enjoy-your-stay

Aquadata looks like a very interesting application, I'm often surprised that there's so much support for database ddl and querying, but not so much support for actually doing something more with the data, like graphing and other visualisations.

And to plug my own little endeavour :-) if you're on Linux and are looking for a quick and easy to use Forms builder, here's my early beta http://www.data-forms-action.com/

Supports MySQL and Postgres currently.

Does anybody know why they are dropping support for kerberos?

I didn't even know there was support for Kerberos in OpenSSl, but it's also under the LibreSSL bullet points as well.

It's been a real shame to watch the decline of HP.

In the early 90's when I was just starting out in IT, their brand was very highly regarded, especially their laser printers which phenomenal workhorses.

Well, mostly benevolent - they don't seem above sacrificing the odd human or orbital if it meets the need of the greater good though.

The most interesting and evil manifestation of AI I think has to be the Shrike from Dan Simmons' Hyperion and by extension the TechnoCore which created it.

In C++, the best way to hand out pointers to anything where the creator may not necessarily be the last one referencing that object or chunk of RAM is to use reference counting, which would have solved the posters' problem.

It would mean that you would have to wrap the incoming string in a class, and probably add the tokenize_string method to that class. Then you would also have to wrap the results vector in a class that then addrefs the original string wrapper class.

But after that, handing out pointers to the contents of the string would be no problem as the results class would addref the string class and then release it when done ensuring that the string wrapper class remains alive as long as the results object has not gone out of scope.

Of course Rust's approach of alerting you when your code path causes dangling pointers is also interesting, but I wonder how that would work if you were to link against a static library that handed out references to internal objects like that - could the compiler see the scoping problem?

Looks like he was doing this on Linux.

A quick experiment shows me that you can call ptrace(PTRACE_TRACEME,..) on OSX multiple times without it failing (the constant is actually PT_TRACE_ME on darwin). I wonder if that's the same for all BSDs ?

Interesting and educational writeup though, and just the thing to get me tinkering myself!

Reminds me a bit of the problems RBS had after large cutbacks and outsourcing had removed a lot of the in house expertise from their batch processing team.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_off...

>...and now I will always want to fly on an Airbus instead.

Reminds me of a joke I was once told by a QA consultant:

His colleague was on his way to deliver a revision of software which had been extensively tested and many serious bugs discovered and fixed. The software was so important that it was to be delivered in person by the consultant on a laptop to the customer.

On the walkway to the plane, he happened to glance up and see the aeroplane he was about to board was an Airbus. In fact the very revision that had the same software he'd just been testing and had found to be full of bugs.

Oh no.

Suddenly getting very cold feet and desperately thinking of a way not to get on the plane he takes a drastic step and deliberately drops and destroys the laptop with the software he was going to deliver.

Happy now he returns to the office and declares 'well, that's a shame - but I think I'll take the train next time'

- was told to me as a true story, and you never know...

I guess it would be like an OS that once loads and starts, will run forever. You can put your machine to sleep which will freeze the sate, and then bring it back on again and start processing instructions from where it left off.

But if that's the case then they'll have to think of ways to do e.g. OS upgrades - where you normally reboot to flush the old code out of RAM.

Or how will you recover if you load a bad driver end experience a blue screen? Normally you reboot to flush the bad state and start again.

Somehow I think you'll need a separate cut down immutable OS alongside the your System so that you can repair things or make updates to the main RAM/Storage space.

Or at least that's how I understand it..?

I thought one of the main reasons for the LGPL was to attract more people to use and contribute to your library, whether open source or proprietary; with the added advantage that developers efforts were not being wasted with needless duplication.

This approach seems to seek to create a much stronger 'us' and 'them' mindset which can only alienate a large number potential contributors.

The first time I realised how fast computers could be was when I first booted up BeOS on my old AMD single core, probably less than 1Ghz machine.

The thing booted in less than 10 seconds and performed everything so quickly and smoothly - compiling code, loading files, playing media and browsing the web (dial up modem then).

It performed so unbelievably well compared to Windows and even Linux of the day that it made me wonder what the other OSes were doing differently.

Now my 4 core SSD MacBook pro has the same feeling of raw performance, but it took a lot of hardware to get there.

Good point, and I think that that's why languages like Java and C# are very popular these days - they hit a good balance between performance and developer productivity.

Programming itself may be a bit of a dead end, where you can quickly hit the glass ceiling; but if you get involved in other important parts of software production like design, specification, requirements gathering, support, sales and marketing then then the domain knowledge that you can gain can lead you onto many other things.

Technologists who also have a lot of domain knowledge are gold dust to many companies because they can straddle the world of business and IT and help bring the two sides together to develop better solutions. Much of the business of computing still baffles a lot of very intelligent people, so if you can act as the translator between these to sides then you can definitely broaden your horizons.

The thing is as well, that you may not have to give up programming entirely. I've managed to lead IT projects, and then once they were delivered go back to working on programming again.

I would have to agree with your comment there.

Although having over 7 years experience as a c++ programmer, since I'm not using it so much now I haven't managed to keep up so much with the changes in c++11 and feel a bit noviced overnight.

Still, move constructors are pretty handy so that's one change I use whenever I can.

... or initialize you freshly malloc'd memory to DEADBEEF for you.

Just to helpfully let you know when you're reading a bit of uninitialized RAM.

Actually Microsoft's earlier and very successful development tools were all dynamically typed versions of Basic.

Visual Basic, Access, Excel and ASP were all dynamically typed, and were very responsible for exploding Windows' market share from Windows 3.0 onwards as it encouraged many to start programming who never would have considered it before.

Unfortunately they created an ecosystem of novice developers that many within MS I think despised and looked down on and which gave their platform a bit of an unprofessional reputation.

Then along came Java and showed them that a relatively sophisticated and strongly typed language could raise the entry bar just a bit, but result in generally much higher quality of end product, so along came C# and out went VB and COM.

'Classic' ASP has also been responsible for much hair loss in early webmins.

I love working on my Mac, but the use of Cmd-Left and Cmd-Right instead of the <home> & <end> keys really causes me lots of wtf? moments when I'm editing.

Fortunately xcode allows you to customize those keys which has made code editing a lot more pleasant.

Indeed. After paying your rent and (mandatory) health insurance there wouldn't be very much left.

Somebody in this thread also mentioned that it's a luxury to own any car in Switzerland - but that's just not true at all. In fact many apartment blocks have underground garages for cars.

It's just that with such an excellent public transport system (really it's unbelievably fantastic) you can pretty easily get by without a car. Especially in the bigger cities like Zürich.

I have to agree, I thought it looks pretty nice too - and for what appears to be his first ever attempt - event better.

Just a shame the '8' character looks a bit like an upside down snowman is all I would add.

Although I've never gone to the effort of actually calling somebody up to thank them, I have gone out of my way to thank colleagues whose code I've been maintaining if I have found it easy to work with.

Code that is: consistent in style and approach (even if it's different to mine) easy to to reason about has clear comments detailing why something was done the way it was

is hard to do consistently, and very often stands out from the spaghetti code that's present in other parts of the system.

The reason I do this is firstly to let the person know I appreciate the effort they have gone to, and secondly to signal to the other developers on the project that this is something worth trying to attain, and at least one person values these things.

You could just as easily alta-vista, or yahoo that because people used those search engines originally, and they existed way before Google did.

Google however turned a better product and has therefore captured the lion's share of the market. But they Google search engine is pretty much a copy in functionality of previous ones that came before.

Of course Google have brought other things to the internet (maps comes to mind), but the search engine didn't change how people used the internet - we were searching long before Google.

What would be binary data? The only possible thing I could think of would be the timestamp. Everything else would most likely be text, ASCII for English speakers, UTF-8 otherwise.

I hereby propose a change to memcpy to include a maxbytes parameter and an optional assert() if len exceeds it.

Might turn up a few interesting things.

Funnily enough, if I understand it correctly, it is illegal to import counterfeited goods into Switzerland and border guards will sometimes check your purchases when returning from holiday to make sure you haven't any in your luggage.

Unfortunately Switzerland didn't manage to dodge the bullet entirely.

Many people saw the Swiss Franc as a safe haven currency and massively bought them up, driving up the exchange rate. This caused Switzerland's exports to become uncompetitive which is also slowing what is a very export driven economy.

Oddly enough prices haven't really come down domestically either, but neither has unemployment risen that much (despite large layoffs in the financial services sector, particularly in their biggest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse).

I also find his videos an inspiration - especially those from NeXT. Fortunately we'll have them for a lot longer than we've had Steve.

I know my contribution will just be a tiny digital drop in the tide of condolences that's coming in right now.

But R.I.P Steve Jobs. You'll be missed.

Linus seems to be (correctly) railing against what is classic cargo cult behaviour.

Making changes until someting seems to "work".

What you have in the bank is irrelevant, it's how far down the development road that money will take you that counts.

That's a calculation only you can do with your current living costs in addition to estimated cost of equipment, services, software, office space, and probably lots of other things you would never imagine (legal costs, accounting costs, cost of incorporating for example?)

If you're asking the question then I guess you haven't done these calculations yet - but putting them all down on paper (or spreadsheet more appropriately) as well as a realistic development timeline will tell you what you need to know.

Good luck! If you never try you'll never know.

Ah, Zurich at no. 10, the place I've chosen to develop my startup. I probably should've taken my hard earned savings somewhere cheaper, but it's a great place to live and has a very good infrastructure.