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etanolon Microsoft MakeCode

I didn't take a deep look, but it reminds me to Bret Victor's proposal on "Inventing on Principle" from 2012:

https://vimeo.com/36579366

etanolon Using Rust in Mercurial

> this is an unfortunate blow to Python

Just as unfortunate as how Python turned its back to Mercurial

etanolon Workers at Amazon's main Italian hub, German warehouses strike on Black Friday

In Spain, Amazon was the major retailer introducing the Black Friday to the local masses.

During the next few years, other sellers joined the trend pushing it even more.

This year, in order to stay competitive, Amazon Spain has been "forced" to follow the trend and have a Black Friday WEEK.

etanolon Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

> Copying files onto a USB stick requires physical proximity, and is uncomfortable for transferring long-term secrets because flash memory is hard to erase. Copying files with ssh/scp is fine, but requires previous arrangements and an account on the target machine, and how do you bootstrap the account? Copying files through email first requires transcribing an email address in the opposite direction

I had similar motivations in 2006 to write a tool to copy files "point to point". So here's my shameless plug:

https://bitbucket.org/etanol/canute

In my case, cryptography was not a requirement, though.

etanolon Maya – Python Datetimes for Humans

Not to undermine its merit, but most of the dirty work and heavy lifting is done by its dependencies:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/maya/blob/d57a78c6bc6b5295f7...

And i18n support in humanize is a bit lacking, as it only translates to French, Korean and Russian. Given that most of the translations needed to render human dates can be found in the CLDR database, maintaining their own looks like a bit of a wasted effort.

Reference:

http://cldr.unicode.org/

etanolon Eagle: Tcl interpreter implemented in CLR

How about Tk? Is it or will it be implemented?

etanolon Write like you talk

Spoken language is backed by other optional channels of information:

* Audio: speaker controls tone, speed and emphasis

* Video: body language

* Feedback: listener can acknowledge reception or ask for repetition

Written language has more time to be composed and it usually has the possibility of being ammended before submission.

Therefore, I always considered natural the difference between spoken and written language styles.

On a less picky opinion: agreed, complex ideas should not be written in complex language.

etanolon Brython – A Python 3 implementation for client-side web programming

Related project:

https://github.com/replit/empythoned

It's a pity it didn't get more traction. The effort invested seems a bit more worthwhile.

etanolon Why I pulled my daughter out of high school to teach her to code

By the same principle, this girl will be also pulled of a CS degree becase the man will be frustrated again that she will be stuck wasting her time in college taking yet another set of computer architecture, operating systems, compiler design or data structures and algorithm classes; when she could be doing what she wanted to do with her life and spending all day learning the next web development framework.

etanolon Google News to shut down in Spain

This is one example of what happens when the population gives absolute power to a single political party: lobbying paradise. We spaniards have the politicians we deserve.

etanolon Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)

Or Hy:

http://docs.hylang.org/en/latest/language/api.html

:-]

etanolon Do you need a degree to be a coder?

Calling yourself a software engineer implies an software engineering degree. Otherwise you would be a liar.

I bet not many people have the guts to call themselves mechanical engineers just because they know how to fix the break pump of a car, for example.

etanolon Python 3.4.0 alpha 1 released

I can't see any mention of the new asynchronous programming support presented by Guido in this year's PyCon. Has it been discarded from this release?

etanolon Exhibit A – the “child pornographer”

He took it to his local computer repair shop. The geeks there went to work. In the course of their work they found a number of images of naked children.

I want to believe that the blame is on the image thumbnails on the Desktop or some folder that is difficult to circumvent. But still, such privacy violation and lack of professionalism from the technicians is not ever mentioned again in the OP.

etanolon SQLAlchemy Migrated from Mercurial to Git

I think you can customize most parts of the Web UI:

http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/wiki?name=Cookbook#css

etanolon SQLAlchemy Migrated from Mercurial to Git

The size issues of the SQLAlchemy repository come from the way Mercurial handles copies and renames.

I prefer Mercurial because is much easier to use but this file rename issue always make me feel uncomfortable when reorganizing code.

These days I'm giving Fossil a try, which still is easier to use than Git and the repository size sits between Git and Mercurial.

etanolon SQLAlchemy Migrated from Mercurial to Git

Too bad there are no comments on the blog:

    SQLAlchemy's issue repository will remain hosted on Trac;
    while a Git repository can be mirrored in any number of
    places, an issue repository cannot (for now! Can someone
    please create a distributed issue tracker? Should be
    pretty doable, though getting Github/Bitbucket to use it,
    not so much...), so SQLAlchemy's long history of issue
    discussion remains maintained directly by the project.

http://fossil-scm.org !!!

etanolon SQLite improves performance with memory-mapped I/O

It is interesting how SQLite is so well known but de SCM built on top of it, Fossil, and by the same author did not catch so much.

etanolon The most useful thing in bash

It is the kernel the one that interprets shebangs, not the shell:

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...

etanolon Sails.js: Realtime MVC framework for Node.js

I think that there is some abuse of the term real-time these days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

etanolon The Meaning of 'su'

Read carefully: "sudo -i" to replace "sudo su - root". You should check the "su" manpage and look for the -/-l/--login option.

etanolon Why PyLadies?

So I've read, congratulations! It's just that these things always remind me to a Simpsons episode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Just_Want_to_Have_Sums

Hence my whining. I hope I'm very wrong.

etanolon Why PyLadies?

This kind of gender segregation makes me sad. So many years fighting for women to have the same rights as men, and now it turns out that IT, the youngest technology of all, suffers from gender discrimination. Thus motivating the creation of these kind of groups.

It's kind of embarrassing.

etanolon Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling

Well, there is still one use case where IE is indispensable:

http://www.bourkedesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ie-po...

etanolon Our take on RethinkDB vs. MongoDB

    «An asynchronous, event-driven architecture based on 
     highly optimized coroutine code scales across multiple
     cores and processors, network cards, and storage systems.»

It may be a dumb question, but isn't this statement a bit contradictory? As far as I understand, event-driven design and coroutines (i.e. cooperative multitasking, lighweight threads, etc.) are the techniques usually chosen to AVOID concurrency.

How does such a design imply multicore scalability? Obviously, coroutines and event loops don't prevent you from running in multiple cores. I just fail to see the correlation.

etanolon The Hardware Renaissance

I have the funny impression that, before, hardware was taken for granted, i.e., people bought the Comodoer64 to code in BASIC.

Now seems that software is taken for granted, e.g., you download TCP/IP Arduino implementations to connect your circuits to a LAN.

etanolon Using /usr/local

This is a kernel issue, it has nothing to do with userspace tools. For example, the Linux code responsible for parsing shebangs is here:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...

etanolon Using /usr/local

While I agree about the use of /usr/bin/env, you should be aware that some systems will perform only one word split on the shebang line. That means that if you use env, you can't pass any options to the $executable.

You can try it if you want, save this into an executable file (test.awk):

    #!/usr/bin/env awk -f
    { print $2 }

Then run:

    echo "Hello world again" | ./test.awk

I get the following:

    /usr/bin/env: awk -f: No such file or directory

etanolon Coding is Dead. Long Live the Coders

Amen.

etanolon Essential C

The document talks about C89, even though the last Copyright year is 2003. Isn't it about time that we start movin on? Where are the restricted pointers, the flexible array member and so on?

And, by the way, I think the comment at the bottom of page 27 is not correct:

The qualifier const can be added to the left of a variable or parameter type to declare that the code using the variable will not change the variable. As a practical matter, use of const is very sporadic in the C programming community. It does have one very handy use, which is to clarify the role of a parameter in a function prototype...

Actually, the use of const is encouraged as it helps the compiler to catch more errors as well as to enable some optimizations.