kabdib

53 ms·

571.
by kabdib 7y ago
I actually work in Windows, and use an Emacs clone called Epsilon, so my tiny batch file and Eel-language customization probably won't help you. It's really just a few minutes of work in any event.
572.
by kabdib 7y ago
The "safe save" protocols that editors usually use to write file contents are pretty good. I've never worried about this and I've never lost a file to a mis-save, not in decades. I don't think it's a concern. A
573.
by kabdib 7y ago
I find it useful to have everything in a single buffer, it makes searching easier. Otherwise I'd have to start issuing 'grep' commands and worry about which file is which, and get clever about regular expressions when all I w
574.
by kabdib 7y ago
Absurdly, comically simple is the way to go. In these situations I usually just send myself an email, or write something down in the current physical notebook. About 20 years ago I spent a while writing a server to do a bunch of automation
575.
by kabdib 7y ago
Well, the Atari ST booted in about one second, from black screen to moving a mouse around. A lot of that time was waiting for a floppy disk boot sector read to time out (so if you had a formatted floppy in the drive it'd spin up, quick
576.
by kabdib 7y ago
The more you worry about format, the more friction there is making to making notes. And you don't want friction, you want a sustainable habit. Just dump stuff in. You'll figure out something that works over time. It's easy to
577.
by kabdib 7y ago
I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that
578.
by kabdib 7y ago
Don't bother reading ANYTHING other than the claims. Just skip right to them. That's the legal part, that's what they're trying to do a land-grab on. The stuff up front (abstracts, diagrams, whatever) don't mean a t
579.
by kabdib 7y ago
Not complicated. It means, "you probably wouldn't want to work there." Interviewing is a two-way street. If your potential employer is intensely interested in your leisure time then that's an interesting signal, because
580.
by kabdib 7y ago
If it's anything like working at Atari was, they'll "have layoffs" in the middle of the night and eject you onto the street around 2AM. Good luck getting your luggage. :0)
581.
by kabdib 7y ago
I took nearly a year off in the 1990s, just "doing coffee shops and bookstores." I read a lot, did some recreational programming and a little travel. Basically took it easy after a number of years of high-hour, high-visibility pro
582.
by kabdib 7y ago
I had a manager at Microsoft -- I called him a "practice manager" because he had little experience managing and was just given a handful of people to wrangle -- and it was absolutely miserable. He interfered with my technical deci
583.
by kabdib 7y ago
At least [edit:] three of the 4TB drives I checked was categorized as "new" but was in fact reburbished ("with a new warranty"). One of them was pretty shady about hiding this fact. [Life is too short and data is too dea
584.
by kabdib 7y ago
A really nice tool for debugging Windows drivers. God knows you needed all the help you could get :-)
585.
by kabdib 7y ago
This is still very much true, to the point that game consoles will reserve areas of rotating media for different purposes, depending on speed (e.g., disk caches on the Xbox are on the outer tracks). For optical media the layout of assets ca
586.
by kabdib 7y ago
You underestimate the cruelty of a hardware team intent on cost reduction. They knew perfectly well what they were asking. IIRC the showstopper was that the CPU wouldn't be able to handle interrupts.
587.
by kabdib 7y ago
> The code makes some dangerous assumptions . . . In this era, code for games was essentially write-only, by one or two engineers. No one would be confused by the code in later releases because there simply weren't any. Code that wa
588.
by kabdib 7y ago
Splunk can get really expensive. And there's something about renting your own data that rubs me the wrong way.
589.
by kabdib 7y ago
They were well known to re-shrink-wrap defective, returned products and put them back on the shelves for resale. I'm not sure I've ever followed the logic of this, unless it was to justify the necessity for a large returns departm
590.
by kabdib 7y ago
The Fry's in Renton, WA doesn't have much stock, and what they do have is mostly very bad quality off-brand stuff (e.g., the keyboard section has just one or two brands of keyboards, I'm guessing from suppliers that weren&#x2
591.
by kabdib 7y ago
"It must be our great task, gentlemen, to keep the monkeys away from the typewriters." -- H. L. Mencken
592.
by kabdib 7y ago
Computers-in-SF titles that are often missed: John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider John M Ford, Web of Angels Algis Budrys, Michaelmas Thomas Ryan, The Adolescence of P-1 (mentioned by someone else here, too)
593.
by kabdib 7y ago
I use a plain text file, and I edit it in Emacs' fundamental mode. I have a key binding that goes to the end of the file and adds a timestamp and some separator characters, but that's the only customization. This single text file
594.
by kabdib 7y ago
> There is definitely enough time to master a new programming language in a a year. I've been using Go for middlin' size projects for several years, and recently wrote about a 10K SLOC program in it. I still don't believe
595.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've seen some of the worst developers commit more LOCs than others (churn in badly written code, or "cut-and-paste hell"). I've also seen developers sandbagging the metric (as well as artificially inflating code coverag
596.
by kabdib 7y ago
For database servers with multiple TB of RAM, 10-15 minutes is not unusual for POST. It's nuts. The memory was fine the last time it was tested (30 minutes ago, on the last reboot). Let's just train some buses, probe some address
597.
by kabdib 7y ago
IIRC GEMDOS was written more less from scratch by Jason Loveman (last I heard he was at Microsoft). While it's possible he might have cribbed a bunch from the CP/M-68K codebase, it started "in his garage" as a private ef
598.
by kabdib 7y ago
That deserves a story, too. Why not? [Note: this is the early 80s. A computer with a large amount of memory might have 64K in this period. I think a 64K ROM cost about four dollars, and 64K of RAM was about fifty bucks] The Atari ST's
599.
by kabdib 7y ago
DRAM testing is not really something you can do incrementally. Localized, bit-level failures are only one kind of failure; things get really interesting when you have disturbances (e.g., a shorted address line or something causes writes to
600.
by kabdib 7y ago
> Minutes? That sounds exaggerated. POST on a Dell M640 is about three minutes. Other Dell systems are similar. POST on the workstations that I use are in the range of 1-2 minutes. This is before the OS gets control (once that happens, i

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