ghewgill

The following lines say "any of", not "all of". Lack of one particular feeling does not imply lack of consciousness. Lack of all of them probably would.

It's a bit of a challenge to get suitable trees to grow in the central California desert.

Yes, let's look beyond centralized services for source control (also known as "developer social media"). For example, Forgejo is working on federation (https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...) which makes the choice of where to host your code less relevant, because anybody on the federated network will be able to interact with any other repository no matter where it is hosted.

The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.

Midnight at the bottom! I really like this one: https://sunclock.net

In the "number field" clock, the hours are always along the top row only. 12:10 and 10:12 look different.

HP calculators were an important part of my formative years. I have a 12C, 15C, and 16C (all original models). I also have an HP-35 (red LED digits) within reach right now. That was the calculator I used for high school exams, because we weren't allowed "programmable" calculators so I had to go a bit retro for the time.

The 16C was an interesting model. It had a lot of potential capability with the different word sizes and bitwise operations, but I think it fell short in practice because the operations it could do just weren't that useful.

My favourite model is the 15C, it got me through four years of math, physics, and computer science university classes. The integration and matrix functions were super useful because it was hard to do some of that stuff in your head.

Maybe I should have complained more loudly about them using the same name as that thing I wrote that I called Copilot. https://hewgill.com/pilot/copilot/index-old.html

I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".

The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.

Electricity costs money too? I don't know how the cost of power compared to the cost of a candle in the beginning of the 20th century though.

MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.

Sheesh, trigger warning please! I remember the how.

I've done AoC on what I call "hard mode", where I do the solutions in a language I designed and implemented myself. It's not because the language is particularly suited to AoC in any particular way, but it gives me confidence that my language can be used to solve real problems.

Neon Language: https://neon-lang.dev/ Some previous AoC solutions: https://github.com/ghewgill/adventofcode

The walrus operator allows you to use `elif` there to avoid cascading indentation.

    if m := re.match(pattern1, line):
        do_stuff(m.group(1))
    elif m := re.match(pattern2, line):
        do_other_stuff(m.group(2))
    elif m := re.match(pattern3, line):
        do_things(m.groups())
    else:
        ...

Raymond Chen happens to have worked for Microsoft for a long time, but he is an institution unto himself.

If text files are your world, then http://todotxt.org/ might be for you. I'm currently using "pter".

The colons there don't represent C++. That's just a way of referring to a windows API function that exists in a specific DLL (in this case "user32"). Because the functions used here do not exist in older versions of Windows, the linked code dynamically loads user32.dll and tries to get the address of those functions so they can be called. That's why you need to know which Windows DLL they exist in.

I think the hard limit of 100 todos is the best feature of this. Why don't other todo apps have this feature?

SLMR and OLX were by the same author, but OLX was a complete rewrite and didn't look anything like SLMR.

OLX (and SLMR) author here. It gives me warm fuzzies to hear about your positive experiences with OLX, after all these years. To this day I maintain that Turbo Vision was peak computer UI, it's been downhill since. :)

You're thinking of the Thawte Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte which was run by Mark Shuttleworth (now of Canonical). The certificates were used for email, not for SSL. I lost track of what happened to it after CACert took over.

Increase the iterations on the sidebar. You will then see more detail until you zoom in even further.

Do you believe that the Library of Congress is immune from the current administration's information purge?

> Mission owners and operators often lack adequate capabilities for software understanding because technology manufacturers build software that greatly outstrips the ability to understand it.

I wonder if this is because software engineers build things that are too complicated for the problem domain, or whether it is because the problem space where the software sits is inherently complex.

This report addresses the unusual modes of operation, specifically mentioning "normal, abnormal, and hostile". So much of software has unpredictable operation in the face of hostile attacks (particularly if the attacker gets "past the firewall", either a network one or a metaphorical software interface boundary).

That also seems like a reasonable explanation. I never got any of the background story from our guides.

There's a pass on the Inca Trail in Peru called "Dead Woman's Pass" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warmi_Wa%C3%B1usqa). I have to assume this is a similar warning.

Yes. This warning in the documentation (and the same warning for "git restore") is doing nothing to help the situation. I've had to put a stake in the ground on this SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/215731/893

I worked with John for a few years in the 1990s. This was during the heyday of BBSes, when he joined our small team at Mustang Software after Mustang bought Qmodem. John moved to Bakersfield California (with his family, including OP!) to be with us. John left a few years later due to I think business differences with management.

John was personable and full of joy. He always loved a good joke. I remember the parties (not wild, we were pretty tame back then) we would have around the pool at his place. He was generous with his time.

The story of Qmodem itself was a bit different. Qmodem for DOS was a one-man shareware business and was John's pride and joy. It was clear that he poured everything into that program. It was finely tuned and just worked. Times were changing though, and people were calling for a Windows version. Unfortunately, John was not interested in learning Windows programming, so Scott Hunter (now at Microsoft), Dan Horn, and I built Qmodem for Windows. It was good, but it really never had the same level of polish that John's work did. It was "Qmodem" in name only.

After John left Mustang he also left Bakersfield and I lost touch with him. I'm sure he continued to make the people around him smile. Thank you for your time and contributions, John.

I agree that the title is ambiguous - it's what piqued my interest to read the article in the first place. Personally I lean toward fewer comments overall - perhaps to a fault - but explanatory comments as shown in the article are absolutely valuable. It's a good reminder to explain the whys and the why nots.

This especially applies to your own code that you write and still have to maintain 5, 10, 15 years later. Just the other day I was reviewing a coworker's new code and thought "why choose to do it this way?" when the reason was 10 lines up where I did it the same way, 8 years ago. She was following the cardinal rule of maintenance - make the code look like the existing code.

> I've been running IRC markov chain bots for ~20 years.

You are my hero. Mine have never lasted that long. One fun thing I did once was scrape user's livejournals and generate random text from them (https://hewgill.com/journal/entries/68-new-lj-toy.html).