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alanl

139 karma · joined January 17, 2009

Software engineer

@alanlarkin

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alanl··on German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal
Ireland jailed a 3 or 4 bankers after the crash.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm

It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.

alanl··on Cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London (2013)
I worked in London in the mid 00's with someone who did this.

  - He worked 2 Days at London Office, 3 days WFH in Spain.
  - He would book his flights about 3 weeks in advance and stay in a cheap hotel for 1 night.
  - As a contractor/sole trader, he could offset some of the costs against his taxes.
If I remember correctly, his reasoning was that the combination of costs, better weather, and being close to friends/family made it worthwhile.
alanl··on Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
I mostly use web sequence diagrams, and commit the text.

https://www.websequencediagrams.com

Otherwise I just draw on a white board and take a photo Then finally Visio if needed.

alanl··on Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development
I believe redhat staff use thinkpads (t-series and x-series)), meaning support for Linux is pretty good out of the box, and you can find a fix/ workaround for most issues on a fedora forum.
alanl··on ThinkPad X1 Carbon
Lenovo X1 usually has good support for Linux.

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad/X1%20Car...

alanl··on Java Runtime updater now installs ask.com toolbar on Macs
If you download from java.oracle.com as apposed to java.com these nasty toolbars aren't included.
alanl··on Ask HN: Any good audio podcasts?
My top 5 (in no order):

ted radio hour http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/

radiolab http://www.radiolab.org/

linux outlaws http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws

techzing http://techzinglive.com/

accidental tech podcast http://atp.fm/

alanl··on Choosing a Programming Language for Interviews
I would normally have to look it up on google or within my existing code base.

But, I still think its a good idea to refresh yourself on stuff like this before hand, because in an interview:

- you don't need the mental distraction from the real problem.

- you're always under time pressure.

- it's never a positive, if you don't know something.

alanl··on My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work done
I moved to consoleZ: https://github.com/cbucher/console

Its a fork of console2.

+ Adds Splitting Tabs into views

Console2 development seems to have slowed down.

alanl··on Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again
How about just showing them in the best or bestcomments list page or creating a new list page that shows them?
alanl··on Introducing Play 2.0
I had just started tinkering with play, with the idea that I might introduce it for a project at work. But the fact that their going to rebuild 2.0 from scratch puts me off a bit TBH.
alanl··on Suggest HN: Hacker news circle on Google+
larkinalan [Invite needed]
alanl··on This Guy Has My MacBook
I haven't tried the others but I can highly recommend prey. You only have to subscribe once your laptop goes missing. Its also open src so I believe you can setup the serverside yourself if you're worried about prey being hacked.

It does have a few small bugs, and one thing I didn't like is the 100 report limit. You see, the 100 rpt limit means that if you want to do 2min monitoring you have to really keep on top of the reports.

Overall 2 thumbs up from me for prey.

alanl··on This Guy Has My MacBook
Yeah, I decided from the start that I wanted to stay on the right side of the law on this. Plus it was stolen from my house, so the guy knows where I live.
alanl··on This Guy Has My MacBook
will do
alanl··on This Guy Has My MacBook
So this happened to me in Feb.

I had my MBP taken with http://preyproject.com/ installed. Now I live outside the US , (in Ireland) and while the police where helpful & curious about how the tech worked, they just did not do anything, even though I got a photo of the guy, his first name and geo location of his apartment block in the first week.

So 3 months later, and although I'm still watching the guy watching porn on my laptop, I have built up a substantial profile of him, through persistent (obsessive according to my girlfriend) tracking.

So just this week I passed on the following details to the cops - fullname - email - phone number - postal address - bank account no - online betting account no - lots of photos of him and his flatmates/friends.

They were kinda shocked I was still on the case, but said they will dispatch someone to go pick up the laptop this week.

So my advice; if you stick with it, and hand them the case on a plate it might work out.

alanl··on Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
Lots of BASIC people out there, it really was very easy starter language to get into.

Anyone know are the kids starting with these days?

alanl··on Poll: How old were you when you started programming?
Yeah, BASIC on the Atari 400 was my first experience too.

It was the early 80's and I was about 7/8 yrs old, the guy in my local electronics shop used to allow my brother and I to photocopy programs from various magazines, of course they would be lost when we turned off the atari, also sometimes we messed up the photocoying, so we were forced to try figure it out our selves. What fun!

alanl··on Ask HN: I want to learn to program (in Ruby). How can I get to "doing", easily?
For rails check out Michael Hartls tutorials by example railstutorial.org, it contains an ebook and videos. Only took me a couple of weeks to get through it and I can highly recommend it. I think it costs about $100.
alanl··on We're entering the decade of the developer
Yeah, I dont know, about this article. Although I have to say as a developer I hope your right when you say the next decade will be mine.

TBH, I'll probably just keep doing what I'm really interested in to the best of my ability and a decent pay check will follow.

alanl··on Ask HN: Anyone have process for creating good internal application names?
Ha, I like that, I'm not the funniest, guy in the world but some of the guys I work with are pretty funny. I suspect my biggest problem with this is that a ridiculous name won’t get past some of the more serious old school members of upper mgmt.
alanl··on Ask HN: Anyone have process for creating good internal application names?
It won't ever be externally facing, so no problems with domain names.
alanl··on Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night
My default google query for a programming problem has become.

[keywords] site:stackoverflow.com

And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!

alanl··on Discuss: There are no more Google/Facebook size opportunities on the web.
No way, the next big thing is always just around the corner. The world will change, facebook and google will become old and their successor(s) will come from somewhere they don't expect.

Look at how Microsoft surprised IBM, then Google suprised Microsoft and now Facebook look like they might threaten Google's empire.

alanl··on Poll: Are you using SSDs?
Not using them, can't convince my employer to open his wallet in this recession.
alanl··on Ask HN: Underperforming, feeling stuck
I agree, I always take one long holiday a year. 3 weeks when possible.
alanl··on Ask HN: How to get to “commit” on a good open source project?
Cheers, I hadn't thought about contributing to documentation as a good starting point.

I had assumed I wouldn't be contributing core code, my motivation is simply an urge to code more outside of my day job, and to get some good/fun experience doing it.

alanl··on Ubuntu 10.04: First Thoughts
Just upgraded from 9.04, took about 2 hrs. Finding the the left side windows icons a little unnatural, but going to stick with it for a couple of days. Otherwise it looks great, and no issues at all.

Great work Canonical, also I see linode have 10.4 vm's available already, fast work guys...

alanl··on This Is Apple's Next iPhone
I agree, it just doesn't look finished IMHO and while the design is nice design it's a bit of a step backwards from the extreme minimalism apple have used in previous iphones and MBP
alanl··on Stack Exchange 2.0
where can I listen?
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