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Today, I learned the shortest command which will determine if a ping from your machine can reach the Internet:
ping 1.1
This parses as 1.0.0.1, which thanks to Cloudflare, is now the IP address of an Internet-facing machine which responds to ICMP pings.
Oh, you can also use this trick to parse 10.0.0.x from `10.x` or 127.0.0.1 from `127.1`. It's just like IPv6's :: notation, except less explicit.8 -
26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
- Linus
PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.
The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.
While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.
Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years.5 -
Watch your git commit messages, you never konw when a webhook might publish the whole thing to Slack...
9 -
Oh JavaScript... can you seriously not even increment the exponent of a float without barfing?
*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*
15 -
College student here.
What are the most important skills/assets one should bring to the workplace? As a developer and a colleague.
5 -
GodDAMN, C# 7.0 is so ridiculously feature packed. I can pattern-match inside a predicate on an exception filter. Want to catch ONLY NHibernate's exceptions caused by a SQL timeout? Boom:
catch (GenericADOException adoEx) when (adoEx.InnerException is SqlException sqlEx && sqlEx.Number == -2) { return Failure("timeout"); }7 -
I grew up on a farm in western KS. My parents bought PCs when I was in grade school. First was a trs80 , then an Epson Equity 1+, where I built a spare key for it, and built levels in willy for my brother to beat. Then a 486 and pentium which I broke often. I ended up working at the same store in college for extra cash. While I'm an adverage developer, I do on and make decent $$. I still help them out with keeping their PCs running, for moms sewing, and dads Linux box. I figure I owe them for their investment in me. They gave me the tools to figure out what I want to do with my career and my life.2
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I grabbed 30 random DOS malware samples from my collection, rolled via urand over Python list, and tried to figure out how they work.
Results:
1x zipped EICAR
4x working but effectively useless ("yeah you wiped the first 100 sectors of the drive... but you wrote their prior contents. Literally nothing's changed...")
10x CPU hang
10x crashdump back to DOS
5x crashdump back to DOS but ERRORLEVEL=0 so normal termination despite real errors being given?
also make sure SOURCER is disassembling using 486 or Pentium opcodes or it misses some 286/386 opcodes and will count half the program as data.2 -
When I got X up and running at 1am for the first time on my first computer, 486 SX 25MHz with 8 MB or ram.
The program SuperProbe is probably depicted now, but it got me up and running back then. -
Family support (2 phases)
When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.
I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.
At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.
Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.
I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.
Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".
By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.
And it worked out. -
Fuck off OneDriveSetup.exe, nobody asked you to install anything. This "i7" is only dual-core, and I need both of them to run my code, kthx.
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When you realize your professor who programs since the 486 era names all variables as such ad "vd_gr" (Validation date grant renewal), doesn't know what encapsulation is and writes his own cryptography algs, which basically replace one letter by another
**Facepalm
**then I still I have to tolerate all the critics for why I dropped college5 -
Just created a CLUSTERED INDEX -- knowingly and intentionally -- for the first time. I feel like a frickin' sorcerer.
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In these dark times, it's inspiring to see that a country as insignificant as Australia can demonstrate to us how things can always get worse.
By passing a law mandating that encryption must be broken, in secret (like the US's National Security Letters), at the demand of the Government, the two biggest parties have colluded to destroy Australia's tech sector.
This is the same government that has been whining endlessly about using Huawei LTE equipment in Australian infrastructure "because it might be secretly compromised". Now the same is true of Australian equipment, by law.
My favourite part of all this is how there will be firmware updates for devices sold in Australia, in order to comply with the new law. How well do you think those backdoors will be secured? How thoroughly do you expect them to be tested, given Australia's population of only 25 million?
How can any Australian company expect customers to trust them now?3 -
When I was maybe 3 years old my dad built a PC with a server case, it was huge! The processor was probably something like 386/486 - not sure. I used to play DOS games on it all day long. And the best part is that we still have the PC and surprisingly it still runs!
(Meanwhile I am cloning my secondary 1TB HDD to a 6TB one) -
First exposure, nice question!
I've been told an Amstrad was my first computer (showing my age..), apparently taught me to read and write.
The Commodore64 was the machine I first fell in love with. I was just as interested in learning BASIC as I was with the games. Tried to use the books which showed page after page to write in the code but that took me so long, TL;DR...
Through the years, my parents did what they can to nurture this passion. Was blown away when I got the 486, even more so with the 686!
mIRC scripting followed, that had an amazing community, made a series of add-ons and chat bots.
Then got in to VB6 quite heavily and made a range of programs.
Had a friend who needed a web project done, so I recommended PHP based, and to help him out, I smashed as much learning in to it and pulled it off in a week, whatever the language, I've loved sinking my teeth in to it! -
Why the fuck do coding blogs insist on using themes with a 600px content column, then use code samples that are 3x wider than that? The whole reason I have a widescreen monitor is to not _have_ to scroll, jackass!1
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Lodash, Rimraf, Grunt, Gulp... I'm still not convinced that our frontend guy isn't just playing Pokémon Go all day2
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> be me, working on small addition to enormous feature branch
> build system in flux due to reorganization started a month ago, not quite solid yet, but mostly works
> f_branch gets master merged into it sometime last week
> bossman makes "minor" change to build system and edits master to match
> doesn't merge changes into f_branch
> bossman goes on holiday for a week
> no permission to merge master changes into f_branch
> linter barfs
> npm barfs
> build server barfs
> mfw I can't even deploy to our testing environment
4 -
just found out that the first CPU I ever had, an AMD 486 DX2 80Mhz, is now more expensive than my actual laptop CPU, an I5 460m...2
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I had my first config with a 286 CPU (dos only) machine when i was like 6.
My father brought the stuff in around midnight... i supposed to be sleeping already then...but it was my first fucking pc! Got so excited that
i was played the shit about a game called JBird like no tomorrow.
Had to upgrade it to a 486 dlc when win 3.1 released and some text editor's response time was over 10sec (for a letter or character to display on the screen from the point you pressed the button). Also it was needed to place a piece of paper between the two ram slots so it can recognize both ones. Seems funny with nowaday's hw and stuff. -
I was 7 years old and my father bought our first PC, something like a 286, 386 or possibly even a 486, don't remember... Anyway, the guy that was setting it up was a programmer and I watched him first set it up and then I watched him program something into the wee hours on our new PC, I've no idea what he was doing, but I watched him for hours, was dazzled by it as much as by the games he installed :)
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TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
I remember playing games like wolfenstein3D, supaplex, sokoban etc. on our family computer 486 which had as I remember around 100mhz processor. (120mhz in TURBO mode)
Yeah and I did created a few levels in wolfenstein, there was a simple editor.
From programming view I did code my first website only using html and inline css in early 2000s. However internet was a thing of a rich people back then (in my country), so my brother downloaded the whole website with docs and basics of html/css/js for me in collage. My first website was coded on 300mhz pentium2 (or 3?) with no internet connection, took me about a two months to complete and was total mess. But was graphically satisfying with nice gifs which took tens od seconds to download. Main container had 600px width and looked pretty good on my 800x600 resolution.
I still remember messing with BOM signature because of notepad could not save a file without BOM. Leaving all utf8 chars as mess after saving.
Good old times. -
Got my QBASIC demopart ready for testing, completely optimized and ready to roll. Found 486 owner (33MHz, 8MB of RAM) who tested it for me.
Takes 13 seconds for the scroller to draw each frame at 300x200.
No possible optimizations are present, everything's crushed as far as it'll go, meaning a completely different method of scrolling is needed.
(Still faster than the array method by 37 seconds per frame, but y'know...)
fuck me... -
Fuck MS, why couldn't you update the NuGet API URL when NuGet updated? The warning on nuget.org states,
"This package will only be available to download with SemVer 2.0.0 compatible NuGet clients, such as Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.3) and above or NuGet client 4.3.0 and above"
It says nothing about using the V3 endpoint, so if you''re like me and updated NuGet to 4.5 and still got nothing but
"NU1101: Unable to find package Foo.Bar. No packages exist with this id in source(s): https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/"
...then you'll be very confused until it strikes you that there might be a new API version. Even if MS doesn't want to deprecate the V2 API just yet, it would be awfully nice to just state on the frickin' site that not only do you need NuGet >= 4.3.x, but also the correct feed URL.
$_DEITY knows how many dev-hours have been lost to this shit.
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Goddamn, Windows' idea of symlinks is completely broken. It's like they faked it at the UI level, but if your build process wants to copy the file? Too bad, it's not real so you can't copy it.1
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the people in Ops
all have space heaters, but we
don't have the power
Seriously though, building management needs to turn up the heat by like 3°C. And install new breakers. And fix the shitty wiring. -
I'd tinkered with computers for a long time but the breakthrough moment for me was a robotics class in elementary school where I programmed Legos in TC Logo.
That summer, I made a washing machine with multiple cycles and a door sensor to interrupt the cycles.
Soon after, I played with the code for Gorillas in QBasic to fix a race condition when running it on my 486 at home.
1 -
Playing Sierra Online games like Kings Quest and Thexdar on an Epson 8088 with duel 5 1/4 floppy drives and no hard drive. I don't miss the days of having to swap disks when moving between different areas in the games.
I remember when my dad got a 486 DX/2 with a 300 MB hard drive and I could fit all my games on it. Prior to that on the 286 that had a 40 MB drive I created a batch file with a menu to select a game that would unzip the game and launch it, then when I exited the game it would zip it back up and delete the directory. -
It looks like Microsoft are back to their old tricks, specifically the DirectX 9 naming scheme. Naming releases after Northern Hemisphere seasons and repeating words never gets old and/or confusing!
Who's looking forward the "Winter (2018) Creator's Update"?6 -
Opus is an amazing codec, but did Soundcloud really have to switch to it with a bitrate of 64kbps? even 80kbps would have been worlds better.
Bandwidth isn't _that_ expensive, even post-neutrality.4 -
You know what's more fun than debugging a SQL stored prodecure?
Debugging a SP which CATCHes all errors and instead returns an error code. Because exceptions are scary... -
Visual Studio's Test Explorer is a piece of shit.
Maybe the user wants to repeat the last test run without rebuilding? No can do. Maybe the user didn't add or remove any tests, but just needs to rebuild without running test discovery again? Nah. Maybe the user just needs to discover tests from THE ONLY ASSEMBLY WHICH WAS REBUILT? Too frickin' bad.
A 120-second turnaround (30 to build, 90 to discover) just to _start_ a test run is bloody atrocious. Especially when VS decides to run test discovery twice in a row for no given reason.
*sigh*...
I'd use ReSharper's runner, but unfortunately it isn't capable of running xUnit v2 tests when you've designated a custom XUnitTestFramework. -
Office manager just mandated that our standing desks would have a "cable pouch" installed at the rear for cable management. My cable tray **was** the neatest of everyone in dev, now it's unscrewed on the floor and all my cables plus the laptop charger are hanging loose, because notmyjob.jpg and contractors generally DGAF.
Oh, and they didn't install it flush with the rear of the desk, presumably because they didn't want to take off my laptop stand. So it's right in the way of my feet when I'm sitting.
Nothing that I can't fix with a screwdriver in my own time, fortunately. -
I wish the U.S. didn't "pasteurize" eggs, because without that, eggs are shelf-stable, which would mean I could keep them in a basket on my countertop and label it "npm"2
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Javascript is a lot easier when you remember that there's a convenient REPL that is never further than an F12 away2
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Using ReSharper is like becoming enlightened, or de-brainwashing oneself to see true reality. Of my entire dev team, I'm the only one who can see the fnords!
Unused identifiers, badly sorted modifiers, unused property setters, redundant `this`/namespace, redundant casts... Surely if they could see them too, such code would not survive!
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