jbgreer

Slacker. Dr. C. Louis-Charles, Claude to his friends, has 69 books available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0GZBYQDQY/allbooks?ing...

I don’t see a LICENSE file in the project root. I’m wondering which will be chosen.

In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc.

Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.

At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).

It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.

A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.

The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.

Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”

Did I mention this was Retail?

Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.

At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.

Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.

Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.

In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.

Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.

I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.

Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.

I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.

I saw Sonny Rollins at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2005. I had written a paper that was accepted at a conference, and thing realized the festival was going on at the same time. Unfortunately I learned this very late. Pat Metheny was the featured artist that year, and I'm a big fan, but all the tickets for him were sold out. I checked the lineup and realized Rollins was playing and snagged a couple of tickets for him instead. Honestly, I admit I mainly went to see him because I wasn't sure how much longer he would be playing.

I especially remember that he played "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" - my wife and I still talk about it.

I was fortunate to go to a high school that acquired a single Apple ][+ kept on a rolling cart that was locked in the chemistry lab closet for safekeeping. Every school day at 2:15PM there was a race to see which student could claim it until they finally kicked everyone out of the building. Thankfully I had pretty fast legs and a nearby last classroom. Our first “instructor” had the good sense to know he was never going to keep up with a bunch of rabid students; I don’t recall any of the lessons, but I recall the experiments we devised.

In 1983 I purchased my first personal computer, an Apple //e. By then we had an entire lab of Apples and Franklins, but I no longer needed to stay. The setup at home was more convenient, but the limitations imposed by the previous setup had a powerful focusing effect: hand-written programs, carefully reviewed and mentally simulated.

Fun times. Thank you, Steve, Woz, et al.

My wife and I visited Reina Sofia last year and saw “Guernica”. That entire wing is fantastic: the section leading into the room covers war posters and other contemporaneous works, leading you into a room dominated by the painting, with side galleries focusing on smaller studies and post-work of characters.

Aside from the subject matter I was not prepared for the size of the work. It is one thing to see on a monitor or handheld screen, and quite another to see it full-scale. It is a qualitative change, not merely a quantitative one. So while this high fidelity picture allows one to study technique, color, and changes he made while painting, I think it misses the point. I say this without having read much commentary or critique of the work, but I imagine Picasso was so overwhelmed by Guernica that he wanted any viewer to overwhelmed, too. So if they do move it, I hope it is in a similar setting - in a moderately sized room, on a wall not much larger than the work itself, inescapable.

As ridiculous as it may sound, if you plan on visiting, plan two outings: one for Guernica, and one for the rest of the museum. That room and work are emotionally exhausting, and at least for my wife and I the intensity of that wing required a cooldown period.

Darn it. I literally just passed through and transferred trains in Maastricht in the last 2 weeks. What with the “anytime today” flexibility of Dutch and Belgian train travel, I would have loved to make a visit to the church a side quest.

I’m wondering who else recalls Charles Simonyi’s Intentional Software efforts at similar concepts? Not completely novel even then (1995) but mature for the time.

I have an Amateur Extra license in the US. I am also a Volunteer Examiner with a couple of organizations. Locally I am a Net Controller for a VHF Net. I am working on my ARES Level 1 Qualification.

It was GMT, wasn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ

My read on the reception of Steve’s post is that there are largely 2 camps, one of which thinks he’s given them a concrete tool to use, and the other of which thinks he has given them something to think about. I read his experiment as suggesting an agent architecture akin to Erlang supervisor trees, i.e. agents are cattle, not pets, and should be monitored and processed as such, with the obvious caveat that context matters.

I thought this article might be about Latent Semantic Analysis and was disappointed that it didn’t at least mention if not compare that method vs later approaches.

I fondly recall being a site operator and programmer on a Univac 1100/62. Remote sync terminals (UTS 40s?) and UTS 4040 cluster controllers. Fun times.

I had no idea of the influence of 'The Cheese and the Worms', but I also didn't know how long it had already been around when I chanced upon it in 1989. Time to read it again.

I’m with you: I read the link and think they are referring to BLE advertisements. The frequency of such advertisements is configurable. AIR, the advertisement interval has to be a multiple of 0.625msec. Per the spec, a random delay of 0-10msec is added in between the interval to aid in collision prevention.

I’ve mainly seen “BLE beacon” used to refer to types of devices, especially ones that primarily advertise.

There are some devices, like BLE-based remote controls, that advertise very frequently, I assume to reduce latency between a user’s action and response by the receiving device. It makes for a very noisy environment if you’re playing at home and not filtering based on MAC, etc.

In the free tier, Suno owns all of the Output. I'm wondering when someone will make a song, realize it's pretty good, and attempt to recreate it after creating a paid tier account.

Subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, if you are a user who has subscribed to the paid tier of the Service, Suno hereby assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions made by you through the Service during the term of your paid-tier subscription. If you are a user of the free tier of the Service then, as between you and Suno, Suno owns all Output generated from Submissions made by you through the Service, and, subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, Suno grants you a license to use such Output solely for your lawful, internal, and non-commercial purposes, provided that you give attribution credit to Suno in each case.

I transitioned from Apple Pascal (based on UCSC p-system Pascal) on the Apple ][+ amd //e to Turbo Pascal on DOS in the early 80s. Turbo Pascal was a blast: the very quick compiler, good feedback, colorful editor, and use of the Wordstar keybindings, which I already knew, made for a great experience.

I recall writing programs large enough to require use of the overlay facility, which essentially let you page in different parts of your program under DOS.

I also recall meeting David Intersimone, a great ambassador of Borland, sometime in the 80s - might have been later 80s - when he visited my university as a guest of the local ACM chapter.

Read the article and found myself nodding along. If you work with larger Contract Manufacturers, they often have design for manufacturing centers that will perform mold analysis and suggest modifications. They often have the advantage of having worked on lots of different designs.

And even further down the road: make sure to account downtime in your production schedule for mold maintenance.

I see others commenting on registration, certification and approval matters and I’ll only say: do not underestimate the time and cost of that for a global product. This landscape changes all of the time. One minute a country will accept evidence of an FCC filing; the next minute they require in country testing with a local authority.

I note that one of the few dentists he mentions by name as providing a diagnosis consistent with his panel and a reasonable estimate is still practicing: Dr. Henry Wah in Marion, AR, apparently still has a good reputation and has been joined by other family members: https://wahfamilydentistry.com/

I have a small connection to an early part of this story.

In 1982/3 I worked for a local data processing / software consultancy / hardware reseller doing a variety of odd jobs. One day the owner came in and said they were going to become a reseller of a new computer, a Victor Technologies machine, as computers and terminals on IBM System 3X machines via Perle protocol converters. I remapped the keyboard of the Victor to allow the right shift to serve as a 5251 Enter key.

Victor had rented space in a new office tower and held a grand opening a couple of weeks later. I demonstrated our wares. There wasn’t that much interest, so I wandered around all of the display booths, learned what they were demoing, and in some cases took over. I remember 3 distinct features: 1) variable speed disk drives, which meant the Victor could store more data than am IBM PC. 2) a built-in codec for recording sound, especially speech, and aiding playback. 3) a stylus/touch-screen monitor option, which could be used for CAD etc.

I had an option to buy a machine for half price. I was an Apple IIe guy at the time and couldn’t have afforded it anyway, but it was a sweet machine. Sadly, that didn’t matter much, and Victor went out of business soon enough.

Like others, I got to play with one at university, but my lab mate was the main user of that machine. [ I did have my own AT&T 3B2, though. ]

As someone who programmed assembly on a one's complement machine* 40 years ago, this discussion is interesting, from both the "haven't we learned anything" and the "makes sense to me" camps.

More interesting to me is how they are introducing this change, both in the previous OTP and next, and how they will arm people with tools to hopefully identify and understand the impact. I wonder how many folks will actually be impacted?

* Sperry Univac 1100/62

For alternate long distance French routes, check out Chemin St Jacques.

I note this trail passes through St Jean Pied de Port, and thus could be used as a natural connector to walk across France and Spain.

That’s funny: I remember seeing it in the mid-to-late 90s and being amazed at how lax the security was. I took several pics and walked all around it.

VeinViewer was invented in 1995 by Herb Zeman, a professor at The University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center. [ Disclosure: Herb’s a friend, but I wasn’t involved and only know most details second hand. ]. Commercialization of the device has a contorted history. Search for Luminetx if you want to read more backstory….

Interesting. As a counterpoint, I was in Norway a month ago on business and as a tourist. Did the Norway in a nutshell thing from Bergen to Oslo with time in Bergen, Flam, and Oslo. I used the Bergen and Oslo day passes for unlimited public transport in those cities. The later was especially handy, as it generates QR codes for both public transport and entry to most museums. My travel passes were handled via barcode docs on my phone. My tickets to a concert in Oslo was via an app on my phone. Route planning for site-seeing (which bus, tram, ferry, or rail) was via an app on my phone.

I paid for restaurants using credit cards directly to payment terminals.

I found the whole experience very easy and enjoyed how much I could handle on my phone.

Back in 2006-8 I had an NSF teaching fellowship, and my peers and I used BlueJ as an introductory IDE in high school CS classes. BlueJ has a feature called “Object Bench” whereby one can instantiate and invoke methods on an object. The main thing I remember from that period is that Microsoft copied that functionality into Visual Studio, calling it “Object Test Bench”. Microsoft even admitted they were influenced by feedback from BlueJ users. Imitation, flattery, right? Then Microsoft filed a patent covering Object Test Bench. Suffice it to say Kolling et al. weren’t happy, and the news made it to several popular sites (Slashdot, etc.). Having been called out so publicly, and having basically admitted their knowledge of prior art, Microsoft withdrew the patent application.

I still have my autographed copy of Mark Pesce's 1995 book "VRML - Browsing & Building VRML", subtitled "The definitive resource for VRML technology." I am pretty sure I met Mark and got that autograph at a SIGGRAPH meeting in Boston, MA that year. There was so much excitement and energy at the time.

[edit] I came back thinking, "We have got to take advantage of this." For a little while, there was an effort. The bigger players got involved, 'standards' started shifting, and the realities of our business network sunk in. Sigh.

I have often said to other devs that if you write code long enough, you’ll eventually find some crusty piece of your own code that will make you want to throw up.