mkovach

Ahh, Lovely Ada. When I was a wee lad, toiling as an Email consultant, having my mind slowly destroyed by Sendmail configurations, the constant fear induced by anything related to Microsoft and Email, and, well, let's not mention Lotus Notes, some wounds never heal, I had the grand idea of writing a secure collection of Email tools.

This included SMTP, IMAP, POP3 daemons, and various other tools. I was going to write them all in Ada. I had a basic SMTP daemon that would accept mail and deliver it. But then, one of the various Outlook worms generated a ton of revenue at the expense of sleep, hygiene, and dignity, and I decided to get out of the Email business ASAP.

Still wish I would have kept working with Ada. I really liked it, and one could write tight code with it.

  "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program" 

Ah, the joys of fun compiler messages. I miss those days. I remember getting one from a vendor compiler that was:

  "No! But they'll only let me warn you. Danger Will Robinson! Danger!"

and:

  "Really! If you are fussing around with void *, just go home or at least back to your editor!"

I think the IT manager kept that as a vendor just because of the message (the SDK was meh, but also fun!).

I'll recommend a video series on it also, for the same reason. While I enjoy the content, the presentation just didn't click.

Une Histoire Populaire du Baseball

https://blacklephant.com/ouvrage/une-histoire-populaire-du-b...

Yes, a book about baseball written by a Frenchman. Interesting that did focus on the "big names" (Ruth, Gehrig, Mayes, etc.) but instead focused on Edith Houghton, Victor Starffin, Moses Walker, Bonnie Baker, Bill Veeck, Effa Manley, Amanda Clement, AG Spalding, Bill Lee, and Juile Croteua.

Yes, he talks about other famous players, but it certainly is a different perspective. As an amateur baseball historian, it was well written and different from what I'm use to reading.

If you can overcome the small problem of it being written in French, and you like baseball, I highly recommend it.

As, I said, things remain that same.

The cover-up is always a bigger story. Ask Nixon :)

Seems to me this might be plain old intimidation. The folks involved, which includes the Police Chef, see that somebody is leaking information to the press and a trying very hard to find they leak(s). Since they can't figure out who, and the press isn't publishing anything they are cranking up the heat.

In both cases he says that they are investigating allegations. In fact, at one point it is said, they turned over information to the police because they thought it might be related to a civil matter (somebody's divorce). They don't feel they have enough information to make the allegations public.

Something never change but the semantics, police are trying to find the leak, IMHO.

I still get a bit impressed with myself when I build a new Cigar Box guitar. Build something that can actually make music, using nothing but, usually, spare parts and almost completely out of wood is pretty cool.

One of my neighbors recently had their move away to college and him and his wife were finally throwing out some of his old things. There was enough things to make them a nice three string using bits of an old desk and a metal arts and craft box.

Gave them them the completed guitar around Thanksgiving and they ended up giving it to their son, who had started playing guitar while at away at school, for a Christmas gift.

I like to think he'll continue to own, and use, those small bits of his childhood as he moves further into adulthood.

Swig was quite nice and I used it often when I was doing some larger TCL projects. Didn't take very long to easily integrate many of the C (or FORTRAN libs wrapped by C) into TCL (or specifically, TK).

Made putting serviceable graphical interfaces to some of the CLI apps we were using.

Drew has commented on the origins of fark.com. Basically, he was drunk and looking for a funny name. Fark.com come was available.

So, basically, a "here, hold my beer" domain name.

Actually, I have been doing this for some stuff now. I wrote my copy of tangle (based on noweb's notangle). I'm starting to write markdown files to that a literate programs for Dockerfile images (as well as the support scripts used in the docker images and support scripts to build/test/etc.).

Since all of this work is in a git repo, it is nice to pass around documents so folks understand the thinking behind things.

Also, (and the main reason I went towards it) is that when I pull what I need from the markdown files, I have steps built around to lint, test, and do additional checks to ensure the required naming, labeling, etc.

It has worked well and reduced many `silly' errors when other folks use the images.

Is it for everybody? Nope. But it works here.

I also did LP many years ago when I worked at a place that produces custom software for embedded systems. Providing them with a friggin' novel about the program was also fun. But, we never .. once .. were told we needed to provide more documentation.

LP has good points, but it isn't a one-size-fits-all.

When asked to send some coding samples, it is fun to have a PDF file that starts 'Chapter 3: And Now, Security! Encryption and Other Pain Points!'

The TI99/4A was awesome. My parents seen my interest in computing and got my the FORTH cartilage for it. It was a fun little machine.

I still haven't quite forgiven them for that.

DejaGnu has been around forever.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/dejagnu.git/tree/

I still use it for testing software. Add in expect and it is fairly simple to write tests against TCL applications (I do it all the time).

The gold old days. My first real corporate gig was programming (Fortran, DCL, and odd bits of Ada) AND operations on various VMS clusters. Fun times. I have occasionally created a Hobbyist cluster and played around with it just long enough to remember when went towards UNIX.

I have been at several gigs where somebody has said, "Oh yea, that connects to a VMS system for x,y,z," and I know enough to sound competent. Still kind fun to find it out in the wild from time-to-time.

But I'll have to give this a look see, there is still some fascinate technology at work there.

Oh good heavens. Arcnet! When I first learned about writing Linux device drivers, it was trying to get a decent driver for some Arcnet cards that the company I worked at as using in some client installations. Can't remember exactly why we never completed it (well, yea I do. Ethernet worked better, a lot better) but since we never "released the product" they never let us send in the driver we did write to the kernel mailing list. That was in the kernel 1.x days.

Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.

Always liked Rexx. Worked at a fairly big IBM shop (mainframes, AIX, desktop, etc) were all Big Blue. Although Rexx was a bit cranky on AIX, almost all system level scripts used (or called) Rexx. It wasn't a world buster, but then I did't have any reasonable complaints about it.

It worked, was fairly easy to learn and teach, and didn't it's job.

Same here!

When I started off in the UNIX world, the shop had a collection of AIX, SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX and Digital UNIX. the x-hack was standard form and I spent a few years fixing errors with the x-hack (or converting the scripts to Perl).

It is just second nature to use the x-hack in if's and case statements on this point. I have to try really hard to NOT use it. Of course, the folks with less gray in their hair and often confused by it, referring to it a "Olde Unix."

I have approved plenty of PRs with the comment, "Updating mek's Olde Unix syntax."

We'll agree to disagree then, but remember nothing is set in stone. That is an article from 1980.

I spent 10 years working at Radio Shack, and the TRS was typically referred to as 'trash' but more people I spoke with.

Of course then, plenty of people working for the company could have been opening trashing it in front of corporate.

Yep, TRS = Trash. It was a nickname. They are pretty good computers. I still use my TRS Model 102 (portable computer, includes basic and a few decent apps).

Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) make some decent computers. My first IBM compatible PC was a Tandy 1000. Used that through-out college.

Good stuff that got stuck with a bad nickname.

Trash 80s were a nickname based on the TRS (Tandy Radio Shack) name. Nothing bad about them. In fact, the TRS Model III - 102, that I still own is still used. (And has a basic written by Bill Gates).

They were great computers!

Oh by, Trash 80s! I learned FORTRAN programming on a collection of TRS-80 Model III/IV in high school. (Yes, for the programming class we were not allowed to use basic, so we used FORTRAN).

Seen my old computer/math teacher last summer, he now owns a brewery he bought in retirement, and we laughed about how things have changed in such a relative short period of time. He was excited, though, to find out that I did work as a FORTRAN programmer for a period of time after college. He is pretty sure I was the only of his former students that every wrote a line of FORTRAN after those classes.

I have some old images made from some of my old school floppies. I'll have to give this emulator a try, pop up to the brewery with a laptop, and let my old teacher look over my shoulder as I debug code, again.

Kermit could be pretty good. Used it for VMS stuff for quite a bit. Really lost track of it when I moved to mainly Unix setups.

I will always have a fondness for UUCP. I eventually moved to qmail (a bit hacked up to handle for some unusual requirements) for all the UUCP related stuff.

UUCP had it's issues, but it was (and still is) one of the best was to transfer stuff over really bad connections. We worked at a place where we had really remote locations and UUCP stuff worked without much work.

Plus, I learned a ton in writing something to do reports and monitoring of the UUCP connections. Fun times, but I am still scarred Sendmail. Some wounds are pretty deep.

Worked at a place with OpenVMS and a UUCP setup. Yep, I've used mail11. I've use to setup UUCP mailers. I've hand configured sendmail with fingertips scarred from thumbing through the bat book. I've worked with sendmail to route mail to Novell NetMail!

I use to be a Sendmail consultant.

I've seen things you people won't believe. Open SMTP relays with zero firewall protection. I've watched people use sendmail to get root without a password. I've seen volumes of email lost in time, like bits into /dev/null. Time to patch.

Ahh, FORTRAN. I have fun, memories of FORTRAN. Write out of college in the mid to late 90's I worked with the language quite a bit. I was working for a logistics company and we spent a lot of time calculating routes, costs (fuel, maintenance, etc.) and the like using FORTRAN. The move from F77 -> F90 -> F95 was rather pleasant.

When the web started to become popular and Microsoft started including IE on desktops, I ended up writing CGI scripts, in FORTRAN!, to model reports in HTML. We were moving from OpenVMS to Sun Solaris boxes, which allowed use to move way from writing text based reports that people viewed on a terminal to HTML pages that would easily allow CSV files to be downloaded. I was a mess for few months. I don't think I have ever fully recovered.

Yep, my first bit of web based programming was FORTRAN 95 and DCL. I had to cobble a cgi library together where I put in something that acted like, but wasn't exactly, authentication and security.

By the mid-2000s the system had been migrated to some monstrous application that was mostly Java, but there were still FORTRAN bits handling the math and numerical back end, but I had moved on by then.

I still have nightmares about the system, but writing the FORTRAN code was also easy. Using it in the right spot was always the hard part.

30 years ago. Man. I was working at a OpenVMS shop, cranking out DCL code and writing mainly in FORTRAN. Books and manuals littered my wee little cubicle. I had a vt220 and vt420 terminals because Reflections rarely worked correctly on my hardly used PC. I also had a terminal to a HP 3000 system,, running MPE, and had to do code review and testing on a app that was written in BASIC!

Version control was done using the features of the VMS filesystem. I believe that HP MPE had something like that also, but I may have blocked it out.

Around about late '93 early '94 they hauled the HP terminal away and slapped a SparcClassic (or IPX? IPC?) in it's place. I was tapped to be part of the team to start migrating what we could off the VMS system to run on Solaris. So, I had to learn this odd language called See, Sea, umm 'C'?

A whole need set of manuals. A month's salary on books. Then another few books on how to keep that damn Sparc running with any consistency.

Then had to setup CVS. Sure, why not run the CVS server on my workstation!

By the end of '95 I was working mainly on maintaining the Solaris (and soon HP/UX and AIX) boxes then programming.

I still miss writing code with EDT on VMS and hacking away on fun things with FORTRAN. You know, like actually writing CGIs in FORTRAN. But that is another story.

Well, if you says so! Gonna order those up, given the source of the recommendation :)

I love this bit of code. It saved my butt in '99 when I had to implement searches for potential "Y2K" coding issues. Some where, collecting dust in CVS repository, probably saved on tape is some storage bunker, is a modified version of this that searched millions of lines of code for various potential "double digit year" issues.

And this also taught me an elegant way to implement recursion in C, that I shamelessly used in interviews to look way smarter than I actually am.

Doc Searls and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Man, I have thought about both in quite a while.

I guess I'll have to find my dusty copy hidden in some forgotten corner.

I wonder what they mean by "notable". Notable folks from my town include announcers for major sports teams, a famous cartoonist, a former director of an international organization, and a Grammy winning musician (among others).

The map indicates the "notable" from my town is a playbook centerfold that married an football player and wrestled a few times, who I had to actually look up.

My thoughts exactly. I love using expect, but why would I write a C program when I quick and simple TCL script (expect is build with TCL and is threaded and easy to make thread-safe scripts).

There are also expect clones in Python and Perl (probably others, but I know and have used those both) if TCL is an issue for you.

This looks nice, but I don't see if as very useful.