Froedlich

I go through my bookmarks every five or six years, weeding out the dead links.

Surprisingly, many of them go back to the 20th century, and a few even to 1995, when I was running Mosaic on SCO Unix.

Now that disk space is so cheap I've been archiving many of the old links to local storage. A really nice bookmark function would do that automatically, but most modern browser interfaces seem to be following Chrome's lead and shuffling bookmarks off into a submenu ghetto as everything turns into a kiosk-style UI.

> Samsung

Samsung also sells "Euro spec" (can install new bootloader) and "America spec" (locked in hardware) phones under the same SKU. You can't tell the difference until you try to flash it. I got bit by that one.

You mean "Microsoft deliberately pwning your computer" instead of "the same level of abysmal security Microsoft has delivered since DOS; expect someone to pwn your system Real Soon Now"?

Add TPM and UEFI, and the CPU and chipset backdoors, and it's a real horrorshow down at the hardware level, too.

1) is he available under my insurance plan?

2) irrespective of his certificates or qualifications, does he listen when I'm trying to describe my problem or is he just looking down and poking at his laptop or tablet checking boxes? (I realize they're crushed by bureaucracy as much as anyone else, but if they're not at least glancing in my direction every now and then, why am I even there? I could just use email or even one of those "telephone" things and get the same service)

3) does he actually do doctor things, or does he view himself as a "primary care physician" whose only purpose is to be the gatekeeper between you and the real doctor he might refer you to in order to get something done?

I've had way too many doctors pass #1 and then fail both #2 and #3.

I have an 8-camera home surveillance system. It really wants to talk to the mothership in China, but it will work without it.

However, the only interface to its control box/recorder is through a plugin for Internet Explorer 7. I have to access it through a virtual machine running Windows XP.

Depends on where you are. My local Code Gestapo is only concerned about AC systems connected to the grid. DC and PV wiring aren't part of their remit, and they're not in the least interested in being tasked to cover those, as it would mean more work for them.

> There have been devices using 3G for years. It is very cheap and the infrastructure is pretty much everywhere. --- My Resmed CPAP machine came with a cellular tattletale. It was a separate module with a cable to the mainboard. I unplugged it. The DME provider got all pissy about it, but I just ignored them.

I'm guessing the main reason it was a separate circuit board was so they could install a compatible cellular module depending on what country it was to be shipped to.

Three years ago I bought a small window air conditioner. It came with the usual front panel controls and a remote. The remote turns it on and off and lets you set temperature and fan speed, which is all I expect of a remote. However, it requires an Apple or Android smartphone, their phone app, and internet access to access "extra functions", none of which were described in useful detail in the sparse documentation that came with it.

No, I'll just use the remote.

An acquaintance was telling me about the new RV she and her husband bought. It has a brake controller for trailer brakes. Not unusual, I have them on two of my vehicles; there's a big lever to manually apply the brakes and a "gain" control to adjust how rapidly they apply. But her RV's brake controller is only controllable through a smartphone, apparently.

A few years ago I went to the store to buy a new alarm clock. All the clocks they had for sale were just Bluetooth accessories for a smartphone. Not particularly useful when there's no smartphone to link to it, and ignoring the question of why you wouldn't just use the phone's alarm instead.

History.

Looking back, the primary goal of each textbook and teacher was to do their best to make sure nobody would ever voluntarily pick up a history book for the rest of their life.

Decades later I wound up reading a biography of a moderately interesting person, which led me off to history in a sideways manner. Now I'm a minor history buff.

Funny, history wasn't the only subject the public school system seemed to be trying to induce Pavlovian avoidance reflexes to...

I've been using plain ASCII text files for 35 years now. Editors, word processors, and operating systems come and go, ASCII still works.

An Arduino ought to have enough horsepower for a plant-watering application. They're cheaper than a Pi, sensor availability is comparable, and they're not hard to program.

The Big Data Problem in a nutshell: the more data you have, the easier it is to draw wrong conclusions from it.

Otherwise known as, "you tend to find what you're looking for", as hidden biases in the query will ignore data that doesn't support that.

My browser's password storage function for general web sites, forum logins, and such.

My memory or a shirt-pocket notebook of passwords for things that need better security.

The notebook is backed up by the simple expedient of using the copy machine and storing the copies in the safe. Old backups go to the shredder.

Most of the email I receive would fail the Turing test.

An elderly friend of my wife's is in a nursing home. My wife talks to her on the phone every day, sometimes twice a day. The friend talks about how she is so lonely all the time, and why can't my wife come and visit more often?

Well, the 200-mile round trip is definitely a factor...

I've gotten a fair amount of side work in the last 20-odd years, largely because most of my admin and programming skill set is antique. Setting up printers on Microsoft Xenix? Updating a business inventory system that was written in BASIC? Making serial cables to hook up old industrial equipment to new controllers?

Lots of C# and Haskell wonks around here, but none of them want to dirty their fingers doing maintenance work, particularly maintenance work on software written in no-longer-fashionable languages before they were born.

"Don't fuck with me."

A bit salty in ordinary conversation. Several online translators agreed "Non futuis mecum" is an intelligible Latin equivalent. Though in conversation, probably less useful than Klingon or Navajo.

Back in the mid-1980s PC world, it would have been hard to avoid at least one of the many competing One True Ways. But the majority of what became my personal ideas of good design came from Phil Burns of Northwestern University, who posted the sources for commercial-grade programs as freeware.

Pib's style was probably evolved from his time teaching programming, and was seriously old-school even then.

A) define the problem set

B) outline a solution set

C) break the solution down into logical, preferably standalone or reuseable, modules

D) write detailed interfaces between every module

E) wrap it all in a main execution loop

This not only broke what might be an overwhelmingly complex program into smaller pieces, but was practically a self-hosting test framework to start with. And being highly modular, it was suited for splitting modules across different programmers.

I've watched many-many styles go by since then, but what I learned from Pib and NWU has always worked well for me, even when programs evolved to where most of my actual "programming" was just calling outside APIs, frameworks, or classes.

There have been so many interview fads it's hard to remember them all, but a particularly disagreeable fad was the "surprise question." You're being questioned about some programming-related thing, and then in the middle of it they want to know how many monkeys you can stuff in a milk crate, or how to develop an optimal strategy for playing roulette.

I suspect a lot of interviewing fads are because interviewing is a long and boring process, so changing things up brightens their workday. But I never had any reason to believe any of them had any connection with discovering the optimal candidate.

I've worked on several projects that used "Black Chamber" development.

That is, local LAN only, with no access to the internet, and no internet-capable "personal electronic devices" or cellular phones permitted in the development area.

You had whatever paper documentation you brought yourself, what was in your head, and whatever was in the /documents directory for that project.

It's a different work mindset. I've since moved to a sysadmin position, running a closed network. When programmers decided they couldn't hack being cut off from the net, they'd quit. Dealing with vendors who signed a contract swearing their product didn't need internet access to install or function, when it won't even complete the install without internet access, is more awkward. Particularly when we call the lawyers in. Because that's why we tediously explained the while "no internet" thing in the contract. That they signed. No, not even for just a few minutes. And by the way, can you explain why your installer times out trying to contact servers in three different countries? Our network admin is curious...

I spent a few years running my own non-computer-related business. It wasn't even on the Web. I shut it down when it became unprofitable.

For some reason, both recruiters and potential employers were laser-focused on that "work gap" and attributed it to time in prison despite the offer to show them copies of my tax returns.

Eric S. Raymond was working on one, with the help of some EE friends, but his blog went 404 some time ago. You might find some mention of it on archive.org, and perhaps contact information for one of the other developers.

> but apparently nobody else can do spam filtering. . I've experienced the opposite; I had to abandon one paid mail host because they turned their spam filtering up to "Thunderstruck!" I was getting about every third message on mailing lists, and other mail seemed to be about 50/50. They had drunk the Kool-Aid from whoever sold them the software, and claimed they couldn't whitelist or turn it off per-account, and I should be grateful that half of my legitimate mail was going into the bit bucket.

Not for all accounts. After several years, they started strongly recommending an SMS verification, then finally locked my account when I couldn't provide them one. [I have SMS turned off by my cellular provider] Every year or so I'll see if I can get back in. Sometimes I'm presented with a non-SMS option, but once I work through that, they go right back to insisting on SMS.

I only used that account for communicating with one friend, [our mail hosts were blocking each other in some kind of spam war tit-for-tat] now deceased, so it was no great loss to lose the account, but rather annoying that they pretend harvesting phone numbers is some type of "authentication."

> So a easy way to get started is to receive everything directly and use a commercial (often with low-volume free tier service) relay for outbound --- I used to do that. Did it for almost a decade, in fact. Then the spam filterers decided any message with mismatched send and receive routes was spam.

And it was, back when any hint of "commercial use" could get your machine booted from the mail routes and usenet. After Cantor and Siegel, it was every spammer for himself.

> I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall garden.

I've had several email providers die since the 1980s. Each time it was a major disruption in my life. The last time, I coped by mostly dispensing with email whenever possible. Like most people I have a "good" email address for important things, that I check weekly, and a "garbage" email address I only bother to check when I have a need to.

Hosting my own mail server, not subject to some provider's ideas of filtering, or simply vanishing in the night, would make email more attractive. But the festering mess that SMTP email evolved into isn't just something you can set up in an evening. It's not even a hobby. It looks pretty much like at least a part-time job. Weighing the options, I don't really need email that badly.

From my experiences trying to tell non-native or highly accented English speakers gibberish URLs or filenames, that would probably be an exercise in misery.

"Three. Like one-two-three." -> they hear "tree" or "123"

"'D'. Like Able Baker Charlie Delta." -> they hear anything ending in "ee", or "abelbakercharlydelta"

And so on, ad nauseum.

If you like Fedora's default Gnome, probably.

If you're a KDE user, Fedora isn't friendly at all. And you'll still have to have all the Gnome binaries to support the Fedora tools that are Gnome-only.

Anything that uses standard mbox or maildir formats should be fine. I have mail going back across multiple operating systems and mailer programs since 1995; it has imported without a problem each time.

From 1986-1994 I used a bizarro lash-up to get email through UUCP, which imported the messages into a DOS BBS program to use as a reader. (I said it was bizarro...) The incoming mail was in standard UUCP format, and could have been imported into any common Unix mail program of the day, and thence propagated into the future. Fortunately the BBS mail datasets were plain text, and I can still read them, even if they're not as convenient as a normal mail reader. For that matter, I can still read them running the original 1986 BBS software in DOSEMU.