konad

hehe savages, what will they do next

I wrote a VHS take tracking system in Basic for a guy that rented out pirate VHS tapes from the back of a van around his council estate. I was about 11 (so about 1982), my dad used to rent tapes from him. - I'd never used whatever computer he had, just the Research Machines 380Z at school.

The next was a clone of some artillery game (a bit like Gorillas.bas) on to another of dad's friend's TRS-80. I'd never used a TRS-80.

Then a stock control program for my dad's pub (which got me an F in my computer studies class but saved at least $50k [I still got an A via the exam which means I scored 90%+]). I did know quite a bit about that system, being my own and all.

Then one day at my local computer shop, I was watching them struggle with their pricing. Only one guy knew the prices of stuff and had employees standing in line so they could price their builds. I was friendly with him so asked if I could take his spreadsheet and make it a bit better. Come Monday morning I'd discovered Access and made a computer building form that worked over the LAN. So they gave me a job making it better. By the end it did the purchasing, retail pricing, BOM production, quote tracking, faxing, barcode printing (which we built by hand as a TTF font in Corel Draw), barcode reading (each fax had a barcode, customers arrived with them and a quick scan later the shop floor people could find their details), sales team target tracking and quite a bit more (this is all pre-internet). The Microsoft rep called the best in-house project he'd ever seen!

Then I taught myself C++ to do image processing for the music video I was commissioned to make by Creation Records (a division of Sony) on the strength of the work we showed while doing video projection at raves.

Knowing vbscript meant I was well placed for IIS web development but realising it was a shit platform I started looking at PHP. I got a phone call from the previously mentioned retailer asking if I knew anyone that could do PHP. I said "yeah me" and got a 5 year job building a recruitment site.

In the process of doing that I taught myself Postgres and FreeBSD system administration.

Now I work in an independent cinema / media centre doing all sorts of sys admin with a digital video strand, DVD authoring & duplication (this pays best!), camera assisting etc. including a 5 machine video distribution and exhibition network on mac minis using Gentoo that can double as a a video wall a la Liquid Galaxy (same code in fact - a patched mplayer which syncs via upd).

tl;dr I knew almost nothing about any of the systems I have done my best work with and learned most of it on the job but got the job because I knew loads of other loosely related things.

I've done that bit :) I bought Loeliger and wrote the TIL from that in AVR assembler.

Forth, still. Written a few bits but want to get serious.

I've been banned by HN twice, no appeal, no explanation, in fact you don't even know because you can still log in and post comments. The first time it took me a couple of weeks of "how come no-one replies to my posts any more" before I thought anything was wrong.

The first one - I have no idea why - I guess the -4 (which I still think is a valid comment)

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skwiddor - 100+ karma

Ok so next time round I'll be more careful, got 400+ karma

Then one day you slip in a joke and you're toast

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wendroid

> I can't begin to describe how much I loathe seeing page upon page of apps

Did you miss Steve's memo : teh app store is not for discovery. You should only ever see ONE app, the ONE you already knew about and came to download.

/sarcasm

* Inability to debug Javascript without Visual Studio

* Terrible error messages

* Firefox

you're right but they want to change that

The theory is that liquidising your food means more chemical reaction can take place.

I don't have soda in reach. One 330ml can of soda a day is 5kg of weight gain per year to work off.

Seth Roberts reported on this a long time ago, though he added a bit of fructose to his water

http://www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf

A farmers know, taking water with your meals increases calorie uptake too.

AFAIK you can't weasel your way out of product liability like that.

No. Germany (and the UK) applied the American drafted European legislation that says it is illegal to distribute software that could be used to break into computers.

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/567 http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_german_hac...

This has had a chilling effect already

for instance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_%28software%29

On September 2007, to comply with new German laws regarding distribution of hacking tools to the public, THC stopped making the program available.

Not the word jail but the threat is in plain sight

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20021836-52.html

"Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products," a company spokesperson told CNET. "With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant."

isn't it illegal for a German to post on how to crack passwords ?

that's fantastic, I'm so going to make one

Hi, I'm thinking of getting RepRap. Do you find your printer brings you any business opportunities ?

Even though I've read it twice, I still don't understand exactly how you get anything to run and start writing arbitrary files.

The way to do it is to send a tar file that happens to extract exe files to ~/bin.

Besides, if you run a fancy wm, that's your problem :)

OT but hey I can afford the burn

The charging a cow should do is with its horns, right in your fat belly.

Cows milk is for baby cows.

After a spell at Bell-Labs working on Plan9 (his Mothra web browser is my favourite HTML2 renderer), Duff is now at Pixar.

Do you know any off hand ? I've had referer headers stripped for a few months now and afaik it's never caused my any problems.

Pike, Ritchie and Cox, those simple fools

I do wish they'd change the name, R is such a difficult search term

C and C++ most definitely are not the same language.

It's 1994, Windows for Workgroups is on your computer connected to the other machines on the LAN via a Novell Network. No WAN. Word 6, Access 1.0, Excel 1.0. VBA is all you've got.

You can use Excel / Word as a COM object and use any language that does COM.

What does that have to do with http referer headers ?

You do know the referer header is optional don't you, I mean, you'd look pretty dumb relying on it for any web service because, you know, some crazy people turn them off altogether, perhaps with the Firefox add-on RefControl.

see also Scheme in a Grid http://siag.nu/siag/

I would say that "smarter over time" is the wrong conclusion of the Flynn effect.

you can still buy them, I got a zx81 with 16k ram pack not long ago for $40