cybergoat

As hairy as it is, COM is an example of a cross language API/ABI. It's workable from C, C++, C# etc etc and even accessible in MacOS as "NSPlugin".

I was messing around with Bing's image generation recently and found it was very sensitive towards the usage of the word "Jesus".

It did not object to me using other gods names such as Krishna or Vishnu.

I managed to skirt around what appeared to be censorship by asking "generate an image of a man wearing a white toga while standing on a small hill, handing out bread and wine to its disciples". This resulted in a Jesus-like image.

Scrum is a sad joke. But corporate loves feeling "safe", with estimates in hand, even if they readily blow out. Usually it ends up with "watergile", a total mess.

You can just time kanban tickets vs estimated size (all the forecasting, tracking, etc, should be done by a manager, without wasting the team's time) combined with pulling from the right hand side and vigorous action towards blockers. Optimise for throughput.

During the best version of this, as I experienced, we spent about 5 minutes in the morning as a team, and occasionally visited the board throughout the day (not as a team, sometimes as a pair, to discuss something and add/move tickets). My manager at the time spent some time at the end of each week by himself collecting cards and doing the tracking to make the higher-ups happy.

This is rather clever!

What immediately came to mind was perhaps you want to hide a secret key from entering memory. If this was done in kernel mode, you would be able to disable interrupts/task switching execute the "secret" stuff, and continue on your merry way...

There is nothing particularly wrong in eating white rice, if your energy expenditure is matching up to the intake.

But as societies change, manual labour is replaced by machines and people move on to physically less demanding work, diets have to adapt.

I'm not sure where you went to eat, but I found the food in KL to be of lower standard as compared to Melaka (which is famed for its hawker food) and Penang. In KL, I had to be shown to the good places[1], but in Melaka you'd be pretty set where ever you rock up!

But the fruits are amazing! There is so much variety of tropical fruits! But my comments about the pricing were based on my observations at the supermarkets -- it felt like the costs were quite high for fresh fruit & veg compared to simply eating out.

[1] Shout out to Klang Bah Kuh Teh. It's been my first stop many times once I've arrived in M'sia!

I am more than happy to address your concerns.

You are absolutely right about the wealth inequality. There are also deep inequalities within Malaysian society not just along socio-economic lines, but also racial lines. It's a complex, multi-faceted issue.

My comment was intended to be a simple set of observations about diet and the broader society of Malaysia, relating to the one of the article's points: Rising obesity.

My wife is Malaysian, but I am not. Here is my outsider's perspective:

* Street food is very tasty, but often laden with gular (palm sugar) or rock sugar (case in point: Sambal). You don't notice because it's spicy!

* Sweet drinks (milo, teh tarik) often accompany the spicy food.

* The street food is so cheap, and available pretty much everywhere. People avoid cooking at home[1]. Fresh fruit and vegetables are not that cheap.

* Because the weather is so hot and humid, people avoid walking.

* People like to eat white rice, as opposed to brown rice (high GI)

* Society has transitioned to office work rather than manual work

* People can afford larger portions because they are wealthier

* The weather is hot and humid, so people avoid walking outside during the day! AC office to AC car to AC shopping mall, etc, etc.

[1] One fascinating thing I have noticed is the concept of a "wet" and "dry" kitchen. The dry kitchen is inside the house, and is almost a show-piece. The wet kitchen is where the real action happens (albeit by the maid), but is typically a lean-to adjoining the back of the house.

I want to give thanks to all the SqlAlchemy devs!

I am a huge fan of the custom column types -- they have allowed me to have code that works against SQLite as well as a production databases with ease!

I'm running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v8 and the LuCI interface that comes out of box is vastly better (cleaner and more feature-full) than the majority of consumer router interfaces I've encountered. In particular, the realtime graph of current connections!

You can likely set your ADSL modem into "bridge mode" and put a user-flashable device between that and your network. Once you get NBN you just connect the WAN port to the NBN termination box and you'll be getting DHCP from your ISP.

Some other bootstrappers from Melbourne:

* PayDirt - http://paydirtapp.com/

* Cycling Analytics - https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/

Other products developed in Melbourne (I am unsure of the levels of VC):

* Aconex construction workflow - http://www.aconex.com/

* Redbubble - http://www.redbubble.com/

* Realestate.com.au - http://www.realestate.com.au/

I don't always understand the hype about investment. If someone is giving you their money, you are giving up sovereignty. If you can build something that earns enough to continue growth, then you can afford to make some mistakes.

Edit: Formatting

I'd like to mention another local success story. Hidden away in Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne is Blackmagic Design (http://www.blackmagicdesign.com). 99% of sales are overseas and they compete with the likes of Canon and Sony. The company was grown organically without any external funding, and does engineering and industrial design in-house. This is not an easy thing to do (hardware is expensive to develop!) but it can be done.

disclaimer: I used to work for Blackmagic