dantheta

It's a lovely set of sentiments. I think another aspect of UI that has been lost is discoverability - finding out how to do things in a new interface seems harder than it used to be when there was one app-level menu bar. Too many things are hidden in context menus, found only by right-clicking or long pressing on just the right spot. A set of multi-modal interfaces might just make discoverability even worse.

I couldn’t afford software in the 90s, but I would definitely have registered PowerMenu from Brown Bag software (DOS front end and program launcher). It was really powerful and enjoyable to use, and the interface was delightful. I still think about it often and fired up a DOS emulator pretty recently.

Same here - I was a Cakewalk user back in the 90s, and decided on a whim to find out if it was still around.

There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.

I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)

I'm running one for calendar syncing (cyanogenmod and iOS clients), personal file storage and as a limited photo gallery. The automatic file sync from my phone is good too. It's running at home on my server. Setup was straightforward, and although I had the odd couple of glitches after setup, it was nothing too major. It's worked out pretty well.

As an aside to your edit, I have also seen "different than" used more and more often of late. I'm not sure if it is an Americanism that I was just unaware of. It's not that "different than" is wrong, it's just different from what I'm used to!

One of my previous companies was producing a Digital TV set-top box based on a Via mini-ITX board. When using component output, the overscan on the image was way too big and we were losing a significant portion of the TV picture outside the displayable area. The next best video mode put large black borders on all four sides of the image.

I needed a video mode that was a better fit for the screen, so I derived a set of parameters to add a new video mode to the Linux drivers for the VT1625 Via video card.

I did this by writing a small C program which could inspect the video card registers on a Win98 machine that was using the official driver. Once I had a set of register values, I used online documentation to transform them into the initialisation values used in the video driver.

The video mode was submitted back to the openchrome project, and as far as I know it's still there. It took me about 5 days of prodding, and another day of trial&error.

I have trouble finding any candidates I can believe in. The only benefit (for me) of the two main parties is that their stance on any issue is widely known regardless of who the individual candidate is, so I can avoid them. I like the idea of independent MPs, but it can be hard to tell ahead of time whether the candidate is a wingnut, even with fairly careful research.

I might vote, but tend to spoil the paper when I can't find a palatable candidate. I also live in an area that has had an unbroken chain of conservative MPs for the last 400 years, and will probably continue to have one for a very, very long time.

I was also pleased to find that in version 1.4 a MySQL login health check was added "option mysql-check".

It surprises me how much the closing paragraph sounds like certain elements of Buddhist philosophy.

You can also use:

$ TZ=CST date -d "Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 UTC 2013"

Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 CST 2013

which doesn't invoke a subshell. env vars can always be prepended to the executable name for use with just that program (not sure if that's bash only, though).