bm98
Joined 18 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Thank you for this article. One of the great frustrations of using Magit for Emacs is the inability to read things because the foreground and background colors for various things end up the same on some platforms.
From this article I found the command "toe -a" and was able to try various TERM values until I found one that makes Magit readable: vt100. This turns off colors entirely, which may not be pretty, but at least I can read everything now.
Comment · 5 years ago
1982 Atari 800 here (was 8 years old at the time). I remember thinking the same thing at the time. When we first bought the thing, there just wasn't much I/O beyond the tape drive (and later the disk drive), and therefore the things we could do seemed very limited. It wasn't until we got a printer (a Star Micronics SG-10 dot matrix tractor feed) and a 300-bps modem that the world really opened up!
Comment · 5 years ago
>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times.
And then you go off to college, and one day the program stops working because of one problem or another, and they call you in the middle of studying for final exams, and that's when you learned about technical support and technical debt and all the things that make programming less fun!
Some people have recurring dreams in which they show up to school or work in their pajamas... my recurring dream is that some program I wrote in high school is still being used twenty years later, and they come calling because something broke...
Comment · 6 years ago
Software lifetime is an interesting topic. See for example [1], a 1992 paper that surveyed business applications and found an average lifetime of about 9 years, with a maximum of 20 years and a minimum of 2 years. 2 years versus 20 years!
Things don't seem much different today.
On the one hand, HTTP, HTML, and producing HTML server-side in a language like Java or Python and with a SQL database isn't all that different now than it was 20 years ago. There are Java web apps developed in 1999 that are kept up-to-date and work just fine in 2020. On the other hand, there are applications developed with popular technologies a just a few years ago that are hopelessly out-of-date and in need of a rewrite today.
I see it as an end user too. I've been an ING Direct (now Capital One 360) customer for 18 years. The web app that I use in 2020 seems to do the same things as the one in 2002 (though it's slower today), but it seems like it's been completely rewritten at least three times.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=23826996884004375...
EDIT: And HN! 13 years old and counting...
Comment · 6 years ago
_That_ is the question we should be asking. If not, is it because geofence warrants have a higher legal bar if issued to a phone company? Or is it about the level-of-effort?
Comment · 7 years ago
I always thought the primary driver of the demise of Flash was that Apple simply decided not to support it in iOS Safari. Is that not right?
Comment · 7 years ago
Walmart. I've been Amazon Prime for years, but whenever I need to buy something with a high risk of being counterfeit (printer ink is the most common one for me), I use Walmart - and it's free shipping from them anyway. Really the only difference is that Amazon usually gets it to my door faster.
Comment · 7 years ago
To me this is the crux of the issue. And it's non uncommon in software development:
The developer fails to check for an error condition or raise an exception because doing so would add too much complexity to the system. So instead it is assumed (or hoped) that it simply can't or won't happen. Problem solved...
(Edit: Or that the user will just have to reboot if it happens.)
Comment · 7 years ago
Tracking time is part and parcel of being a consultant, at least if you have multiple clients and overlapping work. After doing it for 15+ years, I've tried it all - everything from the spreadsheet, to the apps, to forgetting and having to go back and reconstruct.
I read this article and I think it's missing the point about what's so hard about time tracking.
What's hard is: Implementing the trigger on the context switch.
You're working on one thing, something happens and you make a context switch to something else - and in order to track your time, you need a trigger to fire to prompt you to record the switch. It doesn't matter if it's in a spreadsheet or an app or on a piece of paper - I find that my brain doesn't fire that trigger very reliably. Especially if I'm busy.
If someone can solve that problem with a fancy app, I'd be impressed!
I've said it in another thread [1]: I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that.
Comment · 7 years ago
Standards like SMART-on-FHIR [1] and CDS Hooks [2] have the potential to allow innovation developed outside of Epic and Cerner inside of those products. Both of those vendors even have "App Stores" [3] [4]. So far, though, there aren't a lot of apps in these stores, and none of my doctors (all of whom work for large academic medical centers and use Epic) have access to any third-party apps - so I do wonder whether the vendors (or their customers) may be putting up roadblocks that are slowing adoption.
[1] http://docs.smarthealthit.org/ [2] https://cds-hooks.org/ [3] https://apporchard.epic.com/ [4] https://code.cerner.com/apps
Comment · 8 years ago
Most new mice, yes. I use an original Logitech MouseMan 3-button mouse with no scroll-wheel. I realize I'm an outlier, but no mouse has ever come close in terms of comfort for me - so I continue to use it, and life has been just fine until the advent of the Overlay Scroll Bar.
I realize the benefits of the Overlay Scroll Bar to the majority of users who have scroll-wheels. But it sure would be nice if there was an easy way to revert back to the Normal Scroll Bar ("Classic" scroll bar?). You know, the wide bar that scrolls down exactly one page-length if you click outside of the bar? I've spent plenty of time Googling and in "about:config" and exporting environment variables like GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 to no avail.
Comment · 8 years ago
Interesting - it's part of the routine childhood schedule in the US but not in the UK. From NHS: "Why isn't the chickenpox vaccination part of the routine childhood immunisation schedule?"
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/chickenpox-vaccin...
Comment · 9 years ago
Time tracking. No matter how many fancy time tracking apps you use, it's still painfully manual. I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that.
Comment · 9 years ago
> "According to Lee Nackman, Chief Technology Officer of IBM's Rational division (originating in 2003) at that time, the name 'Eclipse' (dating from at least 2001) was not a wordplay on Sun Microsystems, as the product's primary competition at the time of naming was Microsoft Visual Studio, which Eclipse was to eclipse." [1]
The Camel book was so well-written. It was my introduction to Perl, which became my "superpower" in the 90's and far longer into the 2000's than I tend to admit. I eventually switched to Python because it's the closest thing that is considered an acceptable "modern" choice. I really enjoy Python too, but the obligatory XKCD about Python[1] rang true for me about Perl first.
For me the #1 superpower strength of both languages is the first-class treatment and syntactic sugar for associative arrays (a.k.a. hashes, dictionaries).
Perl did the same for regexes and file I/O; Python did not.
I have come to appreciate Perl's backwards compatibility -- that old scripts still run unchanged -- though maybe that's largely because Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long.
[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.png