spc476

64 ms·

751.
by spc476 8y ago
I have a checklist for running one of our regression tests. It's pretty robust now that four people (including myself) have gone through it a few times. I've thought about automating the test, but ultimately decided against it.
752.
by spc476 8y ago
Microsoft has also discontinued a lot of programs over its life, but there's one major difference---I can still use those Microsoft programs! Microsoft long ago stopped supporting MS-DOS 2.1 but I can still use it. Heck, I even hav
753.
by spc476 8y ago
The 6502 is just such a chip.
754.
by spc476 8y ago
I still have to deal with SPARC at work, and the only major differences between it and x86, with respect to C, are: * It's big-endian * unaligned reads will fail (if you have to read packed structures, you need to declare the structure
755.
by spc476 8y ago
Code that is easy to change is changed until it's no longer easy to change. Also: Well-designed components are easy to replace. Eventually, they will be replaced by ones that are not so easy to replace. -- Sustrik's Law Edit: Adde
756.
by spc476 8y ago
I wouldn't think changing jobs requires changing the chip. The original employer can simply mark ID#x as being invalid for access, and the new employer can mark ID#x as being valid. That's not to say I'm for this. I'm
757.
by spc476 8y ago
> The downside of this decision would mean that I would sacrifice having syntax highlighting for 6510 assembly language, and I would be stuck starting at black text on a white background. Not exactly consistent with the “right tool” stat
758.
by spc476 8y ago
Or, you know, actually use HTML with the <abbr> tag ...
759.
by spc476 8y ago
One format I liked is distellamap, [1] a visualization of some Atari 2600 games in poster format. https://benfry.com/distellamap/
760.
by spc476 8y ago
On McMansion Hell [1] one of the common criticisms is the mismatched windows. Aesthetic considerations aside, having mismatched windows can be a maintenance issue. One example might be hurricane shutters for homes along the Atlantic and G
761.
by spc476 8y ago
There's a reason for that---signals are horribly abused as a general purpose signaling mechanism. Originally they were for signaling of actual problems in the code (SIGSEGV, SIGILL) but later signals were not (SIGWINCH I'm look
762.
by spc476 8y ago
One thought that helped me was if I was not doing the job to the satisfaction of The Company, either my manager or HR would schedule a meeting with me about my performance and give me a chance to improve. If that isn't happening to you
763.
by spc476 8y ago
I'm currently reading the book [1] and while I haven't finished it yet, the thrust (if I'm understanding it correctly) seems to be that it was the increasing complexity of civilization (as populations rose in an area) that le
764.
by spc476 8y ago
Thank you! I knew there was another term but I couldn't remember it.
765.
by spc476 8y ago
At Chili's (an American chain restaurant) they have these payment devices on each table. I can't stand them. First, they take up space on the table that can get quite crowded with all the plates and glasses that tend to accumula
766.
by spc476 8y ago
But don't we already have microcontrollers in everything? My keyboard has a microcontroller in it. The harddrive has a microcontroller. USB has a microcontroller (or two, or three). Heck, even our CPUs now come with microcontroller
767.
by spc476 8y ago
It's one thing to do something because you found that it works. It's another if you know what the rules are, and why breaking them will work in this case, and if you (or someone else) needs to port the code, you know the potential
768.
by spc476 8y ago
True. But C is pretty restrictive in what you can assume. POSIX is more lax (for the programmer, not for the compiler) because it mandates certain behavior---like an all-0 bit pattern for NULL pointers, and the ability to case `void *` to
769.
by spc476 8y ago
While an architecture where two distinct pointers could point to the same location is esoteric today (minus `mmap()` tricks), go back 30 years and it was not only esoteric, but downright the most popular system in existence! [1]. Who&#
770.
by spc476 8y ago
At my latitude (26°N) the zenith for noon changes about every 5 miles (8k) east or west of where I'm located, and the distance grows shorter the more north you go (at 45°N it's 3.8m/6.1k east/west). That's why time
771.
by spc476 8y ago
You could include the whole post or just a portion in the feed, but Dave never clarified how it was to be encoded.
772.
by spc476 8y ago
A point not mentioned was Dave Winer's refusal to clarify if excerpts in his version of RSS feed needed to be plain text or contain HTML (either as HTML tags or entity encoded). He just kept saying "Keep it simple, people!"
773.
by spc476 8y ago
There was a link to another article [1] about how COBOL may be better suited to certain mathematical calculations. The article in question presented this iterative function: x[0] = 4 x[1] = 4.25 x[i] = 108 - ((815 - 1500 &#x2
774.
by spc476 8y ago
What is "essential architecture?" I'm having a hard time searching on it as everything comes back as either "essential computer architecture" or "essential architects' architecture" (aka building and
775.
by spc476 8y ago
It had everything to do with it, as more and more is being forced through HTTPS, because I don't know, it's more secure or it's the only port not being filtered. There were a few times I has to run sshd on port 443 (on a ser
776.
by spc476 8y ago
Why not tunnel everything over HTTPS then? Then even SSH will be secure!
777.
by spc476 8y ago
Three years ago I investigated the effectiveness of some realtime black lists (RBL) [1]. I didn't find it worth implementing. I also looked into the result of SPF [2] and again, found it not worth implementing. I rechecked the result
778.
by spc476 8y ago
The regression test [1] for our legacy application takes five hours to run. It takes five hours to run because it also needs to check every log message (via syslog) to ensure every transaction happened. I can't say it saves any time,
779.
by spc476 8y ago
When I was doing QA at work, I never used the official tools to generate the data files required for testing the application, but wrote my own. This brought to light a ton of issues and unwritten assumptions (both in my code, and in the ap
780.
by spc476 8y ago
That happened with me at work. A certain class of error would leak references and over time they would pile up. Fortunately, Lua (the embedded language in use) allows one to mark certain references as weak references and allow collection.

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