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I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because their decision making was hideous), so they decided not to renew my contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane, and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane.

Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media were invited -- and I was very pointedly not invited, presumably because they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you right, you bastards".

Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now, so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...

The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-example of that.

Your comment would have been amusingly surreal if there were no closing tags for the <uint32_t> stuff in the article. I'm almost disappointed that there were. I wonder who was responsible for that particular bug in the Facebook formatting code.

He got himself fired for being an idiot. My Dad would have done the same regardless of who it was; the only difference is that some other kids (or parents) might have been too timid to approach him about it.

But yeah, thanks for your interpretation, that's good too. Pat-pat-pat.

Not a lot of call for that in Australia. Brilliant mental image though. "Now it's time for your 'Avoiding Hypothermia In A Hole In The Ice Whilst Being Stalked By Polar Bears' Lesson, children! Line up quickly please!"

Dateline: nineteen seventy-mumble. School swimming lesson, small town rural Australia. Me, aged seven, evidently having a mild but irritating panic attack about having to go into the water. Swimming instructor gets sick of my shit and throws me in. Oddly, this does not reduce my panic attack! He pulls me back out again and yells at me for disrupting the class.

... And learns an important lesson: if you're going to lose your cool and throw a kid in the pool because he's misbehaving, don't choose the school principal's son.

We got a new swimming instructor... but I never did learn to swim worth a damn. I make a point of living inland.

Now I want to say something oblivious so I can be anontweeted too!

I think it must have been. If he was aware of it at all, he would have associated it with the Reverse Polish Notation of his HP calculator, and probably knew that, while they were certainly powerful, RPN calcs were never going to make it to the mainstream.

And actually implementing a basic interpreter isn't all that complex. The loop is simple:

Read a line.

If the line starts with an integer, you're adding a line to your program; otherwise you need to interpret then execute.

Read the first word. In some BASICs, this is the first string of characters that matches one of the keywords; in others, it's all the alphanumerics up to a non-alphanumeric.

(In effect) dispatch to the appropriate interpretation routine based on which keyword you just read in. For example, PRINT goes to the argument handler for PRINT, LET goes to the argument handler for LET, and so on.

Then you just have a bunch of routines (read one variable name, read an expression and interpret it as a number, read a destination line number, etc) and different keywords use them in different ways.

It's pretty simple, really. Way easier than writing a full LALR parser.

Woz is, for me, the ISO standard geek, the distillation of all that I aspire to. Somewhere in Paris is a vault, and in that vault is a platinum-iridium Steve Wozniak, against which all of us are judged and found wanting.

The primary reason I won't work for Google is because I'm nowhere near smart enough. But I like to tell myself that the ethical shortcuts they've taken in pursuit of the almighty dollar are a good secondary reason. It's just that I don't need a secondary reason, so yay, consequence-free ethics!

Sometimes, you gotta go for the Godwin. Victim blaming like the OP just indulged in, that was one of those times.

Dude. Victim blaming. Not cool. Seriously not cool. As in, giving-a-ninety-year-old-Jew-a-shower-head-and-a-gas-bottle not cool.

I'm sure there's an Autism spectrum upon which Asperger's syndrome lies, and I'm sure that psychology (as distinct from psychiatry) is a scientific discipline, so logic dictates that the weak link is your statement that "it was voted out of existence".

I'm not aware of drinking being a huge problem in Australia either, but that may be the particular places I happen to have worked. Certainly "goin' out 'n gettin' pissed" is an important part of weekly (even daily) social interactions for a lot of Aussies, though we don't have the wowser/puritan history to muddy the waters like the US does.

The Rule of Steves says that, in any workplace, the number of female programmers will never exceed the number of programmers named Steve. I worked one place where that wasn't true, but only because it was overrun with Johns rather than Steves.

Definition of unintended consequences: I don't instantly recognise the names Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or whoever the other guy is -- I have to look them up, and to be honest I keep mixing up Larry Page and Larry Wall. But I know Vic Gundotra, because he's the wanker who pushed the real names policy and made Google+ the laughing stock among my various communities. "I am a Google employee who likes donuts", indeed!

That comment was such an epic burn, it contributed to global warming!

... Which is why, I suspect, the commenter you replied to won't believe it either. Sigh.

I was on Kubuntu when it shifted from 3.5 to 4.0. Gods, what a mess that was! I presume it's had time to settle down now; is it back to being as reliable as 3.5 was? Or do people with long memories still have to grit their teeth at all the missing features?

Well, that was fun. The upgrade crashed halfway through. I rebooted in recovery mode, finished the upgrade using the dpkg repair option, and then restarted a few times and found that it still wasn't working. Looked like a video problem, so I checked /etc/X11 and found the xorg.conf files had been backed up and not replaced. A comment in the last one inspired me to run nvidia-xconfig and it worked fine. Pretty typical when you use Nvidia drivers, and still a lot less painful than upgrading Windows XP to 7.

She's a war criminal. That's enough reason to put up with the inconvenience of switching to a different cloud storage solution, I think.

There's a PDF there of Programming The PET/CBM, by Raeto West. I loved that book - read it from cover to cover, drained it of all its knowledge. I can still tell you random things about the CBM-8032's memory map and ROM code, twenty five years after the last time I touched one.

I looked up Ray West recently, wondering if he's still alive. Turned out he was until recently, but he'd turned into a mad, racist, tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpot, paranoid about Jewish conspiracies and government hoaxes. Fluoride, fake moon landings, the whole nine yards. So sad. That guy was my hero, and he just went off the rails and, as far as I could ever find, completely disappeared.

ETA: nope, he's still around, and still antisemitic. Ah well.

Read a statistic once that the language with the most lines of code written in it was probably Excel's version(s) of BASIC. Not sure when that was or how reliable.

Yeah, w3schools is not a good example. Stack Exchange, however...

One out of ten for me - I loathe Comic Sans, but item 1-9 don't fit me at all.

Every complaint about "political correctness gone mad" (that's the Daily Mail catchphrase you're paraphrasing here) really boils down to this:

I enjoy acting like a prick. Somebody with more power than me is forcing me to stop acting like a prick. I don't like it.

Interesting - I think your prejudices are out of date. Ubuntu has been an out-of-the-box thing for me for the last two or three years, on old and new hardware, laptop and desktop. Of course I avoid Acer on principle, preferring to stick with Toshiba wherever possible, and I admit I'm not thrilled with its battery sensor support, but the old problems with dual monitors, suspend/resume, sound cards, video cards etc are a shadow of what they used to be.

Meanwhile, my own experience with the Red Hat family is with CentOS, which is either kept artificially out of date for security reasons ("bleeding edge" is well-named, generally) or else I only ever saw poorly-configured old versions. So I don't know enough to compare it, but I'm comfortable with the Debian family so I'm sticking with Ubuntu.

Hearts and minds. It's a free product and installed and activated (and pushed!) by default in Win8, as far as I can see, so you can't really measure success, but I would estimate one in three non-tech-savvy people I talk to understand what Dropbox is, and maybe one in fifty understand what SkyDrive is. So I'd call it a failure without too much hesitation.

Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the product ready to go. Certainly they didn't push it as hard as Dropbox did; I didn't notice it existed until I started seeing it activated by default in Win8.

That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me personally is that it gives me one less thing to go in and switch off when I install a new Ubuntu system, but I'm glad they've got a pragmatic attitude toward the possibility of spreading themselves too thin.