zabzonk

21 ms·

241.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Oh, I don't know. I quite like radioactivity. My Dad (RAF bomber pilot) had a pilots watch with radium luminous dials. I always fancied getting it after his death, about 12 years ago, but nobody could find it - my brothers denied all k
242.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Our friendly Lincolnshire ATM thieves are using serious demolition equipment. A little thing like a brick wall is not going to stop them. You might almost admire them if they were like Robin Hood, but they are coke dealing f*ckwits, as is o
243.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
I remember the first ATMs I used back in the late 1970s. They were IBM machines with a red LED display, single-line, in a fairly heavily armoured, tiltable (to take into account people's different heights) slot. These days we have big,
244.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
True that. I used to work in the Netherlands, and sometimes it seemed like every other week the rail network was disrupted by a newly-discovered unexploded bomb, left over from the plastering the Allied air forces gave the Dutch railways.
245.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
The USA never even declared the Vietnam "conflict" as a war, or Korea, come to that, though that did at least have the backing of the UN.
246.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
One of my favourite happy happy songs. > Shipwrecked and comatose is how I have often felt.
247.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
I liked all of the Hyperion/Shrike novels, except when Raul Endymion persistently refers to the heroine/love-interest as "my young friend", or similar phrasing - slightly creepy/boring. I didn't know that Summ
248.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
alloca() is not part of the C++ standard, and I can't imagine how it could used safely in a C++ environment
249.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Type "Manic Miner" into your browsers search bar?
250.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> can't recall experiencing that (at least not to the extent of chocolate) when eating gelatin-based stuff. The traditional jelly around the outside meat of British pork pie would frankly be weird texture (and probably horrible) if
251.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Way back when, I used to work in microbiology. One of our favourite tricks when we were bored was to fill a rubber glove with molten agar and dye. When it set, we cut off the glove and left it where some unsuspecting person would come acros
252.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Nah, that's not a pie! [brandishes a Yorkshire meat and potato pie] Now, that's a pie. Apologies to Crocodile Dundee.
253.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Well, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://la
254.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
I thought this was pretty good, not least because it attempts to explain isolation levels, something I always found pretty tricky when teaching SQL. Mind you, I was only teaching SQL, and so isolation, as part of C and C++ courses so that o
255.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
I thought this was a misspelled article about Kokinelli, the Greek red wine, fairly accurately described here: https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Kokinelli I used to drink this stuff back in the late 1960s, when my Dad was a
256.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> But that seems pointless. Making notes for your own consumption?
257.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
If you are going to post a link to a site like this, please also say what point the link is making.
258.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
You think people would pay billions for a site builder??? Or that it would have been SF 10 years ago? I take it you were not around much 10 years ago.
259.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago such as?
260.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Borland's debugger (came with Borland C++) was very good, if you can get hold of it. I removed copy protection from several games I owned using it, and actually fixed mouse support for another game.
261.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
In the UK I'm currently getting: Hmmm… can't reach this page Check if there is a typo in annas-archive.li. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
262.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" it suddenly struck me that there has never, AFAIK, a single-word noun for a C++ programmer. not sure what, if anything, this implies.
263.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> WITHOUT ANY kind of swapping to the disk how?
264.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Well, you can do it efficiently as you like, but if the data is to be historically accurate on a writeable table then if we are recording SELECT * FROM foobar it is likely to require a copy of foobar at the time of the query, or do
265.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> doing JOINs with the USING clause I'm ashamed to say that despite using SQL from the late 1980s, and as someone that likes reading manuals and text books, I'd never come across USING. Probably a bit late for me now to use it
266.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
I'd be too terrified to change the schema directly via SQL on the metadata tables even if the engine allowed it, transactional or not.
267.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> which queries produced which rows I doubt many real-world applications could tolerate the amount of data/performance degradation this implies. If you need this (and I can't think why you would), then I think writing your own
268.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Not clear if the author realises that all commercial SQL database engines support querying of the database's metadata using SQL. Or maybe I have misunderstood - I only skimmed the article.
269.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
Pale Fire is brilliant - wonderfully written and very funny. The poem itself is pretty good too - one of my favourite bits: How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp. How to keep sane in spiral types of sp
270.
by zabzonk 8mo ago
> a lot like late Philip K Dick Except that (for e.g.) "Scanner Darkly" is tragic (it's always made me cry) and very funny.

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