Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who created the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste," has passed away at the age of 74 (17 Feb 2020).

In 1973, Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste".

In addition to "cut," "copy," and "paste" terminologies, Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing. It ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system's various functions and apps. When they've opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor's insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.

Sure Edge... let me just give larry and sergey a quick call, I'm sure they will be happy to help me fix your problems.

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

In memory of the giant of engineering that was Larry Tesler, today I will be coding solely by copying and pasting. Thanks for making my life so easy, Larry. RIP.

The GashlyCode Tinies

A is for Amy whose malloc was one byte short
B is for Basil who used a quadratic sort
C is for Chuck who checked floats for equality
D is for Desmond who double-freed memory
E is for Ed whose exceptions weren’t handled
F is for Franny whose stack pointers dangled
G is for Glenda whose reads and writes raced
H is for Hans who forgot the base case
I is for Ivan who did not initialize
J is for Jenny who did not know Least Surprise
K is for Kate whose inheritance depth might shock
L is for Larry who never released a lock
M is for Meg who used negatives as unsigned
N is for Ned with behavior left undefined
O is for Olive whose index was off by one
P is for Pat who ignored buffer overrun
Q is for Quentin whose numbers had overflows
R is for Rhoda whose code made the rep exposed
S is for Sam who skipped retesting after wait()
T is for Tom who lacked TCP_NODELAY
U is for Una whose functions were most verbose
V is for Vic who subtracted when floats were close
W is for Winnie who aliased arguments
X is for Xerxes who thought type casts made good sense
Y is for Yorick whose interface was too wide
Z is for Zack in whose code nulls were often spied

- Andrew Myers

So I take leave for a day right.

I come back to the office and my teamlead asks me to start running tests and in the same breath he adds, "so I added SOME code so that it would cater for the annoying popup".
I said cool and made nothing of it.

A few minuts later he stands behind me asking me why its so slow and my reply was.....

"Well I wasn't in yesterday and you added code and it wasn't this slo... "

Words arnt even out of my mouth and he starts shouting at me

"DON'T SHIFT BLAME!!! Don't Shift Blame."

Well okay then sorry...... I guess.

"I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS." - Larry DeLuca

RIP Dr. Larry Roberts, who helped found ARPAnet and the internet. Your legacy will live on well into the future.

"It is far better to adapt the technology to the user than to force the user to adapt to the technology. " - Larry Marine

"We’re not insulting Larry [Wall] by saying he’s lazy; laziness is a virtue. The wheelbarrow was invented by someone
who was too lazy to carry things; writing was invented by someone who was too lazy to memorize; Perl was
invented by someone who was too lazy to get the job done without inventing a whole new computer language."
- footnote from Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, and Tom Phoenix

Hello all, Just started with the Rant.

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

His long do you think it will take for Google to come up with a true replacement for Java. A replacement, not an alternative like Kotlin, but a complete "go f**k yourself, Larry" replacement that anyone can port their Java app over to. On January 1, if you are a for profit, Larry had said if you want to update to the next version and use Java SE to code with, you need a support license. It's a brill move, because Java is everywhere, and at least for a little while, it will generate a respectable profit for Oracle. But I'm sure Google is working on something to stick it to Larry. Wonder if EU competition chief Vestager will threaten am investigation. This should be fun to watch.

"What's important is not simplicity or complexity, but how you bridge the two." - Larry Wall

Asking my mum to answer the child safety questions to Leisure Suit Larry.
"Here you go. Oh that looks fun.."
"Can you go now?"
-- I was 6.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Not a bad experience per say, but it was the only one I have been to so far...

Went to a hackaton with my friend for the Amazon Alexa and we were asked to create a skill in 30 minutes.

My friend and I had never used JavaScript or the Alexa API but we came up with the idea of having Alexa respond with a voice clip of Larry David saying "pretttay prettay good" from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Unfortunately we couldn't get the error regex or something thing on Alexa to recognise video URLs but we still likely our idea 🙃

Realizing that C# is far more easier to read than Java - I'll never take a job for that shithole/shithouse language in the industry (lmfao). I barely touch either...

How much shit am I gonna get from people for this? Larry Ellison's fanboys are gonna crucify me. I'm suicidal anyway lol

"Programming is easy, until it isn't."
(with regards to Larry page's quote on crazy ideas)

Larry Wall
I really like the fact that he approached perl with similar ideas like in the early days of programming.
He also seems like a down to earth guy.

It is kind of sad that perl isn't used as much nowadays.

when you spend hours doing reserch trying to figure out how to get a better job in a different country and some idiot comes along to say its not possible...

gawd... I need help.

So my company is forcing me to take this ISTQB exams for testing and QA... after 10 months of employment.... "Thinks to self" I can wing this cant I?

Data must fall!!!

data must fall!!!

data must fall!!!

I want to relocate to U.S from South Africa.
I'm qualified as a systems developer and currently doing an internship as a QA tester (automation)... sigh.. where to start.. SA has no future for devs here.

"Using simpler forms and straightforward, easy-to-use instruments and controls allows you to achieve a very high level of craftsmanship. We then use color and texture to create a personality for each vehicle." - Larry Erickson

larry elison laughs the term cloud computing years ago, now offers oracle cloud but failed to come up with an effective strategy, wants to monitize java.

(but still a billionaire though)

Read basic documentation.
Pick a fun project to do it with.
Start doing it - with lots of help from larry page and the overflow site.

Fml!!!!! Doing some mobile automation and the client emails askimg me to automate a signature simulating a client signs for an item........... well sure let me make about 50 random squiggles quick , cause you know. That shits easy. (Facepalm)

need help with android automation. no where on the enire internet is there a solution for taping the "Done" button on the soft keyboard

That's The Larry Ellison Taking on AWS

Today there is milk for cereal, tomorrow.... there is nothing? Wtf do you people do? Inhale the fu#& stuff? 28 1L cartons a day wtf!!!!!!!!