don-code

Much as I also have never understood universities teaching to "teaching" architectures (DLX), or "teaching" languages (Eiffel - luckily removed from our curriculum before I started), at the same time I did not land a job based on having learned "practical" architectures 68k or MIPS either.

Thanks, Jia!

KDE2 on Mandrake 8 for me. The look and feel of that desktop was a big part of what made me want to start using it over Windows. Whereas XP had just launched the Bozo the Clown-inspired theme, KDE offered something that somehow looked more real, and lived-in.

The other part, of course, was that the tools it shipped with were far and away better than the ones on Windows. Konqueror (way faster than Netscape) and Gaim (way more functional than AIM - I know that wasn't part of KDE) are two that came to mind almost immediately. Nowadays I live my life in a Web browser, and I'm not sure I'd have had the same impressions there.

I feel like manufacturers still haven't cracked the 3+ monitor code.

My ThinkPad T500 could output to three monitors, way back in 2009 - but you needed to disable Windows' driver signing, and run a custom, patched video driver. Linux on the other hand supported it natively, but you lost the ability to switch between the Intel and AMD graphics cards - it did this by running one display off the Intel card.

Luckily, my daily driver (ThinkPad T460p) outputs to three monitors just fine.

At work, I've specifically requested that I keep my circa-2019 Intel MBP, because it can support three monitors, but at least one of them must be DisplayPort. They're now giving out MBPs with the M2 Pro, but these only support two external monitors at all, and that's a dealbreaker for me.

While not necessarily "messing with my roommate": I lived with a very foul-mouthed roommate during my undergrad. The .NET Framework 3.5 (I think?) released during this time, and it had an API for speech recognition.

I wrote a small program with a dictionary of a single word - f** - and let it count up the number of times that it heard it. (I know now that this will result in lots of false positives, but I was 19 or 20 at the time.)

Of course, I only had one laptop capable of running Windows, and messy as our apratment was, I couldn't just leave my laptop outside his bedroom for a day. I instead took one of my CB radios, taped down the transmit button, and left _that_ outside his room.

If I remember correctly, it counted 19 F-bombs dropped in one day.

A phone, like my other digital devices, is a tool - I try to upgrade my tools only when I can't feasibly fix them anymore, or they by nature can't do what I need them to do.

I don't really use my phone much, and go out of my way not to install apps. Though that means I get into some sticky situations, it also means that when I need a new device, I can typically buy last year's flagship at half price. My current phone (2021) is more than enough to meet my needs. Frankly, my phone before that (2016) also was, but sadly none of the corner "fix your battery!" shops wanted to open up an HTC phone.

My laptop is a ThinkPad T460p (2016 model, acquired 2019), which replaced a ThinkPad T500 (2009 model, acquired 2012) when said ThinkPad struggled with rendering 1080p video, which replaced an HP nx6325 (2006 model, acquired 2006) when said HP proved itself unable to do video calls at more than a few frames per second.

I wouldn't call these things "retro" by any means - those honors go to some other systems in my life. I have a 100-milliwatt FM transmitter, some radios, and Kodi Media Center, in place of a Sonos system. Ditto the Casio calculator watch, instead of a smartwatch - the calculator and other functions actually do get used multiple times per week.

There are actually a number of lighthouses in Boston Harbor. Historically, there had been many more. Some are described at the National Park Service website: https://www.nps.gov/boha/learn/historyculture/lighthouses.ht...

Not all of these are "lighthouses", per se. Nixes Mate is actually just a concrete-and-paint reflector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixes_Mate

This, unfortunately, is on point. It does seem to be getting harder to listen to music, but I also think it's because our expectations around _how_ we listen to music are increasing in scope.

I have an FM radio in almost every room, and a vinyl record player in the living room. This has been (roughly) the state of those two technologies since the 70s. They're simple to reason about and operate.

I also have an extensive digital music collection. And I want to listen to that from...

1. My stereo - so I have Kodi Media Center running on a home theater PC. I control it with my phone. It gets media off my NAS, which means I have to run a backup from my laptop, where I download the music, to be able to listen to it there.

2. My car - which can take a USB flash drive, but can't play back FLAC files, which is how I store them locally. So I have a script which converts them all to MP3s. I need to walk to the flash drive inside, connect it, run the script, then walk it back out.

3. My phone - at least that's click-and-drag.

Listening to a personal music collection has almost definitely gotten more logistically challenging than shuffling around some LPs or CDs, but there are also many more use cases enabled today.

I'l also give a shout-out to Airbyte (https://airbyte.com/), with which I've had some limited success with integrating Salesforce to a local database. The particular pull for Airbyte is that we can self-host the open source version, rather than pay Fivetran a significant sum to do this for us.

It's an immature tool, so I don't yet know that I can claim we've spent _less_ than Fivetran on the additional engineering and ops time, but it feels like it has potential to do so once stabilized.

On the other side of this, that ephemerality is sometimes worth being preserved.

Since the 1970s, Boston DJ Oedipus has put on a Christmas Eve show from 6pm to midnight, with Christmas music from around the world, and even just from the local music scene. It started on WBCN, then moved to WFNX, and most recently landed on WGBH.

Oedipus doesn't maintain a set list - it's just whatever he's feeling like playing as he's doing it. His immense talent aside, it means that it's hard to learn about those songs, or even those bands. For the last few years, I've been recording it and trying to build the set list myself, from either what he says (he doesn't always!), or from Google searches.

Does it take the magic away? Maybe, but I feel that it's what little I can do for preserving something that's been actively disappearing.

FM stations up to 91.9 are allocated for non-commerical use. This is where you typically find college radio, NPR, and so forth.

The law around digital transmission only applied to full-power broadcasters. Some low-power analog stations were allowed to keep operating until 2021.

WITR Henrietta / Rochester here - we had a 705-watt transmitter on top of the dorms that was good for about 15 or 20 miles.

> The wet spot on your dial

See, that's the kind of culture I miss.

One of WFNX's greatest-of-all-time bumpers was, "WFNX... It's 'WBCN sucks!', spelled backwards."

The Boston radio dial feels like it's been bled dry of culture in the last decade. To name a few of the old stations, WFNX and WBCN had a marked impact on the city's music scene, beginning in the 60s and sadly coming to an end around 2010. They carried local artists, broke some big names (WFNX introduced Nirvana to mainstream media, for instance), and often sponsored local music events.

The radio dial now is now mostly content that can be syndicated across the country - classic rock, Top N Hits, NPR, and so forth. The occasional local morning show dots the programming.

There are some holdouts. I find that Emerson College's WERS carries much of the original WFNX spirit. I'll give an honorable mention to WXRV up in Andover as well.

Some interesting documentaries about the Boston radio scene, for those interested:

* https://theamericanrevolution.fm/

* https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/295945558/we-want-the-a... (the original site seems gone)

This is wholly unsurprising to me - the tachometer on my BMW is audibly out of sync with the engine.

Indeed, PPP has a multilink feature which an bond packets from multiple modems into a single bitstream. Both the client (your machine - Windows 98 could do it) and your ISP needed to support it.

I remember trying this a few times while at my parents' store. My dad would tell me which phone line I could use that day - either the dedicated line used to process credit cards (if they were closed), or a spare line off the PBX. But occasionally, I was allowed the use of both - and luckily had a pair of PCMCIA modems with the dongles in different places - and could get speeds well above 56k.

Former CloudHealth early engineer here. That's nothing new. This started almost in tandem with the VMware acquisition - the company culture had been all about small- to medium-size customers, up through the point where due diligence started with VMware. We were told in no uncertain words that VMware would roll the red carpet out for big names, and that our platform needed to be ready for it. I stuck it out for about a year and a half, post-acquisition, where we tried to figure out and build a "CloudHealth Enterprise Edition" of sorts.

I was surprised that VMware kept the "CloudHealth" branding as long as they did, - it turned out that the brand actually had some cache that VMware wanted to hang on to. But it was formally dropped last year, in favor of "VMware Aria Cloud Cost Control", or some equally overdescribed thing.

You're probably thinking of robbed bit signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling

This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaining frame was sampled at 7-bit resolution (hence the "robbed bit"). The "doubling" is probably that you could run 24 digital lines with the 7/8-bit encoding, over the wires used by just two analog phone lines.

When I was younger, I connected via 56k modem over the PBX at my parents' shop. My connection speeds topped out at 33.6k.

Under the hood, V.90 (the standard for 56k modems) expects that there's only a single digital-to-analog conversion, seen from the ISP's side. The line down from the ISP to the consumer is digital PCM until the last mile. In the opposite direction from the consumer back to the ISP, analog trellis modulation is still used. This is why you still typically only see 33.6k upload speeds on a V.90 modem.

Many PBXes will introduce an additional analog-to-digital conversion in the unit itself, before converting back to analog and putting the signal back on the wire to the street. V.90 can't tolerate that extra conversion, so a connection at 56k speeds fails, and the modem backs down to V.34 / 33.6k, which is perfectly usable on a fully analog line.

I for one am actually pretty glad to see the role commoditized. Software's one of few roles where you need the deep theory component (a CS degree) to practice (land a respectable gig). My impression is that this is because we, the software industry, have done a poor job separating the theory from practice.

Much as you hire an electrician, as opposed to an electrical engineer, to wire your house, or a carpenter, rather than a mechanical / structural engineer, to build your house, I do think we should be finding ways to separate "programmer" from "computer scientist". These are both completely legitimate roles, and deserve to be paid according to their value produced - they're both quite high! But the fact that I need a deep understanding of data structures, operating systems, computer architecture, or other college-level concepts to write software feels like a shortcoming. If CS researchers can set standards for software, rather than _write the software itself_, we can more easily create on ramps and shallow ends for people to use.

Low code tools and LLMs are great steps in this regard, but I feel that they're still stigmatized from the enablement perspective.

Norton Ghost could do something similar, but with UDP multicast. You'd boot a room full of machines to Ghost, have them join a multicast group, multicast an OS image to them, and then have the host machine just send the image out once (from its perspective), saving a ton of bandwidth in the process. The individual machines would then rerequest any chunks that they missed.

I also believe this. The counterpoint was made to me by a close friend who prefers to call (I also have friends who _only_ call) - "you really only engage people on your own terms" - which in some ways makes me a bad friend.

My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port.

This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows.

If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that.

If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive.

Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up.

I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.

We've been using Helmsman (https://github.com/Praqma/helmsman) for the same use case. It supports some other creature comforts (automatic fetching of parameters from AWS SSM, chart ordering, etc.) and seems a bit more mature.

At a startup I worked for, we had a cheap wireless microphone and speaker from Craigslist that we used for all-hands meetings. The UX for anybody remote (pre-pandemic, but board members did like to dial in) was terrible - IT would just place a laptop pointed at the speaker. The audio quality left a lot to be desired.

At some point, I pitched the silly idea to IT that I'd figure out what frequency the mic ran at, tune it with gqrx and an SDR, then feed it back to my own microphone using a loopback device in PulseAudio. That day, we had our best-ever voice quality on the remote call, I ended up becoming critical path for all-hands meetings.

Fast forward a few months, the only thing that saved us from building a Raspberry Pi + SDR + Zoom box was another round of funding, with which we bought a proper conferencing system.

There are two alternative behaviors I can think of:

1. The service operator prerenders link previews on its own servers, then sends them to the client, which means that it needs to be privy to the contents of messages. I suspect this is already the case for Skype, but it's a feature that (say) Signal can't do this.

2. The message sender prerenders the link preview. Where link previews are interactive (I'm always impressed by linking Bandcamp in Slack, for instance), one could easily accomplish the same with some malicious JavaScript.

I'm not sure any particular behavior is "better".

I developed a pathological need to monitor Slack at all hours. It was largely based on the culture at my company (a startup, at the time) - while there was no written rule to install Slack on your phone, responding to Slack messages at 10pm was clearly a way to get ahead at the company.

I switched jobs and continued to run Slack on my phone, as everybody seems to do.

Some time in 2021, I got a new phone and just... didn't reinstall Slack. The world didn't end. I found myself just as much on top of things as I was, in spite of the fact that I was now making intentional visits to my laptop off hours (I didn't quit it entirely).

You're probably expecting me to say that this was rainbows and unicorns from there on out, but the exact opposite is true. Two years later, I'm still finding myself anxious much of the time, that I'm missing an important Slack message - sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at 6am. Sometimes I have, indeed, missed an important Slack message. Not having the capability to be notified instantaneously isn't a panacea. I'm only finding it better than the alternative.

That I know of, photography is still prohibited on the MBTA in Boston, but you see it all the time.

I think the Overton window has shifted to the point where the ability to take a photo is now assumed to be a given, and enforcement otherwise would be difficult because "everybody's doing it".

As an engineer, I've never personally understood the desire to release anyway, even when a system has known critical deficiencies like this one. Sure, perfect is the enemy of good, but I'd also argue that inoperable is the enemy of good - it only serves to erode trust in your product, if your team chose to release an unusable product.

Some years ago, I worked on a system not quite as bad as what the author described, but close. We released a new product with a known, quite bad security vulnerability (I'd made sure our product team was _extremely_ aware of this), as well as no monitoring to speak of. The deadline had been communicated for around one year, but nobody had ever really discussed the significance of the date, other than it was what we were all death-marching to, and we needed to deliver.

What did that date turn out to be? The head of product management's birthday, which was revealed to the rest of the company on the highly-celebrated the launch date. People were just kissing ass. I left several months later.

It feels unconscionable to me that a company could have launched an incomplete, insecure, customer-facing product just to give a birthday gift to a leader, but I suspect this sort of thing is common.