MichaelCrawford

My advisor Clem Heusch once took me hiking from France to Switzerland, right by an unoccupied border post.

Its construction suggested it was built either by Napoleon or by the Swiss to defend itself from him. It was just big enough that one soldier with his Nutcracker Suite hat could stand in it.

I expect that's the specific reason "The Hot Zone" and "The Coming Plague" name the victims.

That is, rather than "An African man had Ebola" they would say "Arthur Obama had Ebola".

There's a whole world of difference between the two.

I never ever enable automatic updates however Firefox updated itself through my Earthlink dialup. So that's why The Tubes have been slow to drain lately.

I did not realize until quite a long time after the invisible install, and only then because a very subtly UI element appeared. I was overcome with rage:

I download all updates by hand then neatly archive them on a server:

   Installers/Windows/
   Installers/Windows/Security_Updates
   Installers/Windows/Security_Updates/Win2k
   Installers/Windows/Security_Updates/WinXP
   Installers/Windows/Service_Packs
   ...
   Installers/Mac_OS_X/
   Installers/Mac_OS_X/TenFourFox

TenFourFox is a build for Tiger and PowerPC. I use it on my Mom's G4 iMac,mwhich is mint condition. Mom doesn't see the point of buying a new Mac, and frankly I agree with her.

I downloaded all her patches at Starbucks until Apple stopped issuing them. Now I have multiple offsite backups of thousands of installers and patches for many different platforms - even BeOS DR8!

My most-serious gripe with Firefox's unwanted, uh, "upgrade" is that I required for solid hours of struggle to figure out where the UI for a business-critical Add-On was.

It turns out that Mozilla "deprecated" what I regard as the "status bar". Silly Wabbit! Usability Testing is for kids!

It's actually called the Add-On Bar. Once I manger to turn that fact up under some cobblestone, I quickly found a thread in which many, many Add-Onmusers also desperately struggled but a Mozilla employee set them straight. Much like AT&T with the cell signal they eliminated from my neighborhood one fine July night in 2010:

    We Don't Care.

    We Don't Have To.

    We're The Phone Company.

It would be a valuable contribution to publish the difference between what your tool says JS should do, and what production interpreters really do with that same JS source.

I expect there is an open source test suite available.

While at Apple in 1995 I came across a common in our system software that said "MacDraw needs this". Apple had a lending library with every third-party product that had ever been published, but for QA and bug isolation only.

My job was mostly to isolate crashes that were stimulated by third party code. About half the time it was their fault; to the extent we possibly could we isolated it anyway by reverse-engineering their binaries. Apple Developer Tech Support would work with the developers to help them fix it.

Sometimes its OK to depend on undocumented behavior, sometimes its not. Embedded systems for example might never receive new firmware so if the release firmware complies with specification then that undocumented behavior is completely cool.

Actually, I dont have a problem with that. Otherwise that milk would go to waste.

I have a cast iron stomach, the only time I have ever gotten really serious food poisoning was from the Apple Computer employee lunchroom.

Bubble Yum is made out of spider eggs.

I stand corrected.

Than you for pointing out my error; sometimes, what one reads on Facebook may not really be true.

However that does not imply that I should stop Boycotting Nestle products. There are many other good reasons that I will explain but not just now as I am posting from my iPad.

I will post my explanation at http://www.warplife.com/mdc/essays but my consultancy is on fire so It will be a little while.

If it is not plainly apparent to you that my OP is on topic, I am sorry but there is not much I can say that will improve your reading comprension.

I have Dyslexia myself si I know very well how hard it can be. In my case I am unable to read written music, so I can only play mu sic that I compose myself.

Did you read the parent post?

When I was with Sony Ericsson in 2010 our CEO broadcast an email to all hands to point out that he had just fired two employees over their conflicts of interest.

I commenced my boycott of Nestle products the very same day their head honcho asserted that water is not a human right. There are many other good reason not to purchase Nestle's wares it's just that that single statement drove home my understanding that Nestle employers and stockholders are notorious criminals.

My boycott is difficult not just because I enjoy many Nestle products but because it is not always easy to determine what products Nestle actually makes. I have learned to read product labels very very carefully.

Many fine foods and beverages that were once prepared by other, independent businesses that are now Nestle subsidiaries. Even if Nestle does not own the manufacture it distributes their products.

Just for grins, read the ingredients from a few Nestle foods soldin the United States, fly to Geneva then read the ingredients of their Swiss products. One of the greatest scams in all of human history resulted in American children drinking nonfat milk.

Here in Vancouver I drink "Swiss Chocolate Milk", made in the United States b Alpenrose with whole milk.

For a parent to feed their children nonfat milk is child abuse.

I was a phone hotline volunteer for the Suicide Prevention Service of Santa Cruz County, California.

Think about that the next time your code gets you down.

I remain puzzled that the Statute of Limitations for many civil offenses such as medical malpractice is four years, while offenses such as workplace discrimination for reasons of age or disability is just five months.

The Equal Opportunity Commission and US Department of Justice are quite vigorous at pressing Americans with Disabilities Act complaints. They just about always win.

But despite that I commonly have standing to file an ADA complaint, because my most-pressing concern when I am denied work over my mental illness is that I find some other job, I always let the timeout expire.

I intend to look into who backed the five month statute - who introduced it to the legislation, who supported it in committee, and who contributed their campaign funding.

I understand jQuery exists in part to work around javascript flaws in older browsers.

My first piece of advice is to not download jQuery to those browsers that do not have javascript flaws.

I once found a mask error - a design flaw - in an embedded chip, but I was unable to work around it. I had to tell my client, a primary defense contractor that they selected the wrong part and would have to redesign their boards then respin their prototypes.

All three of Octel's servers would become unresponsive for no apparent reason. Sometimes they crashed after a while but sometimes they would come back up after a while.

Late one night when no one else was there I ran "top" only to puzzle over that a bunch of identical command lines were consuming all the CPU:

    login -p Mkkuow....

I don't remember the exact username but this Mkkuow guy was trying to log into all the terminals on each box.

I dont clearly recall how I figured this out but it was the result of capacitive coupling - parasitic capacitance - between the transmit and receive rs232 wires. The OS would transmit "SunOS login:" then get garbage on the receive line. Then it would prompt for the password a few times, eventually to give up and transmit the login prompt again.

The actual username I saw is easy to figure out by graphing the ASCII voltage levels then considering how capacitance works.

The solution was to replace all the cables with a lower capacitance cable. Because that required all new connectors as well as my time to install them my manager Karen Coates required some convincing but in the end the new cable stopped the hangs.

Mail me at mdcrawford@gmail.com if you'd like to be my very first early adopter.

Market Yourself: Tips for High-Tech Consultants

http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/market-yourself.html

Would you regard it as a wise investment to put your entire life savings on a single spin of the wheel at Vegas?

While you may not lose actual money with a failed startup - that is, if you have the G-d Given Sense to save some of your salary - failed startups, even many successful ones have many other costs.

A close friend and coworker at Live Picture became homeless. He's doing well now but when he told me of his plight I was concerned he would take his own life.

Consider the essays the Elon Musk's ex-wife likes to write about how to become a billionaire.

My own divorce had quite a lot to do with my own effort to succeed in business. I did not have funding because I did not pursue it, but had I sought funding our marriage would not have lasted as long as it did.

   "I'm not really bad; I'm just drawn that way."
    -- Jessica Rabbit

I see your point, but my concern that the coder who implements a security-critical script doesn't know he should use tools like this one.

Lots of those who use other languages like to gripe about the many faults of PHP. While I agree that PHP has its problems I've used lots of languages that were far, far worse. My take is not that PHP is a bad language but that those who use it are often bad programmers.

Take Bill at http://www.radioparadise.com/ He at first built the sight with phpNuke, but rewrote it from scratch in the best of just a few days after "some boys from Brazil" overran it. Radio Paradise is still built on PHP, the difference is that Bill is an excellent engineer.

Cancer runs in my family; quite likely it will get me in the end as well.

My own experience with other life-threatening illnesses yields the insight that if you are to survive, it is your mind that will enable you to do so. If you cannot overcome the mental challenge, no amount of medicine will help you.

A close friend once rang up the US Olympic Bicycling coach to inquire as to how he might make the team:

   "Ride 120 miles every day for the next since months.  Call me again after that."

My friend could ride a lot farther than 120 miles in a day; he really was that good. Even so he did not even try because he was intimidated by the prospect of working so hard for so long.

I do have two specific ideas that would work well for the fellowship as well as for an actual startup. One, while quite valuable would be complex. I expect I could produce an appealing pitch demo in eight weeks. The other I expect I could bring a Minimum Viable Product to market during the fellowship. I am unsure how to price the latter; possibly I would use it to attract potential customers for some other kind of product.

I will cop to you the REAL reasons I desire the fellowship:

My self-employment is very isolating even in the best of times. During one of the cruelest, loneliest times of my entire life I billed $120.00/hour for as many hours as I could stay awake.

I am often asked by interviewers why I want to give up consulting to take a salaryman position:

   I would not wish software consulting on my worst enemy.

   What I really want from a regular job is coworkers.

That's It.

Of far deeper concern is that I know well that I have expertise, insight and wisdom to pass on to the younger generation.

While I seem to be getting better not long ago I was convinced I would die soon. The doctors are unable to diagnose the underlying reason for my brain seizures, the best they can do is give me medicine that makes future seizures less likely.

Many of today's startup founders are very young compared to the founders I knew when I set out. Back in the day most had real-world job experience, some already had fortunes of their own.

Some of today's founders have never had paying work of any sort.

Consider my oft-repeated mantra here at HN:

   Use assertions before you use debuggers.

While assertions serve me well these days they did not serve me at all until I had been coding for seventeen years. I quite commonly find others suffer not because they refuse to Read The Fine Manual, but because they are unaware of The Fine Manual's very existence.

Thank you for any insight you may enable me to obtain.

While Siddartha Gautama had funding, Jesus Christ did not.

San Francisco, Portland and Seattle companies are advertising open positions all over the planet.

While SFO may have a good talent base, those engineers already have jobs. Fewer and fewer people are willing to relocate not just because the rent is so expensive but because housing is largely unobtainable for any price.

I would love to live in San Francisco but not now. Perhaps after the crash comes.

When you are offered options, inquire as to whether the shares you will obtain by exercising will enable you to vote for directors.

The GOOG shares held by Larry Page and Sergey Brin give them control that its publicly traded shares do not. I don't know either way about the shares obtain through employee option exercises.

Stocks are authorized in a sequence of "series": Series A, Series B and so on. What series are your options from? The corporate bylaws sometimes grant different rights to the shareholders from different series.

The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/...

My Live Picture stock certificate sure looks nice. I dont really know but would be unsurprised were someone to tell me I was the only one to exercise our options.

It's not just startups, most businesses of any sort fail in their first five years. While there are advantages to funding there are disadvantages too. Even if you don't blow your VC on aeron chairs and craft beer you must sell a product or service that, while perhaps not profitable at least conceivably could be, and ship it so that it achieves convincing market penetration by the time you burn rate has burned the round you are presently burning.

Most arguments for self funding focus on the dilution of equity that comes with investment but there are many other arguments. Another is that if you fund your project yourself you don't have to answer to anyone.

Whether that is a good thing depends on your own judgement; don't self fund a product that does no one any good.

Every last one of us has the capacity to create a product that could could earn us a tidy living, maybe pay a few employees. At that point we face a choice: improve that one offering, or use some of the cash to fund something completely unrelated?

There are many good arguments for each of the two choices. Ball Metal Container makes every pop can in America. Nokia at first made rubber boots while the predecessor to IBM made bacon slicing machines.

I grant that there is appeal to working for a startup: it's nice to be noticed. I contributed to some products that were huge hits at trade shows. I would make my Mama proud were I to make front page at the Wall Street Journal.

By contrast self-funders often labor in obscurity, sometimes poverty for years. Even so, many succeed, often spectacularly so, as did the father and son who invented Flow Hive, and improved way to harvest bee honey. Their is some possibility that Flow Hive all by itself will reverse colony collapse disorder, in that it makes beekeeping far more accessible to the nonspecialist.

In my own estimation venture backed startups are no more likely to be in business ten years later than the sole proprietorship.

Expectations may be different but that does not imply the laws are different. Expectations are what engineers have; laws are what Congress passes.

I understand that in the State of California it is unlawful to shoot a whale while riding a camel.

Was the respondent on craigslist's premises? IIRC their office is San Francisco.

If thevshop is open to the public its not actually trespass until the shopkeeper asks one to leave.

One fine day I discovered a gross electrical code violation at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. I called the fire marshall then tripped all the circuit breakers then unplugged every electrical cord in the place.

One of the members called the police. The cop called the owner who told the cop that I was no longer permitted in the building.

"What exactly does it mean not be be in the building? Where cannI be without violating the law?"

"Just outside the door."

I assert that the plaintiff in this case is just like someone standing outside the shop, on a public sidewalk, looking in the window.

I applaud every effort to improve Javascript as it all takes eons to download over my dialup but commonly does not actually work.

A favorite contribution is called something like "You Don't Really Need jQuery". I will dig it up,in a little bit.

Of most serious concern is how to convince the working JS coder to actually avail themselves of better javascript? Most dont read HN. I find it is of no use to point out the errors of their ways.

I feel that continuous and frequest releases do not serve the end user.

It can take time to find and fix subtle bugs. Adding new features introduces new subtle bugs.

Even as a developer, for me to grow happy with a tool often means that Apple will crush my joy by altering thatntool in a way that makes no sense to me.

Today's "UX" is particularly tragic. I find so many user interfaces that make no sense. Perhaps thats because there isnt enough time to solicit feedback from end users.