th Century Fox Home Videos
PO Box 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90213-0900
USA

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing in the hopes that you can inform me when to expect a release of the Fox television series Millennium on.If no release date is planned, may I encourage your organisation to schedule it as soon as possible so that fans like myself do not have to resort to downloading bootleg copies in violation of your copyrights.

Well, my first-ever /. story and all it does is demonstrate how clueless I am. Hopefully this won't effect my ability to pretend to be a professional Solaris admin.

If I have no Journal articles, how can ACs berate me?