Timothycquinn

At least windows explorer has some great extension utilities like File Menu Tools; a tool that can be configured to cover pretty much every file explorer extension usecase you can imagine.

OSX and XDG (Gnome etc...) based systems have nothing close last time I checked.

Agreed - As a minimum if the caller has no caller ID I don't answer unless I'm expecting such a call. If I answer the phone and get a long pause or clicks before I'm talking to someone, I'm very dubious of who I'm talking to and get their name and phone number so I can do quick background check and call them back.

With that said, I almost got duped by a good samaritan debit card scam about 20 years ago in Toronto.

Looks very handy. Thanks for these tools!

I don't think that Lillium uses variable pitch blades. Also, using multiple fans will lower the chance of catastrophic failure due to loss of one or more fans. For example, A system with only four fans would mean loss of a single would be truly catastrophic.

If Lillium uses multiple battery packs and redundant wiring and controls, they could achieve excellent redundancy; to a level much lower than many competing in this space.

I've been watching this space for quite a long time and this company seems to have the engineering and backing to make it happen. From a safety perspective, this design has a potential for massive redundancy over several other designs being promoted out there.

Considering that their marketing is not to desperate, and their releases of footage is slow and stead, I predict that they are very confident in their designs.

If I had a few million to throw around, I would definitely be investing in this company.

What gives you this impression? They have amazing engineers and huge backers. My impression is that they are one of the most likely to succeed in this space.

I was about to say the same. iocage is now the default jails wrapper on FreeNAS, which means that there is good documentation and support. The previous jails wrapper used by FreeNAS was not very well documented, but was written by some smart folks.

One thing I like about iocage is how easy it is to grant the jail access to the host ZFS datasets.

On a Jails note, I have had issues creating a jail that can do network inspection. I believe this is an issue with network restrictions of the jails subsystem itself. Eg, I could never run nmap or get mac addresses of remote hosts from within a jail.

How hard is it to compile these days? I recall trying to build several years back for Electron development work on Ubuntu and it was a royal pain in the butt.

What could possibly go wring with dragging and dropping folders to share with the world instantly?

I remember my management trying to get me to take over a GWT based spreadsheet like app for managing FMEA's. The developer only used it because he did not now JavaScript and had no desire to learn. It was developed with zero thought into debugging. Needless to say, I punted that app over to another developer to handle as I saw it was going to fail miserably after the first demonstration and my initial questions to the developer. That project was an abject failure after the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at it.

Love the idea of multiple tables in one view, rather than having to switch between tabs.

I switched about 8 years ago. Tried OpenSuse for several years but have settled in on Ubuntu with ZFS root on HPE ZBook G2 and Z workstations. The only thing that may draw me back is the Apple M* chips.

I agree completely about Graph DB's. I used a third party Graph database that was schema heavy on Nodes and edges and it was amazing for mapping business processes as the customers can actually understand the data model and we did not need any DBA's. I wrote several custom enterprise systems based on this graph backend that were very successful in their deployment and upkeep.

The company that has this DB never sold it on its own and its only available with their $$$$ CAD / CAM / 3D / PDM / PLM software packages used by the big guys (E.g. Boeing, Honeywell ...)

To OP - You sound kinda like me. I went over to Ecco Pro when I started doing programming as the amount of information coming into my head was way too much and I needed something that had low overhead seamless moving and organization of data. I found A single panel outliner (like Ecco Pro, Omni outliner...) works great for my brain.

Every time I download a notetaking app to try a new system, I pray it has an single panel outlining feature but nope. I can't count the number of times I considered writing my own.

Now you have mentioned Notion, I checked and it has an outline mode built right in. Woo Woo!! The only thing left to sell me is Linux support which is my primary DT env.

Thanks for the post!

I had a teammate state that Gates at the beginning of functions were also spaghetti code. E.g: If <condition>: return.

My teammate had learned that rule. from his CS teacher.

I use Gates regularly as they reduce the need for indentation which I believe is a much bigger spaghetti problem. Nothing worse than debugging 7 levels deep of indentation on a function with many pages of code. I also use Goto if the language supports them and it makes the code easier to grok.

But hey, I'm self taught with no College CS degree so what do I know ;)

Agreed. I was amazed to see how much coding time is wasted by people trying to do some data cleanup job when it can be done so much easier and safer with no coding by: 1) Exporting he data to a spreadsheet 2) Massaging the data in the spreadsheet 3) Use a general purpose program to convert the spreadsheet into scripts that can be run against the DB.

I actually wrote a VBA program that does this where you have a query with ~1, ~2, ~3 macros and you just paste in a table, click a button and it spits out scripts for you. I wrote it 20 years ago and still use it to this day.

I did not leverage any VBA or VB. I learned to code in VBA and written way too much code in that space and was well aware of the limitations.

I'm pretty sure the way it went was, on check-in of a new version, I had a Java program that read the spreadsheet validated that all the right sheets were there and that the columns on each sheet conformed with the spec and also validated rows of data. The sheets were translated on each front end node for easy access.

Regarding the expression engine, the the expressions themselves were then translated into TCL boolean expressions. The attributes for the related objects where already loaded into memory into dictionaries and then the expressions were just evaluated to get a boolean result.

I wrote a spreadsheet based rules engine at Honeywell in around 2003 which enabled the business to maintain the business rules for all sales contracts that ran through the automation and control systems division. This gave them the ability to define forms, subsets of forms (legal or otherwise), notifications and approvals. I had its own natural language based expression language which the super users and business analysts could easily understand.

The spreadsheets, were change controlled by the business an imported into the system when they were approved. I considered this design a form of a visual language and the real beauty was that it did not require any re-coding of business rules, which did change quite frequently. The developers did not have to be re-writing any business logic as the rules changed.

The back end was Java and TCL based built on a graph database. Not super fast but super easy to understand and train up new developers.

It was quite successful and ran all sales contracts for for several years with billions of dollars of contracts passing through per year. I lost contact with the teams so I'm not sure how long it survived but I know that SAP charged millions of dollars trying to build a solution in their systems but could not get one working at a reasonable price.

Does anyone have a non-paywalled sources for this article?

Here is the official description: https://www.dlr.de/as/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-194/407_r...

And a good video from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdmK3R04DuA

I wonder how this type of wind speed was generated. From an mechanical engineering perspective its astonishing.

GCP Gray has a great series on voting systems. Here is his one on Alternative Voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

Highly recommend his videos. Funny and informative. Also his Podcast, Hello Internet is awesome.

This is gorgeous. Thanks for the post.

Brings back memories of watching NFBC films on reel to reel that my Dad checked out from the library. The cat came back ....

FWIW, I have used single panel outlines for years starting with Omni Outliner on my OSX 10.0.1 days. However, after switching off Mac, I've come to depended on Ecco Pro[1] which I presently use on Ubuntu/Gnome via Wine.

Ecco Pro only has one level of undo but it just does just what is needed and I've never had it loose any data on me. It was last compiled in 1997 but there are ways to tweak it out for modern OS's.

I have automated scripts to convert Ecco outlines into Markdown also have time invoicing outputs etc. As Ecco does not have any rich text or any intrinsic special formatting coding, its easy to use Ecco as your own personal note taking DSL. For Example: .: <title_block> :. [.] - todo (open) [x] - todo (done) [~] - todo (in progress) etc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Pro

Translation: "Subatomic particle changing to antiparticle and back confirmed after hundreds of incremental tests and subsequent analysis showed a high enough degree of sigma of certainty"

I have automated snapshots of the Windows VM which are backed up to a remote ZVS Pool. This protects me from BSOD corruptions. BSOD corruption can be avoided with bare metal windows but it takes a bit more work.

Performance is fine. I don't use this for gaming or GPU heavy windows tasks and am running on a dual CPU Xeon tower. Have also run This setup on my i7 ZBooks and Elitebooks in the past with no issues with the right config.

Challenge is always disk space and memory when virtualizing. Must reserve RAM for VMware workstation or else you will have intermittent swapping issues.

Biggest reason for me to use Linux on bare metal is security. Windows is and always will be the Swiss cheese of security issues. With Linux, I can harden to host much tighter and the windows host never can be pinged externally as its on a private Network behind VMware.

Just a personal preference. I will only install windows on physical hardware for gaming or GPU intensive purposes. I don't see much advantage to using ZFS on a VM guest except for bitrot protection. This can be accomplished using SMB share on zfs dataset on the linux host.

For my day to day programming and devops, I virtualize Windows Server for all my desktop work that I have to use windows for which is anything I cannot do on Linux which is not too much actually. Just use it for Remote admin of IPMI's, VCenter, IIS, SQL Server and Visual Studio for rare coding scenario's.

On linux, I even use WinSCP which solves all my change request code syncing to remote servers. With ZFS on root, its awesome. Only time I ever lost a linux server is when windows update on another drive screwed up the boot sector on my linux drive. I cannot count the number of times a windows blue screened permanently for me.

I swore to never depend on windows again and switched to Linux for good. May switch to OSX in the future once hardware becomes more reasonably priced (M1 chip appears to be awesome).

I wonder if @bcantrill was aware of this at the time it happened?

I'm pretty blown away that there is an active OpenZfs on Windows Project ongoing.

Personally I would not likely use ZFS for a Windows desktop but for Servers, might be handy.

For desktop, I always virtualize my windows on a host that has ZFS (Ubuntu 20.04). By adding SMB shares from host to guest gives me what I need to snapshot my user data. The only drawback is no hardlinking on windohs guest but that's a rare usecase for me.

With Jeff, loved the podcast. But without Jeff, not so much.