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incanus77

3,715 karma · joined September 1, 2011

Maker, programmer, photographer, and traveler.

More at https://justinmiller.io

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incanus77··on Apple Creator Studio
Me too, with Aperture. Huge misstep and insult to the user base.

This is a useful tool: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

However, you still need to run an older OS. I've still got on my todo list the process of fixing all of this.

incanus77··on Profiling with Ctrl-C (2024)
I kind of do a variant of this sometimes with “pause” in the Xcode debugger. If I’ve just encountered some kind of hang or delay, often hitting that will put me in the right place in the threads/call stack to figure out what I did.
incanus77··on Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades
Sure, but wisdom can be shared about what is less likely to make you happy.
incanus77··on Approachable Swift Concurrency
My recollection was the block syntax one being first as well, back when that was added to Objective-C. It was arcane enough to have to look up all the time.

They also have this variant, though:

http://goshdarnblocksyntax.com/

incanus77··on Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)
I ran an exhibit of eight machines from my retrocomputing collection last year, including a 1986 Mac Plus with 1MB RAM running Photoshop 1.0. People really enjoyed it! It’s kind of remarkable what you can still do with it and how freeing it is to have singular focus in an app.
incanus77··on I program on the subway
I’ve used this downloadable Python doc set at times, it’s quite good offline.
incanus77··on Programming languages used for music
Surprised no mention of Alda. I’ve only tinkered with it, but it’s clever:

https://alda.io/

incanus77··on I program on the subway
Oh sure, lots of things to miss about that time... startup vibes, underdog causes during the worst of the Bush years, and work that ranged from the Mac stuff to Linux/BSD backend admin, PHP dev, introduction of the tech team to SVN/version control, even some music composition for a video. And close work with a bunch of folks on the team who now have their own Wikipedia pages, as well as high-profile clients. My boss left eventually in mid 2005 to go work for (then Senator) Obama and personally interviewed him for / produced his podcast, posted to his Flickr, and that sort of thing.

The commuting... not so much. Moved into DC proper after that year, which itself was a great adventure. Leaving the house at 5:30-6:00am and returning at 8:30-9:00pm was no way to live.

incanus77··on I program on the subway
About 20 years ago, I landed my first real, high-impact job at an upstart consulting agency in Washington DC that came from the ashes of the Howard Dean campaign. Unfortunately, I had also just signed a lease on an apartment in the town I lived in, a two hour drive from downtown DC.

I spent the first year at that job commuting into DC 2-3 days/week, which involved about an hour drive, then an hour regional commuter train, then some Metro transfer and walking — then back again in the evening. I spent that train time offline (as it was 2004) learning the Apple Cocoa frameworks, as in another twist of fate, the company was entirely Apple laptop-based, which was fairly rare for 2004, and I built tools for the team and myself. The focus possible because I was offline, with comprehensive docs, was pretty intense and was a huge part of many aspects of my career to follow.

incanus77··on Fuzix on a Raspberry Pi Pico
Fuzix came preintalled as one of the options on my ClockworkPi PicoCalc, which has really been the most fun iteration of the Pico that I've played with yet. I've also been enjoying uLisp and MMBasic on it. The keyboard is quite good.
incanus77··on FVWM-95 (2001)
Nice, Cortile is slick. Love that it's so modular.
incanus77··on FVWM-95 (2001)
There's a nice theme for XFCE, Chicago95, that looks a lot like this as well and is quite good!

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

incanus77··on alpr.watch
You're right, I hate my nieces, nephews, and all my friends' kids! I want the worst for them. /s
incanus77··on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
Never forget the double polo.
incanus77··on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
I backup my Obsidian vault weekly by blindly committing the stuff in `.obsidian` and then reviewing the changes to the `.md` files themselves. It's not version control, per se, but at least a backup and record.
incanus77··on The Nova Programming Language
Yeah, I was like "rewrite language on a black & white site? I know this!" There can't be that many.
incanus77··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
Yes. This is the modern equivalent of “I searched the web and this is what it said”. If I could do the same thing and have the same results, you’re not adding any value.

Though this is unlikely a scenario that happened, I’d equate this with someone asking me what I thought about something, and me walking them over to a book on the shelf to show them what that author thought. It’s just an aggregated and watered-down average of all the books.

I’d rather hear it filtered through a brain, be it a good answer or bad.

incanus77··on The Nova Programming Language
> A while back there was a rewrite language that was posted (white on black theme site) that was similar but more geared towards coding problems and less on lit programming. I don't remember the name but it was equally as interesting. If anyone recalls what it was it'd be greatly appreciated.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/pocket_rewriting.html

incanus77··on SQLite as an Application File Format
Thanks. Shortly afterwords, I started collaborating with a few folks and it definitely was a team effort to push it forward (icon design, UTFGrid spec, node-sqlite & server-side adoption...). It's still a very satisfying solve for the problem.
incanus77··on SQLite as an Application File Format
Yes! Gus (the developer) also has made & maintained FMDB for many years, a nice Cocoa wrapper for the SQLite bindings.

https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb

incanus77··on SQLite as an Application File Format
I did this for MBTiles, for storing (at the time, raster) map tiles at Mapbox. I was working on the iPad wing of R&D early in the company and we were focusing on offline mapping for the iPad. Problem was, moving lots of tiny map tiles (generally 256px square PNGs) was tedious over USB and network. We had a thing called Maps on a Stick for moving things around by USB, but it just didn’t scale well to the iPad interface & file transfer needs.

Bundled the tiles into SQLite (I was inspired by seeing Dr. Hipp speak at a conference) and voila, things both easy to move and to checksum. Tiles were identified by X & Y offset at a given (Z)oom level, which made for super easy indexing in a relational DB like SQLite. On the iPad, it was then easy to give map bundles an application icon, associated datatype from file extension, metadata in a table, etc. At the time, I was fairly intimidated by the idea of creating a file format, but databases, I knew. And then making some CLI tools for working with the files in any language was trivial after that.

incanus77··on Tailscale Down
Totally appropriate if your Tailnet name is goose-rappel.
incanus77··on What Killed Perl?
PHP contributed hugely for me. I was writing a lot of Perl for web apps from about 1996 to 1999, when PHP really took hold and was an improvement in almost every way, right down to including PCRE regex functions. Perl felt clumsy compared to PHP, especially for MySQL and other relational DB stuff. PHP was built for the web.
incanus77··on How Slide Rules Work
I have an HP-15c as well as a 16c and I've been using the latter on a daily basis while writing a byte-level network protocol client. I'm getting faster by the day and on the verge of writing some programs for shortcuts on the calculator. I still use the excellent PCalc as well, but seem to be faster on the physical calculator, which is kind of surprising.
incanus77··on Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
Same, I have a 2013. It’s such a good size.
incanus77··on Winamp clone in Swift for macOS
I mean, muscle memory & fatigue may be part of it. I used MacOS for a number of years, then I used Mac OS X for 8 years, then OS X for 5 years, and now macOS for 9 years.

During that time I also used Windows and Linux from time to time. Their names didn't change in a way where just calling them that was perceived as incorrect.

incanus77··on Homebrew no longer allows bypassing Gatekeeper for unsigned/unnotarized software
Same here.
incanus77··on I Am Mark Zuckerberg
I know the guy who had Twitter/X @Justin (also my name) early on and he would constantly get mentions for “@Justin Bieber” because people didn’t understand the space.
incanus77··on Hello-World iOS App in Assembly
That would be great if iOS supported a GUI in C.
incanus77··on Betty White's shoulder bag is a time capsule of World War II (2023)
Or, if World War-indexed, 2.
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