mprovost

19 ms·

211.
by mprovost 4y ago
At some point soon the computers will be able to send email back and forth to each other and leave me out of it.
212.
by mprovost 4y ago
Pick one... during the Unix Wars [0] there was X/Open [1] vs Unix International (aka AT&T) [2] and the Open Software Foundation [3] (which eventually merged with X/Open to form the Open Software Group). And then the IEEE got i
213.
by mprovost 4y ago
Nothing like logging into a freshly installed Solaris system and having to configure it using Bourne shell, which didn't have job control or history. At least it had vi. Usually the first thing you would do is get enough networking goi
214.
by mprovost 4y ago
There was a consortium, and it did standardise Unix, and that's when everything stopped moving in the 90s. Standards are compromises and so all the commercial Unixes had to implement the lowest common denominator. Thankfully GNU didn&#
215.
by mprovost 4y ago
It feels like we're in a third wave of innovation in Unix CLI tools. The first was from BSD in the late 70s/early 80s which considerably improved the original Unix utilities, then the GNU tools rewrite in the late 80s, then there
216.
by mprovost 4y ago
Totally agree about not obsessing over tools. That's an easy rabbit hole to go down and distract yourself from producing the actual content of the book. I deliberately chose to use Google Docs because the formatting options are so limi
217.
by mprovost 4y ago
Sure but that doesn't mean it's under active development. Before that it was an ancient version of bash that hadn't been updated in years.
218.
by mprovost 4y ago
I always assumed zsh was abandonware because it's still hosted on Sourceforge, so it's good to see it's still getting new releases!
219.
by mprovost 4y ago
This was the subtle joke in "Anchorman" with Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) the weatherman with an IQ of 48. You don't have to be smart to predict "78 and sunny" every day.
220.
by mprovost 4y ago
That's true of any place in the Southern hemisphere though.
221.
by mprovost 4y ago
Someone once asked the Duke of Westminster for career advice: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.” At least he was honest.
222.
by mprovost 4y ago
I write in Google Docs mostly for the collaboration features. It's super easy to invite someone to leave comments. I use the Code Blocks add-on to format code. When it's time to publish I use the DocsFlow plug-in to import the doc
223.
by mprovost 4y ago
Maybe it's like giving birth and you forget how painful it is after a few years...
224.
by mprovost 4y ago
I deliberately haven't been tracking my time spent writing my book because it would be super depressing to see an hourly rate less than minimum wage. But without knowing that number it's still super exciting to get an email saying
225.
by mprovost 4y ago
This is really impressive! I recently hit $1000 in sales on mine and celebrated with a glass of something nice. You're right about how much time marketing takes - I don't spend nearly enough time on it but I'm trying to get m
226.
by mprovost 4y ago
Have you looked into Ingram Spark? They do on-demand global distribution. I'm considering it for my book once I finish the ebook and get around to printing paper copies.
227.
by mprovost 4y ago
They’re just opening a new exhibit in Block A next week!
228.
by mprovost 4y ago
Regardless of the method, boiling water puts a lot of moisture into the air.
229.
by mprovost 5y ago
When I worked as a sysadmin at Warner Bros back around 2001 our corporate mail was name@warnerbros.com which went to an AOL inbox (they made everyone eat the AOL dogfood). We realised that we owned a ton of domains including wb.com that did
230.
by mprovost 5y ago
I did a warranty replacement on a Dell monitor entirely on Whatsapp. I have to say it was a super slick process. Even down to taking a picture of the problem and the serial number and not having to attach it to an email or upload it into so
231.
by mprovost 5y ago
(Spoiler) Disappointed that they didn't end up with naked pilots. But it reminded me how Polynesian navigators in the Pacific would use their testicles to detect subtle ocean swells. We're used to relying on our eyes but our other
232.
by mprovost 5y ago
Maybe they meant the effort on the other side of the war? The side that has been cut off from the international finance system...
233.
by mprovost 5y ago
> I noticed in another thread that a few people seem to think you can't implement an entire operating system in a GCd language like Java or C#, but that isn't true. Both Smalltalk and LISP were used to write operating systems d
234.
by mprovost 5y ago
Unless you're a sociopath, as a manager it's never easy to think of firing a person (where the alternative is improving them - sometimes people do things that make it easy). It's usually sleepless nights, stress, alcohol, som
235.
by mprovost 5y ago
We noticed a lot of "meeting fatigue" with teams early in the pandemic and after a lot of feedback realised that it was because the limited number of conference rooms was constraining the overall number of meetings. Once that cons
236.
by mprovost 5y ago
But you don't need VPNs with IPv6, it has encryption built it and you don't need NAT because every node is directly accessible!
237.
by mprovost 5y ago
It seems strange to me that the author's names aren't on the website anywhere except in a BibTeX citation and the open source license.
238.
by mprovost 5y ago
Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to un
239.
by mprovost 5y ago
There's a great story from 1998 about David Korn, if I tried to sum it up I'd give away the punchline... https://wiki.c2.com/?KornShellStory
240.
by mprovost 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS3LWOTCW4A

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