jbarham

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91.
by jbarham 7y ago
Several years ago Scottish chip company FTDI took matters into their own hands by releasing a driver that would brick counterfeits of their USB to serial converter chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI#Driver_controv
92.
by jbarham 7y ago
Reading between the lines, it seems that a major advantage of e-rickshaws is that it's easier to steal electricity to recharge them vs gas/petrol.
93.
by jbarham 7y ago
Sorry, I haven't used Tornado's templates enough to compare them with e.g. Django's. Essentially all I use Tornado for is to publish a WebSocket endpoint, and for that specific purpose it's great. For building convention
94.
by jbarham 7y ago
That surprised me too. IMHO Tornado should be #3 after Django and Flask since AFAIK it has the best built-in support for writing hybrid HTTP/WebSocket servers in Python. I use Tornado to serve the WebSocket backend for https:/&#x
95.
by jbarham 7y ago
I have a long-term side project, SlickDNS ( https://www.slickdns.com/ ) which is a DNS hosting service, and recently moved the URL monitoring feature from four self-managed $5/month Digital Ocean VMs to AWS Lambda. My mo
96.
by jbarham 7y ago
Hmm, at least where I am in Australia the Google Ads 1800 number is listed three times before I even login: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_AU/home/
97.
by jbarham 7y ago
If you're a Google Ads buyer, Google is easy to contact. If you're a mere Google products user, good luck getting help via their crowdsourced message boards...
98.
by jbarham 7y ago
Too late to edit: "former boss of Vancouver" should be "former boss of mine in Vancouver".
99.
by jbarham 7y ago
The US healthcare system is probably the best in the world if you're rich. I had the usual PPO plan when I worked as a SW engineer in the US. It was fine given that my wife and I were young and healthy. We still paid a couple of thousa
100.
by jbarham 7y ago
> The US is a downgrade from Canada in most metrics. As a Canadian who worked in the US for 4.5 years I'd say it's exactly the opposite. The only disadvantage I found working in the US compared to Canada was the absurd process
101.
by jbarham 7y ago
I used Tornado to build the the WebSocket back end for this page: https://www.slickdns.com/live/ . It's less than 100 lines of code and very clean. For most web apps my default choice is Django, but for special pur
102.
by jbarham 7y ago
Rob Pike was born in 1956 so he didn't have anything to do with the original Unix. Maybe you're thinking of Dennis Ritchie? Pike's account of how UTF-8 was invented is a fun read: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk
103.
by jbarham 7y ago
Tough situation. It's still generally true that for offshore dev work companies get what they pay for, so if the company really can replace you with 1 US pm and 2 devs for only $4k/month they probably won't be very good. But
104.
by jbarham 7y ago
Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Django, Go/"Golang", C, C++, IoT (especially Particle.io) Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham-res
105.
by jbarham 7y ago
One prosaic explanation for social isolation in Canada in particular would be its relatively harsh winters which make being outside uncomfortable and unpleasant (i.e., cold, wet, dark) for much of the year, especially if you're old. If
106.
by jbarham 7y ago
Looks cool but if the product is only available for "Enterprise" customers and the pricing is "Request Quote" that means it's expensive. At least the AWS pricing is published.
107.
by jbarham 7y ago
Mobile data in Canada is notoriously expensive. The official justification is that it's a large, sparsely populated country. The actual explanation is regulatory capture by a cozy/corrupt domestic oligopoly that has successfully l
108.
by jbarham 7y ago
Actually Canada has a stronger claim to speeding the fall of Communism given that Gorbachev had a similar revelation when he visited Canadian supermarkets in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713
109.
by jbarham 7y ago
Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Django, Go/"Golang", C/C++, IoT (especially Particle.io) Résumé/CV: https://www.wombatsoftware.com/john-barham
110.
by jbarham 7y ago
Use MicroPython ( http://micropython.org/ )
111.
by jbarham 8y ago
The border between Vancouver and Washington is literally a ditch.
112.
by jbarham 8y ago
I found Django-RQ far simpler to configure than Celery. Given that I'm using Redis for caching anyway, it also removed RabbitMQ as a dependency which Celery basically requires. Django-RQ's job decorator is basically a drop-in repl
113.
by jbarham 8y ago
Yes, I send emails async using Django-RQ (previously Celery). It's still a one-liner once you've configured your async task handler. Which makes the example custom email sending microservice even more ridiculous when it can be don
114.
by jbarham 8y ago
I'm aware, I've used Postmark for years. My point is that building your own microservice to send emails is ridiculous overkill.
115.
by jbarham 8y ago
I honestly thought it was myself until I saw that it was an official GCP repo. Unbelievable... Sending emails is a one-liner in Django. Am I a sucker for not building my own email sending service?! Of course being a Google demo they have to
116.
by jbarham 8y ago
I'm guessing Brazil
117.
by jbarham 8y ago
PHP: a fractal of bad design: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ This rant is almost seven years old now, but I imagine that some things still hold true. Python in particula
118.
by jbarham 8y ago
Ironic comparison given that the British Empire banned slavery before the American Civil War.
119.
by jbarham 8y ago
Yeah, as soon as I saw that he was from Nova Scotia I thought that's his main problem right there. (I say this as a Canadian.)
120.
by jbarham 8y ago
> What action do you believe the Canadian government should take in order to reform telecoms? Easy, allow in foreign competitors like we have here in Australia such as Vodafone (UK) and Optus (Singapore) that compete fiercely w/ the

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