The Vent and Rant Thread

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Thanks for the clarification. MSDOS code would present challenges in porting to an NT environment.

Well, it didn't really have to deal with DOS code at all, since NT was written by a few VAX programmers. And it didn't run on top of the Win32 subsystem, but parallel to it. That was actually it's biggest limitation in the initial releases -- it couldn't easily talk to the Win32 subsystem. The Interix subsystem could, for example, do symbolic links. But the Win32 subsystem couldn't interpret them. And if you had an application in the Interix subsystem, it was isolated from Windows, making it difficult to pass data back and forth.

I ran Services for Unix at one point, and also ran Cygwin and AT&T's UWIN package that Dr. David Korn developed. These days I run a set of the Gnu utilities built "native" for Win32 with MinGW. I never encountered the early OpenNT flavor.

I've run most of those at one time or another, but finally gave the whole thing up as irrelevant to the real world.

I've looked at PowerShell, but haven't done a lot with it so far. I'm intrigued by the notions of manipulating fully qualified .NET objects in scripts, but thus far haven't needed to do it.

PowerShell is now my primary language. At one point, I "thought" in Korn Shell, but that has changed. Not without a struggle. But the ability to pass objects down a pipeline is just so compellingly powerful.

Oh, and FWIW -- my PowerShell editor is gVim.

______
Dennis[/QUOTE]

[orlok]

Originally Posted by wodin

Never forget, HR is NOT your friend.

I call them Human Remains.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, it didn't really have to deal with DOS code at all, since NT was written by a few VAX programmers.

Yeah, Dave Cutler was chief architect of both. I logged time on VAXes under VMS.

And it didn't run on top of the Win32 subsystem, but parallel to it. That was actually it's biggest limitation in the initial releases -- it couldn't easily talk to the Win32 subsystem. The Interix subsystem could, for example, do symbolic links. But the Win32 subsystem couldn't interpret them. And if you had an application in the Interix subsystem, it was isolated from Windows, making it difficult to pass data back and forth.

One of the things that pleased me was getting support for hard and symbolic links in NTFS5, though it wasn't exposed by default. I run a freeware app called Link Shell Extension that adds support for creating links to the right-click context menu. Right-click on something in Explorer and click Pick Link Source, then navigate to where you want a link, right-click, and click Drop Link As, and select the kind of link desired from a menu.

The app supported hard links on XP and symlinks under Vista/7/8.1/10. A Japanese programmer provided an open source driver that added support for symlinks on XP, and testing here revealed it worked on 2K, too.

I've run most of those at one time or another, but finally gave the whole thing up as irrelevant to the real world.

Depends on which real world you're in. I dual boot Windows and Linux, and like to have the same set of capabilities on either side where possible. (I learned on a Unix command line before getting DOS, and wanted to get meaningful responses if I typed something like "ls -l" at a PC command line.) I found it useful enough to have that capability to maintain it.

PowerShell is now my primary language. At one point, I "thought" in Korn Shell, but that has changed. Not without a struggle. But the ability to pass objects down a pipeline is just so compellingly powerful.

I still largely think in Korn shell, because I spend time on *nix systems where something like that is the shell.

Oh, and FWIW -- my PowerShell editor is gVim.

gVim and Emacs are fighting it out for most powerful editor. gVim will certainly do the job.

My current playtoy is Mitchell Foicica's TextAdept. It's an emacs style editor intended to be small, fast, and absurdly extensible. The editor embeds Lua as the script language, and most of the editor is written in Lua which can be diddled from within the editor. The editor framework is 2,000 lines of C, and the editor functions are 4,000 lines of Lua. It's built on Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control, which provides syntax highlighting and cold folding among other features. I have it up under Windows and Linux.
______
Dennis

[CRussel]

Hard links have always been supported on NTFS, but until mklink was added as an internal command to cmd.exe, there was no native way to implement them. OpenNT and Interix could create them, and then they were visible and supported on Windows. Now they are fully supported by PowerShell, with New-Item. Which supports hard and symbolic links, as well as junctions.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I must not read things such as these. They make me wish I was born in 1960. Then I would have lived through all the good computer stuff, and I would now be much closer to retirement.

What the good computer stuff is is generational. You can find old timers who think it was when you programmed on the bare metal, possibly by inserting patches in octal. Never mind those namby-pamby assembler mnemonics.

I caught the last whiff of it, because I started on a very old XT in 1990, running DOS 3.2, and later 5.0, with only two 720 KB disk drives. So, I worked like it was te 70's or 80's until 1994. Then I was thrust into modern computing with OS/2 3.0, and later Windows NT.

I began on IBM mainframes when MSDOS 2.1 on the original IBM PC was first appearing on corporate desks as an engine to run Lotus 1,2,3. I worked my way across and down through DEC minis and Unix supermicros, and in recent years it's been Windows, Solaris, and Linux, on servers and desktops.

I got into it by accident. I was variously a graphic designer/print production guy, structural and ornamental metal worker, museum exhibit builder/maintainer, and solar energy analyst before becoming a computer geek. I'd moved to NYC from Philadelphia for love and for better opportunities in the design field. The love didn't work out. I temped for a while when I was looking for design gigs, and found myself at a bank helping a financial guy deal with backlogged paperwork. He decided I was useful, and started handing me things he didn't want to deal with, which were mostly dealing with the bank's mainframe. Five years later I was tech support for my area of the bank and liaison who went to DP and said "This is what the users think they want. Let's talk about what they really need and what you can do to help." I was the translator who spoke both languages.

The bank ran one of everything made, and I defined my job as "If it's a computer, I get to play with it." I got a liberal education in computer systems, finance, and the workings of large corporations.

Next stop was a small Unix systems house owned by card-carrying Scientologists, who knew everything (they thought) about L. Ron Hubbard, and nothing about the business they were in. There have been other stops on the way, and I've logged time on systems many folks have never heard of. But it was all a matter of being tossed into the deep end of a pool and learning to swim.

That love of the old, hardcore CS stuff never went away though.

My education was Computer Science, with a specialisation in (very low level) programming of micro controllers because of the love of the hardcore stuff, but nowadays, I'm often writing HTML/CSS, and trying to understand the latest Javascript framework / library fad.

(I have just written an entire rant about that some pages back... the one that got this entire thing started )

Yesterday and today, I've spend over a day to get a fracking user interface right, to show it at least somewhat similar in the major browsers (IE 11, Firefox and Chrome on the desktop, Safari on iOS, and Chrome/Android Browser and Firefox on Android).

An old friend is a former print designer who works in online design now. He was grumpy back when about the rising popularity of Firefox, because he was accustomed to just making it work in IE and forgetting about it. I told him he had it the wrong way around. IE was the least standards compliant browser (though it's better now.) He needed to get it right in Firefox, then go back and add work-arounds for IE's stupidity.

Currently he's unhappy because Flash is increasingly deprecated and the world is going HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript.

I sympathize, but one of the reasons people are moving the HTML5 is the <video> keyword, which will let you embed video without using Flash. You'll still need a codec for the video, but it will be part of the browser, not a third-party plugin. Increasingly, browser development has the attitude that plugins are bad, and the user should be able to do everything without resorting to them. I'll be delighted when Flash goes away. Mozilla implemented a plugin-helper in their products that runs as a child process, and provides a sandbox in which plugins can run, so a crashing plugin doesn't take the browser down with it. Flash was a primary reason why they did it.

A friend of mine, who is a front-end developer, could have probably done this in less than one day, and add jQuery transitions, slides, and other shizzle-wizzle to make it really smooth and blitzy. Or he would have used Bootstrap or something, which costs too much time to get into right now.

I can't. I'm just happy when the UI looks logical, somewhat decent, and works without problems.

Then, the data ends up at the server, in the backend and that's where I live. I write the stuff nobody ever sees.

A friend is in a position analogous to yours, doing devops for a startup. I was around when he got a call about the desire to do an online demo, but the machine the demo would be on was not online. He said "If you want to bend over and moon the Internet, do X, but we need to have an architecture meeting, because the machine you are doing this with is not currently set up to be online and secure."

He has a front end designer whose code would be demoed on the machine. He said you tell him what you want the front end to look like, and he'll give you one that does that, well designed and working as intended. But infrastructure stuff like security on the back end his code will connect to is someone else's problem. That's entirely reasonable, and it should be someone else's problem, but you must have that someone else and everybody needs to talk to each other.

I juggle data as if it's made of sushi, eating a piece every so often (hey... I do that with the rolls that fail, you know... so I eat invalid data as well). Analyzing it, transforming it, doing whatever the frack you want with it, saving it on disk and/or database... no problem. Done in a jiffy.

I believe Unix developer Rob Pike (at Google these days) said something like "The essence of programming isn't your algorithms, it's your data structures." I think he's quite right. One of the things I've done over the years is get data out of one format and into another for the benefit of programs that expect to see it differently than the form it's currently in.

That same friend who can make the blitzy user interfaces was a colleague of mine some time ago, and we have 'helped' each other to meet deadlines.

Let's just say he doesn't want my help on UI's because they look like a work straight out of the 80's. I haven't the knowledge to make them glitzy and modern; I have to go look up everything. So while I *could* do it, it would be very time consuming.

Similarly, I don't want his help on the backend/data part... although if "crashing" was a requirement, I would. Crashing the application is the main perk of his backend code. He forgets half of the code, or just doesn't have the knowledge on how to do it right; just as I don't have it for doing nice UI's fast.

He writes front-ends, and does that very well.
I write back-ends and/or algorithms, and I do that very well.

Trying to swap our tasks results in either very ugly, or very crashy programs.

The issue tends to be keeping management from trying to swap your roles. (Or worse, consolidating them into one job that one person is expected to do. Can you say DevOps? )

The pity is, the user interface is the stuff people see. Therefore that guy has a nice portfolio that he can show to people, while I can only show pictures of systems I've written code for. Nothing to see here... it's all inside. If you *SEE* my code, you'll probably looking at some sort of crash dump.

I had discussions with co-workers in the past where I pointed out that if our stuff worked right, we were invisible. The system Just Worked. We only became visible when it failed. But we reported to non-technical people who didn't understand what was involved in making things Just Work, and it was on us to educate them about what was involved, especially when performance review time came around. Part of any success I had was being able to talk to management in terms they understood to educate them in what was involved.

I would probably have loved being in the computer science field in the 70's and 80's (the time without screens and proper keyboards might have been a bit too old even for me).

One of the things I've been fascinated by for a while is domain specific languages like SNOBOL. I looked at it, and a descendant called Icon by one of SNOBOL's designers, and have versions of both here. I'm currently looking at Lua, which is designed to be embedded as a scripting language in applications. Because of that, it's not stand-alone. It has no I/O facilities, for example, because it assumes the app it's embedded in will handle that. It's turning up in an increasing number of places.

The hardcore CS stuff you loved is back in fashion courtesy of the Internet of Things, with lots of embedded development done on that level.

One of the folks I follow is a chap named Dmitry Grinberg, who is at Google these days. I encountered him in the Palm OS world, where he did things like rip a version of Access Netfront (the closest to a usable browser on Palm devices) out of the Sony Clie line which embedded it, remove a device check, and package it as an installer for other Palm devices. (I have it on my TX.)

Dmitry got Linux to boot on an 8 bit Atmel processor. He did so by writing a hardware abstraction layer that would intercept ARM instructions and convert them to Atmel equivalents, then booted an ARM port of Linux. It took hours to work, but it would boot and technically run. I posted the link to a mailing list largely inhabited by techs, and got told "We have drugs for that now..."
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Hard links have always been supported on NTFS, but until mklink was added as an internal command to cmd.exe, there was no native way to implement them.

Like I said, not exposed by default. IIRC, back when you had to install an optional MS package to get mklink.

OpenNT and Interix could create them, and then they were visible and supported on Windows. Now they are fully supported by PowerShell, with New-Item. Which supports hard and symbolic links, as well as junctions.

I'm not surprised PowerShell supports them. (I'd be surprised if it didn't.) I make a fair bit of use of them, but through the aforementioned LSE.
______
Dennis

[Rumpelteazer]

My family seems to think I'm able to conjure up cards on demand. They don't seem to understand that my process of making cards takes days to make one.

I just got home from running errands, when my father told me my cousin had called. She had picked out a bouquet of flowers from my sister and I for my grandmother and she wanted to know if we wanted a ribbon. To which my father answered that that wasn't necessary: I would make a card. So when I got in I was told I had to make a card.

I kind of exploded. For the passed week I've been keeping all my emotions inside and this was the final straw. It's really had for me to put together a card in less than a day and for me it's unimaginable to put something together for my grandmother's funeral.

My mother's suggestion was to make "something with a branch or a flower or something". Not helpful.

Now I need to think of something, and something that works with the supplies I've got (nearby art store is closed on Monday). Otherwise I'll be blamed for having a bouquet without anything.

[cromag]

Sorry that your loss has been compounded by this mess, Rumpelteazer.

[cromag]

This is going to be an incredibly stressful year on every front. I seem to be reacting by having my insomnia rear its ugly head. I got 3.5 hours of sleep Saturday night and, so far, no sleep Sunday night into Monday morning. I still have time to get (maybe) 3 hours of sleep before a meeting.

Ugh.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by cromag

This is going to be an incredibly stressful year on every front. I seem to be reacting by having my insomnia rear its ugly head. I got 3.5 hours of sleep Saturday night and, so far, no sleep Sunday night into Monday morning. I still have time to get (maybe) 3 hours of sleep before a meeting.

Ugh.

Well, if you suffer from it chronically, you've probably tried EVERY-thing, but...what have you tried, if you don't mind me asking? Fellow chronic sufferer here. BAD.

Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

My family seems to think I'm able to conjure up cards on demand. They don't seem to understand that my process of making cards takes days to make one.<snip>
Now I need to think of something, and something that works with the supplies I've got (nearby art store is closed on Monday). Otherwise I'll be blamed for having a bouquet without anything.

My sincere condolences on your loss, Rumple.

I know it's difficult. I hope that your family gets their heads out of their keisters, and that they realize it's a difficult time for you, too.

With sympathy,
Hitch

[cromag]

Originally Posted by cromag

This is going to be an incredibly stressful year on every front. I seem to be reacting by having my insomnia rear its ugly head. I got 3.5 hours of sleep Saturday night and, so far, no sleep Sunday night into Monday morning. I still have time to get (maybe) 3 hours of sleep before a meeting.

Ugh.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, if you suffer from it chronically, you've probably tried EVERY-thing, but...what have you tried, if you don't mind me asking? Fellow chronic sufferer here. BAD.

Hitch

I have always had a mild circadian rhythm sleep disorder. When I was younger it was actually a benefit -- I had no problems working a rotating shift, and was fine with 24 hours of darkness in Alaska. Also, I have family members with SAD -- but not me.

The routine insomnia started about 2 years ago and responds unbelievably well to a dose of strong light when I get up. I lucked into that solution last summer. I get very good results from reading on the deck in the sun -- when we have sun. I got a "therapy light" (intended for SAD sufferers) for days when we don't have sun and, while I don't enjoy it as much as the sun, it works.

This bout is stress related. Doesn't happen as often, and the light helps, but it's not a miracle.

[cromag]

At 1:43 AM I just got a robocall from Verizon, my telephone company, wanting to know if I'm authorized to make changes to my account.

Are you kidding me?!?!

At 1:43 AM?

I guess I can understand them using a robot for that call, because why should they have a real person making calls at that ungodly hour?!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by cromag

At 1:43 AM I just got a robocall from Verizon, my telephone company, wanting to know if I'm authorized to make changes to my account.

Are you kidding me?!?!

At 1:43 AM?

I guess I can understand them using a robot for that call, because why should they have a real person making calls at that ungodly hour?!

Are you sure it was really from Verizon? It sounds like a possible scam strategy - get people while they're dozy from being woken out of sleep.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Are you sure it was really from Verizon? It sounds like a possible scam strategy - get people while they're dozy from being woken out of sleep.

Getting information from anyone at Verizon is ... challenging. I say this as someone who worked for the old Bell System, the ancestor of Verizon, and really wants to like them. But Verizon has eliminated anyone who knows anything from any customer contact position -- I assume it's cheaper to go with unskilled labor and temps -- and it's very frustrating getting information from someone who knows less about their job than I do.

While neither the supervisor I spoke to, nor the online support person, could imagine what happened, it appears that there could have been a problem with the account. It may have been an internal error, a hacking attempt to get billing access, or something else, that triggered the automated "confirmation call." But, at this point no one at Verizon knows what happened or why, and I'm still talking with them. We're in the process of changing passwords and "auditing" our account.