Wrote my first program in 1969. Worked writing COBOL and FORTRAN for many years. Wrote shareware in the 1990s written in MASM. Worked at Lockheed-Martin doing VB and then Java. Worked at IBM at Watson on WebSphere components. After that took short term high rate contracts until I retired a couple of years ago. I still support a bunch of WordPress plugins written in PHP.
I am a beekeeper and I have not had a colony collapse since I started treating the varroa mites with oxalic acid solution. Colony collapse is a generic term for hive failure and not a specific disease. Varroa is the main reason why my hives failed. The oxalic acid seems to fix this. I treat them after I harvest the honey in the fall. The varroa infestation dies down and the bees do well.
The crisis in beekeeping is largely a misrepresentation of the facts by the press. Bees are doing well and the count of total hives is increasing each year in the US.
I am going to order some Saskatraz queens, but mainly because they sound like an interesting hack.
I've built a half dozen Fender Bassmans and a few Fender Super amps over the years. I thought the article would be about this kind of amp building, but evidently not many hacker news readers play blues harp through a tube amp.
Low tech tube amps are quite easy to build, although they cost a few hundred because the transformers, chassis and tubes can be pricey and the cabs and speakers aren't cheap. The results are great, though, and I'd say go for it if you are thinking about trying.
Get everything you need from Tubes and More dot com or eBay.
I have 4 hives now out of 8 that made it through the fall. I can't seem to keep the hives alive in the winter even with treating. This spring it was Hive Beetles that killed them.
I'll split any hive that looks healthy - walk-away splits almost always work if you are careful to get a frame of brood into the queenless half.
One year I made $5,000 off of 6 hives, but usually $2,000 to $3,000. Except for the glass that is mostly profit. I can charge $12 a pound in a New York suburb. I put a sign up at the end of the driveway and 10 days later I am sold out. I harvest in June/July and again in October (Ragweed and Goldenrod make great honey).
How many times a day? I usually can't get away from being around the hives without a sting. Luckily the bees are usually calm and a honey bee sting is like a bad mosquito bite. It is not like a wasp or hornet sting.
If I open the hive without gloves and veil, I can get stung, but not always. If I have to "work the hive" I have to go full bee suit to prevent being stung.
If you can't handle being stung then raising bees is not a good hobby. If you can stand it, honey is like gold, and people will hound you for it.
I raise bees and sell the honey. Good for a few thousand a year and the money makes up for the stings.
I have a couple of dozen chickens and sell the eggs, but this makes very little money since eggs are so cheap in the super market. It pays for the feed and that's it.
I wrote an Amazon book on how to play harmonica in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson II that sells steady and makes me beer money.
I sell a couple of my Science Fiction short story collections on Amazon. "Error Message Eyes" and "Frogs in Aspic", but after a good first year they sell only a couple of copies a month.
I sell four or five Science Fiction stories a year, but only occasionally do I get pro rates. It's nice to see your name in print, though.
Thanks. I have need something like this, but the web pages do not indicate anything about what it does, how it works or how to use it. I don't have Node installed, either, so it was a waste of time clicking through. I wonder why it was posted here?
I started writing in COBOL in 1976. I wrote a lot of code and even started teaching COBOL in the local community college. The language is pretty simple, although wordy. I think that COBOL code would be pretty obvious to a coder today. They might not be able to code in it, but they should be able to follow the flow. The advantage of COBOL was that it was closer to machine code. A statement in COBOL translates to one or a few instructions of machine language. COBOL was a sort of assembly language. This made it run fast and efficiently on the big iron IBM mainframes. Remember that a machine with a meg or less memory had to run hundreds of terminals serving users at the same time at a clock speed measured in in a few millions of CPS.
My last job before I retired was translating COBOL to Java. The COBOL code always ran faster than the Java classes that replaced them.
This is not a big problem, but it is annoying enough that I downloaded the extension. I'd like to see a Firefox extension, too.
I have been making little JavaScript extensions to do things like sift eBay results and remove sponsored links from searches on some sites. None are mainstream, but they are used and useful.
My company sent me to Boca Raton in 1983 to learn how to use the PC. It was a week long class with hands on experience configuring PCs and BAT file programming using "EDLIN".
I had PC serial #7 in the class and serial #1 was at the front of the classroom.
The instructors were very excited that they could use BAT files and were bragging that the whole class roster was entered and managed on the PC using only the tools that came with PC-DOS.
The course set me on the path of systems and programming and kept me fat and happy for the next 35 years.
My first programming job, also.
One Christmas in the late 70s I had three 5120s set up in my living room. I was programming a complete accounts receivable system with reporting and data entry (I was an accounting major, long before small colleges had CS degrees). When all three were running I could turn the heat off, and still have to open a window in the middle of winter. I paid off my college loans with those computers.
One thing not mentioned in any of the discussions was how impossibly slow the systems were. I ran the sieve program from Byte magazine a few years later and the results came out in last place.
I coded in BASIC and the IBM BASIC had a wonderful ISAM built right into the language that made it very easy to handle indexed files. If you have ISAM, you don't need a database.
I took my last 5120 to the the salvage yard 30 years ago. I still have some 8 inch floppies with the code for my very first programs. Unfortunately, I have no way to read them.
In 1984 I was a PC instructor at a large paper company and I was called up to the 23rd floor to fix a senior vice president's PC. He stood there while I worked on it. It would not power up. I looked around the back of the desk and the PC was unplugged.
I then carefully took off the case cover and removed all the cards and cleaned the contacts and put them back in. I assembled the PC, plugged it in and it booted.
I did not want to tell a senior VP that his PC wasn't working because he didn't check to see if it was plugged in.
Back in the days of shareware, around 1985, I wrote a program called TXT2COM. It was a simple way of turning a text file into an executable. All a user had to do was run the converted com file and the text file appeared on the screen with full scrolling, search and save. I had my name and phone number embedded in the program.
My first problem was when someone converted the Constitution of the United States into a COM file, but made some typos. I got hundreds of calls.
Then someone converted a entire library of gay porn text files which resulted in some uncomfortable phone calls to my wife while I was at work.
I released another version without my name and phone number, but the damage was done. I can still find my name embedded on com files in old archives.
The program was eventually bundled with an edition of "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald E. Knuth. He used it to wrap some of the text files on the disk that came with the book. He paid me with a signed copy of the book and a very nice letter.
I am using a model M right now. I bought three at a computer fair for $3 each about 20 years ago to save space on my desk.
The advantage, other than the tactile and sonic feedback, is that my wife can tell when I am working.
I remember sitting with John Dvorak at his private party in the Sands at Comdex in Vegas. John was buying and we got very very drunk. The occasion was a wake for the obvious demise of Wordstar, which we both preferred. Word Perfect basically out marketed Wordstar by giving away tens of thousands of demo copies at Comdex and Soft-Sell. Word Perfect had a half-assed WYSIWYG but John called it WISHYWYG (you wish what what you see is what you get). The doomed Wordstar was a better product in almost all respects, but Word Perfect was able to market them out of business.
I worked with a programmer who cut his teeth on ancient iron in the 1950s. He had a computer that had 4K of ram and two 512 byte I/O buffers. He would set the loader for the program into the I/O buffer and then use that to load and initialize the rest of the program. The I/O buffers would go away on the first read/write. Every byte counted.
I used the same techniques when I wrote MASM in the 1990s to create a 16k I/O buffer in the CGA graphics card. The graphics card memory was slower than regular memory, but the 16K made the program fly on reads and writes.
I remember a utility that used the Hercules Video card memory for EMS (paged) memory. I think it came with the card.
In the early 1980s I was hired as the Manager of Micro-Development at Lockheed Martin because I wanted too much money to work as a programmer. In these days the section I was in had no PCs so I brought my old luggable (not really portable) IBM PC/XT from home. I worked as a programmer for the large part and I was happy doing development work with two or three other programmers, but when PCs became ubiquitous I had a whole department and I spent much of time managing personnel issues and not coding.
I switched the coding from COBOL to VB4 and Oracle and then Java, and produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a Document Management System that I wrote from scratch.
At one point, when the Director was promoted to another department and the VP was fired, I was acting VP of the entire development group. Luckily this only lasted a month before they hired a new VP.
All of the systems that I wrote (including the original EZPass system for reviewing toll violations) reached maturity and my job was managing small improvements and bug fixes and nothing new or original. It was programming hell.
By the time I left, a new department had been formed to set up some the Web apps that would eventually replace the systems that I wrote, but I was left to maintain the old system.
Basically I worked myself out of job. I was doing precious little coding managing people that were bored and unhappy. Younger and more ambitious people were getting the next big thing. In 2000-2001 people were hiring anyone that could spell programmer for big bucks. After 10 years I was glad to move to IBM where I hoped I would be appreciated.
I have been a programmer acting as a team lead since then, but I never again want to be in the position where people call me in the morning to give me lame excuses as to why they can't come to work that day.
I am 64. I wrote my first program in 1970 and have worked as a programmer since 1976. Programming was a good career choice. For many years I was a manager and pretty much hated it and returned to programming. I quit my job and went to work at IBM as a software engineer the year I turned 50. I was the oldest person in my department, and was a bit of a father figure to some of the kids there. Otherwise I did not fit in and left after two years. I worked at about the same salary on a job for the next ten years and now, at 64, I have a nice job helping to translate COBOL to Java. I am still making a six figure salary, but I will retire in 313 days (I wrote an app that gives me exact time down to the second). I had no problem finding a job when I was 62, but the job was one where I needed Java skills, plus in-depth knowledge of legacy programming languages.
I taught myself Fortran, then Cobol, then PL/1, then Focus, then Basic, then VB, then Java, then Javascript, then Ruby. I find it easy to upgrade my skills. I code in PHP for fun in my off time, so when I retire, I will still program my little PHP projects for fun. Programming is not what I do, but who I am.
I have been using the Google Sky version of the API for many years now at my star finder astronomy site (eg. http://www.starsfree.com/view/91.025/-24.3/M8 ). I don't know of an alternative. There is a Moon version and a Mars version, too. I don't know if the images for Sky, Moon and Mars are available to create an alternative, but if they were, I would be up to cobbling together a program to replace these.
With enough ingenuity the tricks in assembler can be automatically translated.
I work for a company that converts legacy languages like COBOL and mainframe assembly language to Java or .net. The founder has a bunch of programs which analyze the code. In the case of mainframe assembly there are many weird tricks. Self modifying code or jumping into the middle of an instruction are common. There is even one program where the code jumps into a constant to cause an abend.
The translation process works like a charm.
My job is to get the translated output working in java and compare it to the original to make sure the translation works. A few things need to be tweaked by hand, but every once in a while we'll get a series of programs where the original coder uses the same tricks over and over again and a new rule has to be added to the translation tools.
Some programmers used all kinds of odd tricks. I can tell when a program was written by the same person, just by the style of coding.
It's a fun job.
Yeah, it is stupid. On one hand it is an interesting experiment and on the other, just dumb. If I get any takers it will a measure on just how weird social networks can be.
I was going to let the domain expire and figured this would be a good placeholder. So far no takers, but I bet between now and next May I'll make ten bucks. I've already made a few cents off the ads.