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.

Also an extremely happy Zim user for desktop notes, projects & work journal.

Recently I was looking for a self-hosted equivalent to Google Keep (which I use mainly for lists, quick notes and web snippets), and tried out Joplin. It looked pretty good, but I wanted a web app frontend, which Joplin doesn't seem to have. I'm now trying out Memos [1] now, and it's pretty good so far (though I would love to see postgres support in Memos as well as the current sqlite DB).

[1] https://usememos.com/

Take a look at Gemini: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

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).

I'm currently a reasonably happy puppet user, but I do like the look of Salt. Puppet's configuration DSL always struck me as a little over-wrought (and slightly too inconsistent to remember easily). I would have preferred YAML/XML/ini files.

As a UK resident, I feel a pang of embarrassment and sadness and anger as I see how non-residents are treated when going through immigration control. Heathrow immigration is the worst. It's depressing, oppressive, cold and ugly. These are probably deliberate choices.

On several occasions, I've seen customs and immigration officials behave aggressively, usually fidgeting with night-sticks (truncheons) in a way that suggests that they are itching to beat someone.

I'd definitely agree. I guess more specifically (and more charitably), I'm thinking of the section of the audience that uses photoshop but doesn't need any of its intermediate or advanced features, whether they paid for it or not. There's a lot of them. If they had more awareness of their own (lack of) requirements, I think it would be a greater opportunity for the < $100 graphics packages to pick up more sales (since that's definitely a more attractive price than Photoshop's), or just more users in Gimp's case - if they were willing to put the time in to learning the interface.

I'm not sure about photoshop killer ... although I do suspect that outside of the professional class of photoshop user (webdevs, print designers etc), a great many people who have a less-than-legitimate copy of photoshop and dramatically under-utilize its features could do worse than try out Gimp. These are the users for whom an entire copy of photoshop is massive overkill and a terrible waste - the absence of some professional-level features from Gimp won't be a problem.

XML also has the advantage of declaring the character set of the content.

Just a quick note on those HP microservers - I have one, and I'm fond of it, but the e-SATA port doesn't support hotplug and the inbuilt ethernet doesn't support jumbo frames (at least, under versions of Linux that I've tried).

The e-SATA thing probably doesn't matter too much, but for anyone looking to run iSCSI or even higher-throughput NFS, the absence of jumbo frames may be a more important consideration.

I was an OS/2 user from 1993 - 1996 or so. I have very fond memories of it - for those lucky enough to have a supported machine, it felt indestructable. You could do the most obnoxious things inside a DOS session, and the most that could be trashed was the DOS session itself. At the time, I was doing x86 assembly and C programming for a college course. The kind of pointer mistakes that would cause (or necessitate) a reboot on DOS only took out the session on OS/2.

I only stopped using it because I changed computer to one that didn't have a nicely-supported Cirrus video card (my replacement machine had a Diamond Stealth), and there were no drivers for the new machine. Graphics drivers on OS/2 are a separate story! Two years later, I was on Linux full-time, but I still find myself longing for a Workplace Shell clone.

It's a shame that your post is disappearing into the gray background - I feel something similar every time I have to use Javascript & HTML for a rich interface. Every time that happens, I wish I was using GTK or QT instead.

That might have been fluxbox (fluxbox.org), from the BlackBox family.

strace can do it (Linux). Watch out for "open", "read","write","unlink" in the output - these are some of the filesystem operations.

inotifywatch (from inotify-tools) can show you changes made to files in a particular directory.

"Microsoft believes that WebGL will become an “ongoing source of hard-to-fix vulnerabilities” in its current form. "

If only they'd had the same insight with ActiveX, and all of the other attempts to turn Internet Explorer into a zero-install native application execution environment.

There is a temptation to use MySQL message queues to provide more complex queueing strategies - prioritization, retries, folding multiple queues into one table, claim tokens to avoid the global lock, and in the very worst case keeping all of the queue data to double up as log records. All of these must be resisted - they scale and perform poorly.

If they use MyISAM as the table format for the queue, it may crash and require repairs. If they use InnoDB, then the queue is no longer very lightweight.

Queues in MySQL certainly can work, and are pretty straightforward, but they'll need to be replaced with something else eventually.

"The right tool for the right job" and all that. I just wish AMQP didn't seem quite so sketchy ...

One thing I am curious about (genuinely curious!) is how so many of the mac git GUIs are closed-source and/or paid apps. The original CLI git client is GPLv2, IIRC.

Are the mac clients calling the git command line tool, have they re-implemented the git file manipulation routines, or are they using some other means of manipulating the repository files?

I'm just interested to know which approach they chose.

I would certainly think so (the two languages you've mentioned are both regarded as being quite easy to get started with), but everyone is different and is interested in different things. If the demo app you're writing (and the framework you're using, if any) allows you to try something and see the results quite quickly, that's a good way to avoid getting discouraged.

Although frameworks (Rails, Django etc) are a good way to avoid writing boring or non-unique stuff, they do add to the amount of up-front learning you have to do before you can write _your_ programs (since you have to learn the language _and_ the framework at the same time). Trying out some noddy programs that just use stdin/stdout is a good way to learn the language features first and then the framework can follow afterwards.

Early code in any language is always horrible when you look back at it a few months later, don't beat yourself up :)

I'm self-taught, starting with C on MS-DOS at age 9 (I'm now 32). I moved onto Visual Basic (ugh) at 12 because my C compiler wouldn't do windows programs, and later moved to Borland C++ on Windows. I did later do a BTEC course in computer studies, but that was just to hedge my bets.

I Switched to Linux in 1995/96, and have spent the last 15 years alternating between systems administration and development roles. I've worked for large online retailers, government departments, multinational manufacturers as well as smaller content portal websites, and I'm currently at a search startup in Cambridge, UK. I can program in C, Perl, and PHP, but the language I love most is Python. I also love relational databases (PostGreSQL in particular), and have quite a strong DBA-streak.

I've never really noticed much tension between the CS-taught and self-taught programmers that I've known. I've often considered that a team is stronger for having both types represented. The self-taught programmers, if they started early, often have an additional 5-6 years commercial experience over the degree-holders (for their age), but it all balances out in the end.

In terms of success, I'm gainfully employed, I'm well regarded by my peers (it's one of the things that motivates me), I can still learn things, I can still teach things and I'm not in management. Win.

I hope that's a useful response for someone!

I do find Mac OSX slightly inconsistent at times - to install desktop apps, drag to Applications; to install lower-level stuff, double-click the .mpkg file. Where is the uninstall for the .mpkgs?

The most annoying thing I find about other people's Macs is the case-insensitive filesystem.

include "lib/myfile.inc.php";

will work fine on the mac, but by the time it's deployed on the production Linux servers it breaks horribly because the file is _actually_ called MyFile.inc.php.

I just wish they were case-sensitive by default.

As a Linux sysadmin in charge of said production servers, I'd much rather have a yum repository with RPMs (or Apt repo with .DEBs) in it that I can deploy with none of the fuss, rather than language/platform/framework specific installers.

I can't say I entirely agree with the way he's phrased it, but I do understand where his frustrations come from.

I use a mac laptop (13" Air) - they make very nice hardware. I don't always find the desktop environment to be the easy-to-use, fulfilling experience that other people have reported.

What jurisdiction does the company/service/servers fall under? Although I'm based in the UK (which is hardly a privacy haven), I'd be quite wary of storing account data or anything on US-based servers, even though I'm not remotely interesting to the US Govt.

Rsync.net offers storage in Switzerland for this sort of reason, although just to be on the safe side I encrypt backup files for storage before uploading anything.

I'm probably a little too paranoid for cloud-based password management, but it might be an interesting consideration for people who are less paranoid but still keen on privacy.