malbs

When he adds metaclasses and Virtual Class Functions to C#, I'll say his migration of Delphi features is finally complete.

Mate I've got a project whose first lines of code were struck back in the 80s in Turbo pascal. Your "continuously deprecated" argument doesn't hold a lot of water from where I sit... In terms of actual language features/changes that have caused deprecated status, those are very few and far between. Maybe some VCL database controls, for sure it would have sucked to have built stuff relying on interbase, but that is not a language/compiler feature, that was CodeGear EOL that particular project (I had to manage the exit strategy on one of our projects where it relied on that crapware)

Even library developers are pretty good at pumping out versions of their libs that have support for even Delphi 5. I know of at least 2 people who are still doing windows dev on Delphi 5 or maybe 7, I can't recall.. the very definition of "from my cold dead fingers".

Suffice to say if you were one of those real hold-outs, not updating to the latest.. you wouldn't have generics, dynamic arrays, lambdas/anonymous functions, and you would probably struggle to grab much code written in the last decade and compile it straight up.. but that would probably be the case for a number of languages that have had core features added to them over time.

The fact that the system is proprietary certainly is an issue, but every install always ships with all the source code of the RTL, VCL, and clear instructions on how to compile it with a "you're on your own now" sense of adventure.

The one negative I've found with Lazarus... And this is purely if you were someone coming from a Delphi background, or were planning on Lazarus being your "get out of jail free" card if [Embarcadero/(whoever owns it now)] decides to stop updating Delphi (and even then you could probably manage it's lack of updates for years, hell I stayed on Delphi 2007 for a good 8 or 9 years after XE, XE1, XE2 et al had been out).. Anyways, back to my point, the one major negative I've found with Lazarus is you simply can not take Delphi code, and compile it straight in Lazarus... There are many many many very subtle differences. Totally fine and understandable, but if you were planning on taking the attitude of "Stuff Delphi, lets take our 400k line project and move to Lazarus", you are going to have a bad time.

Having said that I've done a couple of my own projects at home in Lazarus. It's fine, it feels dated, going back to the original Delphi / VB style of RAD tool with form designer/code editor as floating windows etc. The intellisense leaves something to be desired, but I can't be too critical because it's not like I'm putting my hand up to contribute to the project. If you look at what you get for what you pay for, it's quite literally amazing.

Fidonet as the original electronic mail package, Door Games (BRE, cross-bbs wars, wow), ANSI Art, damn, it was really fun. I loved my time dialing into the local BBS's.

It was interesting watching some of the larger ones in my area turn into the most successful ISPs at the time (and get consumed later by the much larger national ones).

It inspired me to run my own, and while I only had the one line, and a very simple set of RemoteAccess screens, the experience taught me a hell of a lot about computers in general.

Here's my 2 cents.

Anyone who is telling you they have cracked the parimutuel pools, and "here's how to do it", is trying to sell you something else. Anyone who has actually cracked the parimutuel pools knows how they work, and that if you share your "tips", or selections, you only serve to diminish your own returns, so you are not going to do it.

hah, how funny I almost copied your post word for word ;)

What are you up to now Shaun? Are you still in Hobart?

Betfair API is 100% free for customers with a lot of code examples in various languages.

Tabcorps TABStudio - http://studio.tab.com.au/ (You need to register as a tabcorp customer but it's "free"). Its basically a JSON REST API

NZ TAB have their batch mode, at filebet.tab.co.nz, which is nothing more than a file upload system.

The ATG, and the other Scandinavian totes provide coupon upload systems (where you generate a coupon file with your selections in it, using third party software), but if you win they will end up banning you.

Most providers keep their APIs hidden or require signing NDAs or other types of contracts, I'm referring to companies like Amtote, Churchill Downs, PMU, BetFred, PGI, LeTurf etc

Usually they're quite surprised when you contact them about doing "integration work", a lot of the APIs are designed for retailer shops to integrate with. For example, I've done some integration work with BetFred, where my client never wants to cancel a bet (placed at the last possible moment), however in order to pass their integration tests, I have to fully support cancelling a wager, just like any retail shop would.

On a side note, I have used (at least one of) the APIs shaunray was referring to that he had worked on.

Here's my two cents

I haven't so much fallen out of love with coding, but fallen out of love of shiney new things. The last truly "new" thing I jumped on was C#. At the time C# was first released, I was also playing around with Smalltalk, and that actually destroyed me. I couldn't understand why people were excited about all these features in C# as they weren't new.

I became seriously disinterested in new tech, web 2,0, full stack bullshit.

Now I work in Delphi, and I actually love it. All the other guys in my team hate Delphi and would rather be working in whatever is the latest and greatest.

The problem with that is that everything just gets reinvented, and stuff that was old is new again, and the cycle repeats.

That's why I have fallen out of love - I've become a bitter old coder who just uses (and does) whatever requires the most minimal amount of work

so I just completed 4 months of fasting (I had a friendly wager going, where I had to lose 15kg in 16 weeks, or pay $2000)

I did it via intermittent fasting (no breakfast, or lunch, black coffee/water only, and a normal dinner)

Chart: https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi

Basic routine was this

Monday, fast, overhead press at gym Tuesday, normal eating, deadlifts Wednesday, fast, rowing/kettlebells Thursday, normal eating, bench press Friday, normal eating, squats Saturday, fast, cardio/hiit Sunday, normal eating

came in under the target (needed 15kg, ended up losing 18kg) and won myself $2000 because the guy I had the wager with didn't hit his target.

Fasting really works, it doesn't cost you anything, and you save money.

I guess you could argue on the ethics due to the fact that these "smart" players are never contributing to the jackpot, and only playing when the payout is higher than the probability (an over), but you need the mugs in order to fill the pool.

If the world was filled with smart gamblers, no one would bet because nothing would be an overlay.

Its like when I see a horse racing win pool go up from $0, to $2. Someone has had a bet. Whats the most they could possibly gain by that bet (given the current pool)? Its about $1.70, so why bet in the first place? I don't know. Maybe they liked the colour of the horse.

You can do better if you cut a deal with the people you are buying the tickets through to split the commission, it can be an extra few % on your turnover.

As alluded to early in the article, he was selling 300k in tickets per year, making 20k profit, which is around 6% commission or so.

So when you plan on buying a lot of tickets, choose one agent, and tell them their total paid commission is about to get a significant boost because of you, and you should split it.

If you find a lottery that looks to be an over that is.

I wish I'd taken my step-dad up on his offer and done an chippy apprenticeship when I was 17.

Instead I flailed around, did some c programming, some web development, never went to uni. I even managed to get myself that first job as a software dev, slowly trading upwards, but it always worked against me that I was a high school drop out and had no degree.

Later in life, I looked upon the lack of degree as an asset, I worked harder than the guys/girls who did have a comp/sci degree, because I felt I had to prove myself constantly, to out-do those with a degree.

But I always look back and think, man, I wish I'd just done a carpentry apprenticeship. It's not like the systems change underneath you ever few years, that you have to learn a new "circular-saw" to help you cut timber because everyone is using it, even though the job you're working on, you could get away with a regular hand-saw. The analogy is shit, but you get what I mean.

Any friends/family who ever say "I'm thinking of being a plumber/sparky/chippy" I wholly encourage them.

I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious

Ahh FuckedCompany.com

I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?"

"Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?"

"Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"

"Oh great"

So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11.

Should have paid more attention to that damned website.

a recommendation for mailinabox, I've been using it for about 6 months, very nice

You're assuming they used a consultant. I doubt it.

I bought Doom before I owned a PC. I bought the game, and sat it on my bedside while I saved up the money to buy a PC to play the game. I would go to the retail stores and install Doom on the demo PCs there just so I could play it.

Finally I had enough money for a PC to play Doom, my brother and I played Doom for a couple of years on our home lan. I played dialup doom with friends. I played Doom with the mouse and keyboard because it was the only easy way to strafe kill someone "easily". and then Quake came out.... I went to a friends place and they were playing DM. I hadn't even heard of Quake. I was like "What is this game" "Oh its Quake, by those guys who made Doom". I had to get it. I had a 486. Wasn't ever going to fly. It ran like shit. You couldn't run out and buy a AMD cpu to play it on either because of the FPU. You had to have an Intel. So I bought a second hand Pentium 60, and off I went! I still remember the day I got the Pentium 60 and 8mb of ram and now I could also run Windows 95 too.

Quake was a genre changing game, probably one of the most influential games ever. id loved to make modifiable games, and Doom had quite a solid mod community, but Quake was really the Internet's child. The Quake servers that came online initially were dark foreboding places for anyone not on a fixed line connection. You'd be dead before you knew what happened, so then Carmack created QuakeWorld, with the predictive movement, and suddenly online gaming FPS on a modem was a whole new experience.

So many game sites spawned from the advent of Quake that are still around today. Entire media companies popped up around it.

People have mentioned in other threads why didn't more people use SVGA mode. The answer is because no computer could run it at an acceptable speed. What came of that? GLQuake. Then people were buying shitty (not at the time!) Voodoo 3dfx cards to play GLQuake, with the broken GL implementation Glide, and thus the video card arms race was born.

I got my first real job because of my affiliations with the Quake community. My first true love (who I met through Quake), "Internet friends" that I made playing QuakeWorld that I am still friends with today.

I don't believe any other game has had anywhere near as much influence on my life, or gaming in general.

I reckon you're talking about QuakeWorld. Because Quake on a 200+ ping was ice-skate-mode.

We've had issues with the latest versions of kaspersky. A burst of network activity is almost guaranteed to crash a machine.

It took us a while to isolate Kaspersky 10, and it's not even any particular component inside of Kaspersky, but only when all features are enabled. We tried different permutations of features to try and isolate the cause of our crashes, but as soon as you have any one feature disabled in, the crashes stop, Very frustrating because ultimately our clients laid the blame at my feet (new software feature, new release, blah blah blah), and not exactly much you can do in the way of hardening against this particular crash, the app generates a burst of network data, and boom, blue screen/instant reboot.

I can't actually find the link, but he was some special panelist on a stream last year.. A lot of people were asking who the hell he was, and he was claiming at the time to be a researcher with a heavy involvement with bitcoin, and at the same time either the Australian Federal Police, or Australian Tax Office were raiding his properties looking for damning evidence...

He had taken federal funds for research purposes and miss-appropriated them.

I can't find the original articles, sorry... Here's some links though

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-09/bitcoin-suspected-foun...

http://www.coindesk.com/documents-offer-clues-to-alleged-bit...

https://delimiter.com.au/2015/12/15/lawyer-says-craig-wright...

Didn't they debunk this guy as a hack? /r/bitcoin pretty much destroyed him when he popped up last time

No, Australia. Once you've hired someone, there's a process you need to go through in order to get rid of them - multiple warnings for breaking company policy, mediation, it depends on what the problems are. If they know their rights, and play by the rules, it's basically not possible.

Worse, if you have someone who just doesn't play well with others, there are no grounds for dismissal. You end up having to cook up some sort of severance package for genuinely toxic staff, and hope they hate the environment as much as others hate them.

"Please take this package. In the long run it will be better for everyone" and hope they see the light and walk.

Just went through this process from the POV of employer.

The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great, that it's often better to not choose anyone. If there is any doubt what-so-ever, it's better to not make a a hire, it can be too damaging to a team, manager, company.

I've tried so many different "coding interview" scenarios. But I found the best one was a real task that a real staff member would be expected to do, extract it out into its own example, and before I talk to someone, they present their solution to the task, and the only thing we talk about, is their solution. If they can dissect and discuss their solution eloquently, and reason about trade-offs, short-cuts, talk about what they may have done better....

Of course, it can also be a simple case of, "is this person an asshole? are they going to rub my team up the wrong way? yes? fuck them."

Thanks for the invite

As far as I understand, their infrastructure is from the home/street to the exchanges. Major backhaul links are still done via individual ISPs, the net result of which is vastly differing NBN performance between providers.

I can't edit my original post now, but if anyone is interested in further reading on the power situation here:-

http://www.wattclarity.com.au/2016/03/some-thoughts-on-the-s...

Solar isn't too bad. As soon as I can buy a couple of Tesla batteries (or equivalent) I'll probably look at getting solar... In the winter the days are short (but nothing like Scandinavian countries), and can go multiple days without seeing the sun, so definitely want a good set of batteries

Here in Tasmania we're not at the shut down stage yet, but it's something no one wants to talk about. They're not asking residents to shutdown yet, but if things continue the way they are, who knows. The major companies/power users are currently being rationed (Aluminium smelters, paper mills etc)

The state relies on hydro-electric power, and last year sold off a lot of its "excess" power to Victoria via the Basslink cable at a huge profit.

However we're suffering a fairly bad drought, and the dams are at historically low levels. Worse still, the Basslink cable (which allows the state to both export and import electricity) failed on December 20th 2015, and the repair ship has been unable as yet to actually locate the fault in the cable (it's a 270km long under-sea cable)

Apparently the repair ship costs are running @ $100,000 per day, and it could take months.

On Friday they severed the cable in order to begin testing to locate the fault, and half of Tasmania's internet went down. I was unlucky enough to be with one of the ISPs who didn't provision enough backhaul connectivity on the other network cables, so my 100mbit fibre internet now looks something like a 1998 dialup connection

malby@peep:~$ wget ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/test10MB.dat

--2016-03-14 16:07:41-- ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/test10MB.dat => `test10MB.dat'

Resolving ftp.iinet.net.au (ftp.iinet.net.au)... 203.0.178.32

Connecting to ftp.iinet.net.au (ftp.iinet.net.au)|203.0.178.32|:21... connected. Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!

==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.

==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.

==> SIZE test10MB.dat ... 10000000

==> PASV ... done. ==> RETR test10MB.dat ... done.

Length: 10000000 (9.5M) (unauthoritative)

100%[===============================================================================>] 10,000,000 6.82K/s in 43m 41s

2016-03-14 16:51:24 (3.73 KB/s) - `test10MB.dat' saved [10000000]

I mean, I feel bad complaining about my internet speeds, because in 6 months times if there hasn't been any rain.. well, it's going to get a lot more serious.

The only entity that knows what you are downloading is the usenet provider you are paying to access usenet in the first place.

SABnzbd has been a must-have piece of software for me for years. Thank you team!

If people are interested in indexers, https://www.oznzb.com seems to be ok for finding a few files. Personally I use DOGnzb, but I don't believe it is public. (Sorry I don't have any invites I can hand out either, I checked)

Torrents?

SABnzbd + DOGnzb + tweaknews :)