paulrpotts

23 ms·

61.
by paulrpotts 4y ago
A couple of years ago I worked on a project that involved parsing the very idiosyncratic output of a lot of different command-line commands. Not standard or semi-standardized commands like cat, ls, etc. - a vendor-written command line inter
62.
by paulrpotts 4y ago
>"It doesn’t matter where you work, as long as you get the work done." Having worked with a number of overseas teams in China and India, it's actually somewhat difficult for US-based teams to work with teams up to 12 hours
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by paulrpotts 4y ago
Well, I never actually said I really approved of their "walled garden" app store. I will say that I use Signal, and once I've installed it I can sign out and continue to use it. And there's no need to stay signed in to u
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by paulrpotts 4y ago
You need to sign in to an Apple account to get it going for the first time or to buy apps through the app store, or to do software updates. But you don't need to stay signed in or use the cloud services. Granted, it will pop up annoyin
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by paulrpotts 4y ago
I have not had a breakdown quite like that - I never had hallucinations/delusions. But in my 32 year career I have gone through stages where I became: - Extremely depressed and anxious. (Still able to function at a pretty high level at
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by paulrpotts 4y ago
Great article, no notes. I think you are correct about Stroustrup and want to amplify on that a little bit. I will add that I'm in my mid-50s and have been programming since childhood and so I've had a chance to observe the evolut
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by paulrpotts 4y ago
It kinda depends... my purposes have changed a lot over the years! So here are a couple of instances where computers were underpowered/powerful enough for my purposes. My TRS-80 model 1 did not have enough memory (4K). Writing early BA
68.
by paulrpotts 6y ago
Since getting into embedded firmware, I've had to write some very "critical" pieces of low-level code, often very low-level. For example, I took over a piece of code that ran on a DSP on an audio card. This code handled PCI b
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by paulrpotts 6y ago
Don't try to buy all your books at once. Purchase them over time as your tastes evolve and you discover what you like. That said, if you want to start out with a very nice set of "classics" to dive into, consider getting a se
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by paulrpotts 6y ago
"Keeping up with your brain" is an underrated concept here. I used to type about 120 wpm, although that number has come down a lot over the years due to carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. But I still think it's important
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by paulrpotts 6y ago
So, what's the title for a person with 43 years of experience programming computers - not just GUIs, applications, or programs, but whole systems, comprising tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code across several platforms and l
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by paulrpotts 6y ago
You can search for parts like this on Mouser: https://www.mouser.com/Semiconductors/Switch-ICs/Multiplexer... This one seems to be "dual" - there are two sets of control pins. I'm not sure from your
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Yes, an antibody test (a blood test) can do it. A swab test looking for the virus in your saliva probably wouldn't find any.
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
I implemented a streaming deserializer for MessagePack data in C for small microcontrollers. It is quite small and not complete. Then I tested it with test data streams generated by the reference C++ implementation and Python implementation
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
My main computer is a 2008 Mac Pro.
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
If the phone is accidentally left off the hook (or if there is an electrical problem with the wiring so that it is _reading_ as off the hook), the exchange may drive it with a very loud fast BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP sound. That's just part
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
"It's not the fault of this horrible product, it's simply that no one should have been stupid enough to trust it and go on vacation!"
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Yes, by the standards of most employers and schools it is very late. I am fortunate in that I can often sleep until past 8, and I'm much saner and healthier for it. But all through high school I had to get up at 6:30. Since I was _also
79.
by paulrpotts 7y ago
Good analysis. Didn't Knuth famously say that his job was to get to the bottom of things, not to stay on top of things? If I were writing a one-off program to do this once for a paid project, the shell script is absolutely the way I wo
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Howdy Walter! I'm Paul R. Potts. You were very generous with your time answering my endless questions about how NewtonScript worked under the hood back in the day, and I still remember that. It got me into Scheme, Dylan, Common Lisp, a
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
I am a leftist whose exact ideology is a work in progress, but I'd generally call myself an anarchist in favor of localized gift economies, food production, and devolved government, so distributism and worker-owned collectives are both
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Well, sort of. Specifically, printf is an oddball function because it uses the varargs mechanism, and the whole format strings mechanism is inherently risky because it effectively bypasses the type system and says "trust me." Back
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
This is terrific. My own personal C coding standard has evolved over the last few years to include quite a bit of "useless" whitespace including vertical space. I'm no longer coding on an 80x24 terminal or something like that
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
I've been using Macs since 1985 and I've owned several, going back to the SE, PowerBook Duo 230, PowerBook G4, and 2008 Mac Pro, which is still my basic workhorse machine. I've also done a lot of development for "classic
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
>You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in Hypercard. I think that's true - but my experience was that it was a good language for beginners, but didn't "scale" well as you started working on
86.
by paulrpotts 7y ago
>Are you the Paul who worked at Computerland? No, but I wrote a couple of articles on how to write XCMDs/XFCNs for the Washington Apple Pi Journal, then also some stuff for MacTutor. I was a student at the College of Wooster then (i
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Really disappointed that I couldn't get the pigs to jump across the floating platforms. Maybe I didn't do it right?
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
All very true - I also wrote XCMD/XFCN plug-ins back in the day, and my first published technical articles, in MacTutor and Washington Apple Pi magazine, were about how to do that. HyperCard had more innovations that I miss. One of the
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
I still use this method, except I lean towards very large binder clips and several stacks of cards (work, personal general, personal writing project). I keep piles of blank cards on my desks at home and work and I stock up when they are BOG
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by paulrpotts 7y ago
Ah yes, the first video game I had ever tried that I simply _could not play_ because after just a few seconds, it made me feel like I was going to throw up. To put that in perspective, I had been a big fan of many previous 3-D games, includ

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