marcusr

Formatter author here - we do have the ability to protect specific sections with a // formatter-ignore comment before the section you want the formatter to leave as-is.

My school had a classroom of BBC Micros which were connected over a primitive network to a "server" which I guess must have had a hard drive for saving files too. I can't take the credit but a school friend worked out how to view the memory of another machine over the network, from which we made the first remote keystroke capture I had ever seen, which got us the teachers' passwords.

Our first hack was born - with their password we could get onto the server and print out the password file (in plain text of course). The teachers started to realise they'd been hacked but I think thought it more likely we'd observed their typing when sat nearby and so changed their passwords. Of course we could just keep watching their passwords being entered at a distance.

I think we were caught in the end red handed with the password file printing out and unable to stop it printing when they came in the room. Luckily back then it was seen as experimentation not criminal!

Currently getting up to speed with Reason (ReasonML). The latest version (3) brings Javascript-like syntax, and after many years of dynamically typed languages, having a compiler infer and check my types for me (and catch many errors before they reach the browser) is a good feeling. It's built using Bucklescript which brings a great toolkit of its own, and also means I'm pretty much learning OCaml at the same time.

I'm learning Haskell too for home/side projects, but ReasonML means I can do functional programming for work whilst I learn all about FP again.

This is too technical for most unfortunately, but the only way to guard something as valuable as your email address is to own the domain and so control the MX records.

I'm fortunate enough to have a grandfathered free Gmail account so I can own my domain and point it to a Gsuite account without paying.

Otherwise it's worth paying up for Gsuite, Fastmail or similar.

It would be a great destination for cloud backup, where one of the concerns is loss of all your backed up data due to malicious action - look at the trouble the hackers had to go to in Mr Robot to take out their offsite tape backups. I'd be more concerned though with the durability of the company rather than their disk systems over the long term though.

Dropbox for Business has really changed my view of Dropbox the company. With AzureAD SSO integration, and the new Smart Sync feature, it's now possible to run a small company completely in the cloud, with terabytes of data in the cloud accessible to everyone without them synching it all to their laptop.

Smart Sync is their game changer.

That's sort of exists with the file requests feature.

I'm guessing I'm a similar age to the author from the reference to parents shouting at the phone bill from my 1200/75 modem running all night. And just recently I've felt exactly the same way. My job involves both running systems and writing software, and the joy has disappeared from both. I used to work all day, then come home and hack all evening, but now I don't know if I'm burnt out, but I can find no interest in making computers do cool things any more.

There's been one small bright spot - I tried learning Haskell and loved the way functional programming stretched my brain but there's an awful lot to learn to do anything useful. But Elm, wow, do I love Elm. I feel the excitement I felt when I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time ten years ago. It's finding something interesting and useful to build with Elm that I'm struggling with now.

I wonder if it's the message that if you're not building a product that will build a unicorn company, then it's not interesting that's part of the general malaise.

Sometimes only A power or B power is delivered to the rack (otherwise you could receive different phases).

Power failures also occur sometimes when the issue is on the wrong side of where power is distributed - we've lost power to our servers when maintenance has gone wrong for example.

We run some between offices across the street from each other. We were lucky as we didn't understand the minimum distance was probably more important than the maximum distance for this type of setup! They have run flawlessly at about 800Mbps for the last year.

The majority of the corporate world is either already on Office 365 or moving to Office 365 for their email, which could be subject to the same argument.

That said, I think any hacker would die of boredom reading my company's Slack channels before they hit any nugget of interesting information!

We were using Mandrill's email to HTTP feature for delivering inbound emails into our web services. The cutover period for needing to be a paying Mailchimp is April 27th, so we had two months to convert. Luckily it took less than a day to build and test the same functionality using Amazon SES, so we've already converted away. To be fair, it was functionality we were using completely for free, so I expected it to happen sooner rather than later.