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karlmdavis

878 karma · joined February 11, 2011

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karlmdavis··on U.S. Homeland Security employees locked out of computer networks
> The feds forbid LE.

Nope! Very much allowed -- at least for almost all applications.

Here's just one example from a quick Google search that turned up lots of others: https://www.digitalgov.gov/2016/09/07/lets-encrypt-those-cna...

karlmdavis··on Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows
I used to have this problem a TON, and it drove me absolutely batty.

One thing I've found that's drastically cut down on the frequency (possibly eliminated it? not sure) is this: Always wait ten seconds between display state changes. Waking the computer up from sleep? Wait ten seconds before you dock it or connect an external monitor. Undocking it? Wait ten seconds before putting it to sleep.

Also: never make more than one state change at a time. For example, don't put the computer to sleep while docked, then undock it. Undock it first, wait ten seconds, then put it to sleep.

YMMV, but like I said: I think this has eliminated this problem for me. I've been using this process for some months now, and I'm doing much better at the uptime game (28 days since my last restart, right now).

karlmdavis··on Federal judge stays deportations of travelers in Trump immigration order
Of course that's okay with most folks. Reality is messy, and large swaths of it are unamenable to formalization in laws; human discretion will always be required.

Now, we can argue about where the balance is best struck, whether it's better to have the president making decisions vs. individual government workers, etc. Those discussions are fine. But we nerds have to stop pretending that a nation's laws are or could be or even should be as black and white and bug free (hah!) as most computer code.

karlmdavis··on Show HN: Whoishiring.io – all tech jobs mapped out
It would also be nice to break down remote by allowed timezones, which many job postings specify.
karlmdavis··on Major Service Outage at GitHub
The coding equivalent of accident rubbernecking.
karlmdavis··on Dgsh – Directed graph shell
This is perhaps a bit off-topic, but what I really wish more data processing/ETL tools supported is the concept of transactional units. Too many of them seem to start with the worldview that "we need to shove in as many of the separate bits as we possibly can."

What's often needed for robust systems, instead, is solid support for error handling such that "if this bit doesn't make it in, then neither does that bit." Data is always messy and dirty, and too many ETL systems don't seem architected to cope with that reality.

Of course, maybe I just haven't found the right tools. Anyone know of tools that handle this particularly well?

karlmdavis··on My Watch Runs GNU/Linux
Probably don't want the default refresh of 2 seconds. And the title/header is probably redundant, as well. Maybe this, instead?

$ watch --interval 0.1 --no-title date

;)

karlmdavis··on Blue Ocean
FWIW, if you fight through the "undocumented features," Jenkins actually ends up being one of the best tools out there to manage via Ansible or whatnot. The Groovy/Java API for Jenkins is incredibly powerful, and by adding Groovy scripts to the /var/lib/jenkins/init.groovy.d/ directory, you can configure just about anything.

Maybe this will be helpful? Here's the Ansible config I've built for a Jenkins deployment I manage: https://github.com/HHSIDEAlab/hhsdevcloud-ansible/tree/maste.... Most of the "meat" is in the Groovy scripts in the templates/ directory there.

karlmdavis··on Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective
Because of the power differential? In the same way that it's different for a short man dealing with harassment from a tall man, or an average man dealing with harassment from a gymbro.
karlmdavis··on Google joins .NET Foundation as Samsung brings .NET support to Tizen
Why on earth would Google care enough right now about MS' phone efforts for that to be something they're actively seeking?

I think it's far more likely that any movement towards C# on Android would be motivated by: 1) perhaps enough devs are asking for it, and 2) it would give them extra leverage in negotiations with Oracle about Java.

karlmdavis··on Stealth Boat the U.S. Government Won't Buy or Let Be Sold Abroad
Or if, 4, you live/operate in the US, and are thus bound by their laws.
karlmdavis··on Why and how you ought to keep multibyte character support simple [pdf]
Ding ding! Hard things are hard.

It seems... at least a bit arrogant for a developer that doesn't write any of the languages that rely on these features to claim that they're insane and excessive.

karlmdavis··on OS X-KVM: Running Mac OS X El Capitan on KVM and QEMU
I do. I mean... seems pretty hypocritical for a coder who's made most of their income from software NOT to.
karlmdavis··on Is your SSH password revealed when you attempt to connect to the wrong server?
Here's half an answer: Kerberos.

Which SSH does support, btw.

karlmdavis··on The People’s Code
Also, if you're interested in issues like that, you'd probably really enjoy joining the http://codefordc.org/ community! I've only attended one Meetup, but it was the most ridiculously welcoming and well-run tech meetup I've ever attended!
karlmdavis··on Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
Wow, uh... I'm not in enterprise software right now, but if I were, I'd be asking you where I could send a check. This is fantastic advice. Thanks for sharing it!
karlmdavis··on Why the Cure for a Sluggish Economy Is Actually Longer Vacations
What evidence do you have that productivity is elastic in that way? I'm particularly curious how "far out" the effect you're describing goes: is it still elastic enough to cover an extra 3 weeks of vacation per year?
karlmdavis··on Ethics for Freelance Programmers
On Windows, Manic Time does a beautiful job of this active window tracking. I haven't found anything that does it for Linux, though.
karlmdavis··on Finish your stuff
There's a set of tradeoffs here. 1) You really, really need feedback from your users as early as possible, to help keep you on-track. 2) Shipping something truly half-baked can kill your chances with most of those users.

The trick is in threading the needle on this one. In my experience "shipping" doesn't need to be a binary operation. Seek out your early adopters as soon as possible, get your product in front of them, and take their (hopefully) constructively blunt feedback to heart. Ask them what's needed to make it truly usable for the rest of your users.

karlmdavis··on Ask HN: Why use Docker and what are the business cases for using it?
Is that really where we're at? That an "average Java developer" doesn't understand the classpath or environment?

I've certainly worked with a lot of folks who didn't, but I guess I've just always hoped that experience was unique to me.

karlmdavis··on Yahoo and Oracle strike deal affecting JRE installation
The only positive here is that Yahoo! is better than Ask, and maybe--just maybe--it'll just be a change to the default search provider, rather than the installation of yet another lousy toolbar (YALT).
karlmdavis··on Technical debt and tacking into the wind
I was 50/50 on whether or not he was just trying to defend poor decision-making with this post, up until this line:

> It’s worth repeating that what’s generally overlooked is that each decision was made by the team and a variety of alternatives were considered. Moving forward with Wasabi .NET was only done after considering a lot of alternatives, including porting to python.

That right there is the crucial point for me. I think the real danger (and concern) with these types of technical debt situations is that they're often forced on engineering by upline management (i.e. non-coders). But if the folks who will have to maintain any mess they create are the ones making these decisions, the decisions are likely the correct ones-- at least at that time.

karlmdavis··on Why Don't Software Developers Use Static Analysis Tools to Find Bugs?
I use SonarQube myself and have generally found its rules to make sense after a quick Google, at most.

Aside from its code formatting rules, which are just silly. They're easy enough to modify or turn off, though, so there's that.

karlmdavis··on Measuring Software Reuse and Deleting Code (2014)
While I intuitively agree with the conclusion there, this analysis definitely doesn't prove it...

Of course more time was spent editing files with more lines of code. In fact, if your entire application was all contained in one file, I am willing to predict that you'd (shockingly) find that all of your time was spent editing that very same file!

karlmdavis··on Lawyers threaten researcher over key-cloning bug in high-security lock
I don't know this for sure, but I seem to recall that lawyer's professional rules of conduct require them to not leave clients in the lurch, without providing them ample warning to find new counsel.

I believe this is what the GP poster is mentioning when he says that there often isn't "sufficient time to withdraw."

karlmdavis··on IBM Is Going Agile
As someone who regularly uses Git (and prefers it), RTC really isn't all that bad. I'd even go so far as to recommend it for some teams/companies.
karlmdavis··on Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
For me, a combination of these three things has proved to be successful:

1) Every day. I've seen this with working out, side projects, or whatever... I can't stick with commitments if I try for an "every other day" or "only weekdays" strategy. Has to be every day. [1]

2) Track it in a visible fashion. GitHub's contribution calendar is fantastic for this. I've got a text file named 'work-log.md' in my side project's folder, and I update and commit that file whenever I spend time on my side project-- even if all that I did that day was research, rather than coding. My current high score/longest streak is 59 days in a row, and wanting to push that higher is incredibly motivating. With workouts, some sort of fitness tracker serves the same purpose.

3) I don't beat myself up too long or hard about screwing up. There are some folks whose "longest streak" on GitHub is 365 days or more. Good for them! I'm always sad when I realize I've missed a day, and I often take a break for a week or two once that happens, but I've never even thought about just quitting. Just motivates me to try and do better next time.

[1] One exception to this was biking to work: I never really biked on the weekends, but it didn't prove to be a problem. Probably because commuting by bike was so hard to forget about.

karlmdavis··on TypeScript 1.4 sneak peek: union types, type guards, and more
Yeah, I noticed the interface types, which seem like a much better/safer design choice. (Again, though, it's entirely possible this is just my strong-typing prejudices coming out.)
karlmdavis··on TypeScript 1.4 sneak peek: union types, type guards, and more
Perhaps I'm poisoned by my love of strong static types, but... what would you ever use union types like that for? I'm having trouble imagining scenarios where a "list that might have strings or integers" is a good idea. (I know that's likely just a silly example, but I'm not able to think of any non-silly ones right now, either.)
karlmdavis··on Sysmon – Log system activity to the Windows event log
I can understand why they wouldn't have wanted to create an XSD covering all of the possible keys.
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