Bill Menees's Blog

In 1998, I wrote an IDE called MIX Builder for developing and debugging programs on Donald Knuth's MIX computer as defined in his The Art of Computer Programming book series. Dr. Knuth is big into "perfectability", so he offers a $2.56 reward to the first person to find each error in his books.

While writing my MIX emulator, I was lucky enough to find two errors in TAOCP Volume 1, so I have two checks from Dr. Knuth for $2.56. The honor of having two rewards from Dr. Knuth is way cooler than having another $5.12 in my pocket, so I'd never cash his checks. Some have described Knuth's reward checks as "among computerdom's most prized trophies". I understand that completely, but it's hard to explain it to people that haven't tried to read TAOCP and don't know Dr. Knuth's background and major contributions to computer science.

Recently, I ran across an article about Knuth reward checks in Wikipedia. It has a list of known checks, so I added my two (#392 and #462) to the list. I also scanned in the letters that Dr. Knuth sent back with his annotations. He stopped using email on 1/1/1990, so he sent his responses along with the checks via snail mail.

• Scan of check and letter about the 1^st error I found.
• Scan of check and letter about the 2^nd error I found.

Labels: Software

Microsoft just released Windows PowerShell v1.0, which is a new object-oriented, .NET-aware, dynamically scriptable command-line shell for Windows. It's pretty cool, but I wanted the ability to launch a PowerShell window for a selected folder in Explorer the same way I can launch cmd.exe with the old "DOS Here" PowerToy from Microsoft.

Way back in the "Monad" beta days I wrote such a PowerToy and posted it to the private Microsoft newsgroups for the early adopters. Then once Microsoft changed from the Monad codename to the official PowerShell name, Scott Hanselman posted his own independently written "PowerShell Prompt Here" PowerToy. But his version was hardcoded to look for PowerShell under "C:\Program Files", and now for the 1.0 release, Microsoft moved PowerShell under the Windows\System32\PowerShell\v1.0 folder. So I've updated my old PowerToy to look at the correct location, and you can download it below.

PowerShellHere.inf.

Once you download the file, just right-click it and select "Install". Then when you right-click a folder in Explorer, you should have a "PowerShell Prompt Here" item on the folder's context menu.

Labels: Software

I've created this blog for a few reasons:

• I'm a programmer, and I have several CharityWare apps available on http://www.menees.com/. When I update any of them, I can use this blog to notify anyone that cares.
• I'm a martial artist, and I'm writing a book called The Road To Shodan: A Guide To Reaching First Degree Black Belt. I'm going to self-publish it sometime later this year using lulu.com, and I plan to communicate publically about the book through this blog.
• I'm a beginning knifemaker, and I'll be publishing photos of my knives and stories of my workshop experiences. Hopefully I can get feedback from a wide group of people here.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to my feed. If you'd like to know a little more about me, you can see my short biography at http://www.conradjoneskarate.com/.

Labels: Knifemaking, Martial Arts, Software