When I count my blessings, among them is the fact that it’s been more than 10 years since I’ve had to touch an oracle db.

It’s been a while since I’ve read such snotty, arrogant drivel.

any other laptop feels like a cheap plastic toy nailed to the floor

This is the classic Apple fanboy “I’m griping at Apple but while I’m doing it I’ll remind you that my tribe is better than your tribe.” Apply laptops are pretty, but laptops are tools, and tools don’t need to be pretty. You can get your work done just as well on a Thinkpad or a sputnik. Get over yourself.

Ew, creeps! Let this shit stay in 2007. I went through it. I grew up. It looks cool and “cyberpunky” for literally one evening. You never use it afterwards.

Guess what? It’s no longer 2007 and things have changed, except evidently your prejudices.

Things must be useful, not “beautiful”

The irony of someone who paid 3000 Euros for a pretty laptop saying this is strong. It’s even stronger when the rest of the article talks about the time he wasted trying to make that laptop’s signature feature not suck. He’s the same kid who wasted time configuring his linux desktop in 2007, only now he’s wasting time configuring his touch bar and bragging about how much of an adult he is.

One company I joined had a unit test that failed if it ran less than 5 minutes before the top of the hour. Turns out there was some bogus ad-hoc time arithmetic that added 5 minutes to the time without taking into account hours, day, month, year, etc. This test had been that way for years but the company culture was “eh, run it again and see if it passes” so nobody had noticed the pattern.

Saw a huge block of XML, screamed and hit the back button.

Interesting, but of course, DRM companies don’t care about ‘family’, they just care about selling you a package that is attractive to you because your wife can use it, too. I have no idea why rules like ‘you can only be the member of one family’ would be absurd or a ‘falsehood’ in this context.

The first net-negative programmer I ever met was on a consulting project that had been set up in a hurry so devs were hired after a brief phone screen. Until then I had heard of NNP’s but wasn’t sure they existed. Ron changed my mind. We started giving him simple jobs, then when he failed we gave him simpler jobs, then when he failed again we just made up a few make-work tasks having nothing to do with the system we were working on. He’d try, but his efforts would always break things so we ended up writing a short script called “un-ron” that would check the commit history for his commits and revert them.

This is one of those times that it’s actually a good thing to have one of my projects become obsolete: https://github.com/caboteria/rails-bigint-pk

On behalf of old people and Linux users everywhere, I fully agree and look forward to the end of the scourge of tiny text.

Apache is increasingly becoming the software version of an aircraft boneyard. I honestly upvote announcements of projects moving to Apache these days not out of excitement, but because it’s one of the closest things to a “this project is now dead” announcement we have in the industry.

I had a “huh?” moment when I clicked the link, then realized that it was the post-signup page. It’s more obvious what Blisk does on the home page: https://blisk.io/

I’ve used this tool and I’d recommend it only as a last resort - the packages it builds aren’t much better than tarballs. I’ve found that I can almost always find the packaging scripts for a “real” Fedora or Debian package of the code I want to install. The advantage to leveraging the upstream packaging is that the config files, log files, libraries, etc etc all end up in the right place.

I’ll read between the lines and infer that the server that they lost was hand-crafted and that’s why he needed to recover from a backup and not just fire up and configure a new one from scratch in a few minutes. This read like something written before devops existed.

The problem with 500 is that it’s misleading to the client. Anything in the 400 range means “you messed up, send me something different” where anything in the 500 range means “I messed up and someone will fix this bug.” Percival’s solution is OK when there’s only one client and he wrote it, but it’s not OK when clients will be writing their own clients because it’s misleading to them.

The problem with best practice #3 is that the database itself may change in ways that make your schema creation scripts no longer work. So I’d view practice 3 as a guideline (“should” not “must”), but you also need to be able to modify schema creation scripts if necessary.

Also, the title should be “Database schema versioning best practices” because versioning the data is a whole different kettle of fish.

We use Rails. It’s overkill for API’s but we have a bunch of stuff in one app (including web pages) and don’t have enough volume to make the run-time inefficiency be a practical problem.

Not long after, Sidekick users noticed prolonged service disruptions until eventually, Microsoft discovered that this data center had not been updated to run on Microsoft technology, which ultimately led to the system failure.

<cough>Bullshit!<cough>

If you enjoy the book and think it would benefit kids to read it, you can donate a copy to libraries: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/

There are some really great historical details here. I particularly enjoyed:

The IBM 1401 does not use bytes. Instead, it uses 6-bit BCD storage.

It would be super interesting to understand why they built it that way. BCD seems like an interestingly inefficient way to do arithmetic in hardware. Had the “standard” binary encoding approach not been invented yet? Was there another good reason?

Even the comparison instruction cost extra.

That whole paragraph is very interesting in comparison to the normal way of doing things today. It’s not unusual for modern hardware products to have features physically supported but soft-disabled. Sometime between the late 60s and now (probably driven by VLSI), the economics of hardware changed dramatically.

The 1401 I used is the Sterling model which it supports arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence, which is a surprising thing to see implemented in hardware.

I consciously knew that the pounds/shillings/pence age ended in the early 70s, but my unconscious mental model of history doesn’t have it overlapping with the computer age.

I had intended to become a SFC supporter for a while now, so this is the nudge I needed.

http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

Here’s a much simpler alternative: https://gist.github.com/jbenet/ee6c9ac48068889b0912