dws

LastPass, 1Password, ...

Consider that part of the audience are developers who've dabbled in HTML/CSS over the years, but never frequently enough to stay current. We have old habits to unlearn. The context helps.

La Bamba, which had moved to Middlefield and Rengstorff, recently gave it up and went truck only. The truck parks in the O'Malley's Sports Pub lot on Old Middlefield.

That one was wonderful. C programmers would stop at the mention of '%' and go "aha!", but no!

I've yet to have an issue with a Samsung Evo (or Evo+) card.

Multiple Families / Single Family / Married / Single, and I apparently live in 3 different states. It did get the "Chrome" part right, though.

I stumbled on "Le Morte d'Arthur" in college. It was one of the few books that having a few beers really helped with.

Google mentions sharding in a 2005 patent. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2007011957A2

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/sharding-for-st... notes the term in use within Google by 2003.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot

There was serious intermingling back then.

Yeah. Looks like that changed after Raspian Jessie. Still, that shipped on a lot of Pis.

Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) on millions of Raspberry Pis.

You might take a look at how Java got its JIT.

Years later. What later became Google was initially prototyped in Java and Python.

The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok now but make sense if you think back to mid-90's hardware, where of multi-day build and test runs causing projects to grind to near halts. Fertile, but painful, soil for the idea of "Refactoring" to take root in.

ParcPlace hired a CEO who knew how to solve problems by buying and selling companies. It worked for him once or twice (he previously sold Ashton Tate to Borland).

From inside ParcPlace, it looked like we were starting to gain traction. There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures, and people seemed to be willing to try this weird, new (to them) thing that let them get prototypes up quickly and then grow them.

Then Java arrived and sucked all of the air and mindshare out of the ecosystem.

Java lucked into ideal circumstances, and Sun Marketing played their hand very well. The Web was just taking off, VCs were looking for something new and hot, publishers were looking for the next big thing, and programmers were looking for something that wasn't C++. Java looked familiar enough, cost nothing, had Garbage Collection and Interfaces (putting Gang of Four Patterns within reach of many), and let programmers keep their favorite tools and editors instead of adopting Smalltalk's strange model of doing everything in a (mostly) sealed environment.

A bit of context that's gone missing: In 1977, the Fortran source for Adventure, by Crowther and Woods, leaked from Stanford and starting making the rounds on PDP-10 magtapes. Zork, from MIT, came along shortly thereafter, and was seen as more than bit of MIT taking a slap at Stanford by saying, "Now, here's how to do this right. First, one creates a Dungeon Definition Language. ..."

Until reading the backstory a few years back, I had this grudge. I picked it up from my late father, who was a Lieutenant in the Marines in the late 50's. He'd picked it up, with the admonition that "the Marines never forget" from one of his grizzled old Sergeants, who had been charged for coffee by the Red Cross after the war and never forgave them.

"Pirates go out of their way to minimize the impact that their actions have on small time authors."

Citation, please.

I enjoy the story. It's a chance to reconnect with past times when those same things happened to me or someone on my team.

Oh god. I did the binary tree tree thing, too, and also in C. We needed a symbol table for a thing, and I assumed symbols would come in in random order. Oops. Someone suggested AVL trees. The reference I used (which may have been Knuth) left delete "as an exercise for the reader." That led to my next big oops: Pondering how to delete from an AVL tree while slicing onions for dinner. Lots of blood. I still have the scar.

To avoid clock-stretching problems, using one of the small Arduinos that support USB serial to handle the I2C bus can help considerably, at the expense of a bit more programming complexity.

The codebase that has no TODOs has no vision of its future.

I get weird, vivid dreams after drinking some wines. After a lot of experimentation, I narrowed it down to Lodi Zinfandels, which raises an interesting puzzle: Is it something in the soil, or are the local winemakers in some sort of competition to hotrod their wines?

The same approach works. Under-specify a problem, then see what questions candidate asks, and at what level they jump in. When Windows used to ship with Minesweeper, I'd ask candidates how they'd approach implementing Minesweeper for a touchscreen on an embedded device. Good candidates would get clarity on hardware and constraints first.

On the Pi at least, once you've got a card set up you can `dd` it onto another card. Saves a lot of time when rebuilding. I tape them to their respective cases so they're easy to find when needed.

When making this comparison, it's worth noting that Jeffries is showing his work process. Norvig is showing a cleaned up version of his final result after throwing away some earlier attempts. (Source: I spoke with Peter about Sudoku solvers shortly after he'd published.)

most of those, plus

set hlsearch

A Pi 2 at work runs a Grafana playlist on a spare display.

A Pi 3 at home runs a Flask server that collects data from sensors around the house (ESP8266 + SHT20 for temp/humidity), and provides a web page that overlays sensor data on a diagram of the house. I've been curious about CO2 levels in the bedroom overnight, and have parts for that experiment on order.

That 'appearing to take writes but reverting on restart' thing drove me nuts. Switched to Samsung Evo Plus SD cards. A year later, all good.