petit_robert

Very interesting.

There appears to be a push to control open source software, in the guise of protecting children via age control.

With OSS, anybody can tweak the code on his device to pass the control, so the idea would be to only allow certified software. Which is expensive, and out of reach of most open source projects. Enter big, reliable companies that can afford the ticket for the certification of horrendous piles of slop.

see this recent HN post about it, I find it resonates, so to speak, with what you explain :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960155

Apparently not :

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-database-83-perc...

It depends on the stakes?

In the 90s, the French IRS seized massive amounts of files from Elf, then a major French oil company under investigation for various frauds.

Their offices where burglarized maybe a couple nights after that. All that was seized disappeared.

It tends to happen with a reasonable certainty to most whistleblowers, from what I gather.

So yes, you can swear you read that same story before, and I could swear you will read it again :-\

It's not limited to Japan. The French call them 'trognes'

https://www.agroforesterie.fr/la-trogne-arbre-paysan-aux-mil...

Other countries do it too :

https://trognes.fr/trognes/trognes-a-travers-le-monde/

>The heat goes into the air

Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.

The way it's written is funny, I find. But I'm a programmer...

And as GP wrote, it would take a substantial amount of time to explain to a normie (infinite I'd say, but let's not despair).

I meant to add that I don't advertise it and just invalidate the account. Omitted it for brevity.

There is also the long time friend you do a site for, with an agreed upon price. And he forgets to renew the bank transfer every year... for months.

>If contract broken, sue them. Why throwing a scene?

Haha! tell me about it.

A client of mine ended his contract in 2010, pretending he did not use my software anymore. He had the source because I had to compile on site for technical reasons.

A disgruntled employed called to tell me and my associate he was still using it. It took me 3 years to find a proof, lawsuit started in 2014, the expertise began in 2016 and ended in 2021. I have a first trial hearing scheduled Feb, 12 2026. Expect 6 to 12 months before a decision, and of course, an appeal after that.

The guy had stocked up 5 million dollars net when I stopped him with the lawsuit [0], he is using the money to pay well known lawyers to delay the procedure every which way.

I'm out largely over 100 000 euros in court, expertise and lawyer fees, plus the countless hours spent responding to the endless, senseless dribble their lawyers produce.

As far as I'm concerned, my services are now hosted by me, and failure to pay shuts down the service, it's in the TOS.

[0 : he subcontracted for a big entity. I would never had gotten that contract myself, lacking the thief's network; said big entity never replied to our mails about our software]

GP seems to mean that if people cared about audio quality, they would not use bluetooth in the first place?

Audiophiles tend to have firm stances on what is acceptable or not, I find.

Interesting. Nice way to get headers quickly, I'll have a look.

Fun project I'm sure, but out of curiosity, is this something that you can monetize somehow? because the fun only goes so far.

I built an accounting app :

https://compta.libremen.com

Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.

I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.

Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.

It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.

Hi,

When one clicks on 'Play tutorials', the text at the bottom reads :

>Start by follow the instructions

Should be 'Start by following the instructions', I believe?

Strange, for me it's the opposite.

Just yesterday, I moved some 100 lines of code using a hash quite a few times from the main module to a function using a reference to the hash.

if %args is the hash holding the data, '$args{key}' tells me the value of 'key' in the main module.

a reference to the hash passed to the function is noted like so : '$args = \%args';$args->{key} tells me value of 'key'

All I had to do to adapt the code was to replace '$args{' with '$args->{', done by the time I typed the replace command in my editor.

Funny that it just makes sense to me, must be something with the brain's wiring.

>This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone

I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :

My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.

There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.

The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.

So, your comment rang a bell.

Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.

Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned

I had to laugh out loud at this (by myself).

The amount of requests I get on my servers for WP related files is insane

> I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime

You did not say what system you use on them, but don't you need to reboot them to apply kernel upgrades, for instance?

Haha! we named our software Marica for "Management des risques et des contrats d'assurance" (we're a French company).

We have since translated the software in several languages. It appears that marica in spanish means something like queer in English when used against homosexuals, only _more_ derogatory amongst these macho people :-(

Screen writers and actors have a union, both fill some needs that apply to the rank and file but not to stars.

May be the model could work for developers?

"But they're the exception, not the rule."

Excuse me, you must have forgotten about a certain global financial meltdown in 2008?

Web UI is an interesting problem, but even just building a proper data structure can be very challenging, when the user's environment is complex and one needs to build a simple yet extensive enough tool.

I see it a bit as rock climbing : I looks simple, but not everyone can do it right.

"But when you look at it as a probability rather than as an absolute, yes, you should expect more popular things to be better than less popular things, no? "

Possibly in areas where no serious money is involved, but I haven't experienced this in the big corporate/government world myself. It can occasionally be true, but it's certainly not the rule

Sure, but at MtGox, the theft was 477 millions.

http://news.yahoo.com/mtgox-opens-call-centre-500m-bitcoin-l...

That's a lot of duffle bags to haul.

I would suggest subscribing to and reading the fine postgresql mailing lists (general and performance).

It's amazing what you can learn from the questions and answers they get.

"This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it"

Agreed, I went through the burn out too.

Got out of it by starting my work day with a 1 to 2 hour walk in the morning. It serves two purposes at once : first your body recovers gently from the hours spent sitting on a chair, second you go to sleep before midnight and can start over the next day.

There is a learning curve, but I am fond of mod_perl because you can do almost anything with it. It's also very fast.

http://perl.apache.org/docs/index.html

You can wrap your existing CGI scripts in it using

http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/api/ModPerl/Registry.html

so the transition can be rather smooth

Not sure what you mean exactly, but in any case I know nothing about Java; my LAMP stack is :

Linux, Apache, Mod_perl, Postgresql

All very pleasant to work with (1) and stable; mod_perl has a rather steep learning curve, but worth it for web work. Very powerful _and_ low cost.

( 1 : if you like Perl, obviously )

[Edit] asterik in note caused weird formatting; replaced with 1

>A, in my opinion

mmmh... I thought about this too.

However, MS is anything but stupid marketing wise, I find. So I dismissed incompetence.

>Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" >faster than I could learn the last great thing.

Same here. I design databases, and MS kept bringing new data access methods every three years; I never could wrap my head around the ADO/DAO difference, but that did not matter for long because both were replaced by .Net

I sincerely wondered if this was not a deliberate tactic by Microsoft : while developpers are busy learning their newest "next great thing", they can't invest time in anything else.

Meanwhile I learned how to use an OSS lamp stack and have been happily using it for the last 10 years. Very stable and reliable, I could not be happier.

I switched several years ago and never looked backed. No problem whatsoever, I produce all my corporate documents with it.

Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.