ajlburke

I saw the name and thought it might be some kind of retro throwback to the 1996 version of Netscape Communicator. I was sort of looking forward to the integrated but awkward built-in mail client and newsreader.

Hacker News still uses tables - for layout!

But it always loads super fast, and it just works.

We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore.

(Applications are a different matter obviously)

I liked his point near the end of the article comparing blockchains to XML - overcomplicated and oversold and added to too many things due to marketing and consultant hype.

The obvious next question he didn't ask is, what is the JSON of blockchain? The one that's more flexible and efficient and ends up actually becoming ubiquitous?

Maybe it hasn't appeared yet? Maybe it shouldn't? I don't know, but the comparison is just waiting for that followup.

I gather it was used to regulate the temperature of the liquid coolant - but instead of just some pipes or whatever, the designers turned it into a nice "waterfall" feature. I think it even lit up.

It should be noted that anybody coming into Canada now from a foreign country, no matter their citizenship, is being told to self-quarantine for 14 days.

This isn't mandatory or enforced (yet) but it's not exactly a red carpet for folks to come visit for tourism or business meetings.

Thanks for the beorg link - I've been trying to find a way to make my org-mode files mobile-accessible.

JustifyContents and AlignItems are like inserting an old USB key: I always get it backwards the first time and have to switch it over.

Take a look at FlexBox - if you've been around the CSS layout block a few times you might find yourself going "finally - they figured it out!"

I like to think of Sisyphus a bit like someone waiting in line for a rollercoaster or a ski lift. The pushing is a slog, but then you reach the top and WOW BOOOM the rock cascades down the hill and it's AWESOME! Time to start pushing it back up again.

Yes yes I know Sisyphus is a metaphor for the pointlessness of life - but that doesn't mean you have to take it at face value.

I loved EMACS when I first tried it. Granted, that was in around 2001 and my day job had required using a terrible bloated version of IBM WebSphere Application Developer which would leak 16 megs of RAM every time I tried to open an HTML page, forcing me to completely restart my 640meg Dell several times a day. EMACS, in Terminal.app on the then-new OSX, was so refreshingly fast and light (and comparitively good looking) that I finally felt like I could do some real work for a change.

I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, considering EMACS' history - but you never had to use that vintage IBM JSP suite!

Between this and the infamous hacker group called "The Shadow Brokers" I think it's time someone did a study on the influence of Mass Effect on tech culture.

Not me, though - I'm in the middle of some calibrations right now.

My local airport (Halifax YHZ) has notoriously bad landing conditions, and around a year ago I was in a 767 that aborted its landing and went back around. Turns out (at least as far as I've been able to tell from Wikipedia etc.) that the entire aborted landing sequence is activated in one step by the pilot and the plane does all the multiple complicated things it needs to do (change thrust, trim, flaps, etc.) mostly by itself. How that would work with bad sensors is a separate question - although presumably by this point in a flight you'd know what's up with your sensors one way or another.

That's very cool - thanks for sharing!

I've done some work in "parallel worlds" overlaid on top of the real one by latitude/longitude, using the cool "ARCL" library - and the biggest headache I've found for location-based AR (instead of the type that just scans the room or a table) is that even little variations in GPS positioning can really interfere with the experience.

The first time you see virtual objects linked to a real-world place, it's magical - but that magic quickly goes away when everything suddenly shifts 10 (or 50) meters to the east because your device got updated GPS info.

I've become much more aware of how much "cheating" happens in driving / map apps to cover up these hiccups - ever take an exit and your map still shows you driving down the highway for a while? That kind of cheating probably won't work in an AR space.

This is technology that will no doubt improve, but it's definitely one of those "final 5% is 50% of the work" nuisances where just a small amount of inaccuracy can wreck the illusion.

One of the reasons I loved the Mass Effect games was that their design team had clearly been looking at these same pictures, especially when they built the Presidium.

As a kid, I would look at those pictures and imagine my life in the future looking like this. Instead, in the real future, I play video games where I can wander around these kinds of spaces virtually.

Freshbooks and Wave both offer repeatable invoices - I'm sure other invoicing/bookkeeping services do as well.

I "Flintstoned" my small SAAS with automated monthly Freshbooks invoices until I had the time and money to get Stripe properly integrated. It meant we could get paying customers from day one with one less programming/integration headache to worry about.

Skara Brae also features in some of the Ultima games. Supposedly both companies hired the same consultant who provided some of the same naming ideas to both customers - oops!

I cannot recommend this highly enough. It's a real slice of history. If you're lucky they'll actually let you play the game - which is still a fun challenge.

When I went there a few years ago, the PDP-1 demos were actually done by the original guys who programmed Spacewar! I don't know if they're still doing that, but it's magical to be in the presence of these pioneers. This industry is young enough that many of the original masters are still alive and eager to share their stories and achievements.

You're right - my mistake!

It was pretty awesome for enterprise software in the mid-90s, but the world caught up with it soon after.

I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over).

Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - but it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication, built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different topic).

Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases. Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed. This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases.

In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.

I usually use one large monitor with my MacBook as a smaller sidecar for little things like music, billing timer, notes, etc. but there's one time when I've found two monitors come in really handy: if I'm mixing local terminal work and server-side terminal work. The most important thing when doing this kind of work is to ensure that you always know if you're working on your local or on a server. I've used different terminal colour schemes, even different terminal applications - but for me it's even better to have local on one screen and remote on a completely different screen.

(I've sometimes dug out an old machine so I would even have to use a completely different keyboard - but those aren't always available.)

But as a developer, I'm generally more happy with lots of terminal windows on one big screen - but that's just me.

You can still see clocks in the UK from the late 19th century which have two minute hands: one for the local time and the other for the official Greenwich time.

The Bristol Exchange has a big one with the hands ten minutes apart, since that's the difference between local noon in Bristol and noon at Greenwich.

Supposedly in Oxford you can still be 5 minutes and 2 seconds "late" for classes or meetings since that's the offset between there and Greenwich. I've only heard this third-hand - are there are any Oxonians out there who can confirm?

They're called "Gregorian Chants" because they were compiled by the much earlier Pope Gregory I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant)

My apologies

If you're on a Linux/MacOS/BSD machine, "ncal -p" on the command line gives you a nifty list of when various countries switched to Gregorian.

Interesting factoid: Russia's "October Revolution" actually took place in November in most of the rest of the world!

(edit: I had originally said ncal works on all "POSIX" systems but that turned out to be incorrect)

'Now, we shall receive four minutes warning of any impending nuclear attack. Some people have said, "Oh my goodness me — four minutes? — that is not a very long time!" Well, I would remind those doubters that some people in this great country of ours can run a mile in four minutes.' - Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe, 1960

The original Star Wars movies were largely shot in Britain, and used British actors for many of the roles, especially the Imperial officers and officials. Carrie Fisher's family had worked in Hollywood during the "golden age" of the mid-Atlantic accent and she had been sent to an elocution school in the U.K. just before being cast for Star Wars - although she admits that her accent changed a lot in the first Star Wars movie.

Have you BEEN to Kansas City? I got sent there for work meetings once and I have to admit I dreaded it - but it's got lots going for it, with lots of great cultural history (Jazz!) and some awesome food (BBQ!) and some really interesting places downtown. The people I met there were a whole lot more genuinely nice than most Bay Area folks, too.

YMMV obviously, but if you dismiss most of the rest of the continent as "geographically uninspiring" you're going to miss out on a lot.

Canadian banks have generally been much more regulated than US ones. Through the 90s and early 2000s they constantly complained about too much government regulation getting in the way of their profits etc. - they seem to have shut up about that since 2008.