mmccaff

American here, but I've always known these to be distinctly different. ANSI art uses the full 256 character set (and mostly the extended, block-like characters), and 16 colors, whereas ascii art doesn't have the extended characters and colors. There was a thriving ANSI art scene in the 90s in the era of BBSs.

If you have not seen it, the definitive ansi (and ascii) art archive, 16colors, is great https://16colo.rs/

Or try your hand with this online ansi art editor https://ansidraw.com/

same

This red "major outage" status has been reported on their dashboard since at least Dec 2, when an (unrelated to messenger) api bug was introduced that I've been waiting on a fix for.

It has been surprisingly slow to get a fix or an update.

Love it! Thanks for sharing.

I remember when split-screen chat started becoming popular in the BBS scene. Being able to type at the same time as the other person was groundbreaking! :) Prior to that, if you wanted to interrupt the other person or break in with a thought, you'd just hit enter a bunch of times or 'fjskdfklsdhfjsd' until you could take over the conversation. It was like if two people were chatting in a text editor.

I also remember versions of chat where each character would cycle through different sets of ansi colors.. harder to read and totally useless, but looked cool..

As someone else said, a blinking cursor would be nice. I got a little lost for the first few seconds without it.

Any comments on the tech that you used to build this?

"Clever" "marketing" language like this is not unique to Laravel, most frameworks use language like it for tag-lines on their homepage. Pyramid, a framework for Python, even goes with the same "artisan" language. They're just trying to be fun, inspiring, etc

From the home page of a few other frameworks:

Django: "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines."

Flask: "Web development, one drop at a time"

Express: "Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js"

Pyramid: "You need a Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans."

Why is it clean? Build an application with Laravel and you'll find out. :) The documentation and community are excellent. I've used many frameworks across many different languages, and (imo) it really is very nice to work in.

It's funny how the most negativity comes from people with very little experience, or at least recent experience, in the thing that they don't like.

I've slowly started tracking tutorial articles like this, and also automated setting up an Ethereum/Solidity development environment and tooling in a VM, with Vagrant. This has been my starting point, but I haven't gone much further yet.

Both the tutorial links and Vagrant setup is here -

https://github.com/mmccaff/vagrant-ethereum-dev

Yes, there is Golem https://golem.network/

Yes, Coinbase supports daily / weekly / every 2 weeks / monthly recurring buys. They have fees on every buy though.

Interesting, this could be like an RBL for Ethereum addresses, instead of ip addresses of spammy mail servers.

If the data were kept current and remained open for other systems to query, it seems like something that could be useful. There should probably be a way to appeal something that is blacklisted in the database just as there is a way to report.

I'm also curious what the approach was to being able to scrape sites in a way where the code is not coupled to a known, fixed markup structure using css selectors, xpath etc.

What are your plans for the project? Will you be open sourcing the code on GitHub?

Beautiful design!

Care to share any of the details on the tech? Are you using each of the exchange's individual APIs to calculate the weighted average? Did you use any library or framework to help with websockets, or to look at the blockchain?

The meaning of "Estimated Money Sent" was a little confusing to me, even after reading the definition on the About page.

What do the scrolling numbers in the background mean? I imagine there aren't enough of them to be all of the realtime transactions happening on the blockchain. Also, I'm sure you know, but they overlap when showing as 600x120 in iframe mode.

Allowing users to embed the widget in an iframe is nice and a good way to spread the word about your site. Maybe unbury that from the About page and link directly to an 'Embed this' page from the main page, and (as silly as it sounds) use something like clipboardjs to make copying the snippet to the clipboard easier.

Hah. Any idea why the system admin didn't want you to bubble sort anymore?

Was it noticed to be taxing on some system's resources or too long-running of a process or something?

I wonder how many similar stories there are out there and how they were handled.

Good times they were not, though. As a kid who didn't have bad intentions, dealing with the repercussions was a lot.

There was no precedent (at my school, at that time) for how to prevent and deal with a situation like that, though.

Consider if you will be fulfilled by selling a commodity.

It's a race to the bottom and unprofitable users often demand the same level of attention and support as ones who pay more.

Also think about hidden costs. The other company might be priced as they are for a reason.

Is it a product where differentiating on price is something that would even matter to the user? The difference in price would be enough to choose you over the competition?

I use the -subdomain argument for this available in the Pro version and it works perfectly.

Define "good" :)

If you need to have a desktop app quickly (for multiple platforms, even) and it's the difference between launching something or not, then yes it is good.

If memory footprint and performance is a critical part of what you're doing (it's not always), then maybe you should look at a different technology.

I think Electron has allowed a lot of cool things to come into existence that wouldn't have if not for Electron.

I agree about childhood days, but I don't know if that's entirely it.

I think we now take technology for granted and apps/sites are less special of a thing than BBSs were. Users are fickle, so much is fad-based, and we move on to the next thing without a strong feeling towards the last. Using Snapchat isn't a primary hobby or thing that you devote time to, more of a thing you do while doing some other primary thing. If that makes sense. :)

I doubt that memories of Snapchat will be as strong to a user as memories of BBSs. But who knows.

Good commercial. Kind of chilling how visionary those ideas were at the time and that they did happen, though not exclusively brought to us by AT&T.

Great story!

I don't have a memory of caller id being around when I ran my BBS, or maybe I just didn't have it.

Someone local to me had launched a pay-for-membership based MajorBBS that had something like 16 phone lines in. MajorBBS was the only thing I had seen that could support so many users at once. This was around the time I had stopped running my own BBS, before college.

This meant it could offer an active chat room, and it had a MUD game that everyone loved, called TeleArena.

For me, TeleArena was fun because I'd write scripts that would automate playing the game for me when I wasn't there.

Thanks for those recommendations, I didn't know about r/bbs and Enigma looks like an interesting project. I just starred it on Github and will definitely check it out!

About missing those days - I still find joy in doing a lot of the same things around software, and although I did sell Dementia for $50/copy, it was a passion project and not a job.

If I was retired and didn't need to work, I'd still find some software to build and spend my time building it because that's something that I love to do. That's essentially what we were doing back then, so it was a good time.

I think there is some truth to what you're getting at with less noise and constraints and creativity.

Although - during this time, I dreamed of a future when every house and every business had their own BBS. That basically happened in the form of the www. The www and internet would have AMAZED a teenage me, it still does.

I remember that past fondly because they were exciting times for those reasons, but current times are also exciting. :)

Yes, it was Midnight Sun and my BBS was called The Night Light.

You were long distance in 609, so we might not have ever met. My only memory of the 609 area code was of a good Pascal developer named Ffejtable? (question mark included in the handle.) What was your handle?

That is amazing to hear!

Dementia's beta tester was in Modesto and he distributed the demo version (limited to 5 users) around CA.

It was towards the end of middle school and through high school. So, my early to mid teens.

I had never worked on a larger project before that. It was great to have one single large project to work on, and to keep adding features to. I had messed around with code since I was about 7. It was based on the source code of something else which did the heaviest of lifting.

My dad taught computer science at a small college and was able to get OS/2 and C compilers for me. I forget which C compiler I used, I think I might have switched from Borland to something else at the time -- but I remember the one C compiler came with a set of books in a box that was about 4 feet long. I used the box as a footrest when I'd code. Haha.

I chose OS/2 because it was the first operating system that I knew of which allowed true multi-tasking. Two processes (instances of the BBS}) could actually run at the same time without one pausing the inactive one. It was also cool to try a new OS, to try something new.

I'm not even sure that I used that new user questionnaire myself. It was a feature of the software, for SysOps who ran warez boards.

I actually had a licensed copy of OS/2. My dad taught computer science at a small college and was able to get it for me.

I loved collecting BBS Software at the time to look at what other people were doing.

Pretty much everything was either a Forum (Pascal) or WWIV (C) hack.

Amazing that you got it back up and running! I would love to see some of the old messages on the public message boards of my BBS from those days.

I had a tape drive as well,and I did back things up at the time, but even those backups are gone.

Yes, and seeing LD boards outside of the usual ones in your local calling area was an exotic treat. Every second was precious. :)

Yes, I had so many DOOR games, and Solar Realms Elite (SRE) and Baron Realms Elite (BRE) were the only ones that I enjoyed playing myself.

I liked how they were turn based (each user got X turns per day) and one player played at a time, but you were playing in a multi-player world against other people who would take their turns for the day.

I always thought it'd be interesting to do something similar in modern day, where you could take turns offline in a game (eg. in a subway or something, without internet access) and when you had online access, those turns were submitted against other people in the game. I wonder if there is anything like that?

RIP graphics were progress and a great innovation.