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Aha! So there is. So it's not bad implementation, just bad UI design.

So the trick is:

- Change your email address to something like kjghoyvgljhbvljhvkljhbv@mailinator.com.

- If you get a confirmation message to your old address, delete it.

- Change your password to jkhvouyflkjbv7897t^%REjhvljyyf.

- Go to the mailinator address to confirm the change.

- Clear your browser history.

Then you're free of HN forever! ... Or until you make a new account.

Made a new account? I don't know.

It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.

I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit.

What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.

It's an intriguing idea, but like the correlation between margarine consumption and divorce, or the rise in global warming and the reduction in pirates, it needs more than intrigue. Perhaps the Grauniad article will give it enough publicity that it will be studied and meta-studied, and who knows? Correlation may imply causation this time.

And thence comes most of the really stupid arguments on Facebook that aren't about guns or Firefly.

This is why I long to own a t-shirt bearing the words "Practising Peddant".

In Year Eight at school, I had an English teacher who liked to mix things up a little. One time, I was answering a question in class, and I used "different to" or "different from" or something -- maybe even "different than", I don't remember now. The teacher told me to stand up, then explained that there was a right form and a wrong form for this, and got everyone to pick sides -- "than" here, "from" there and "to" over there. Then I bamboozled him, because I noticed that the smartest girl in the class, a gorgeous lass who gloried in the surname of Snodgrass, had picked a different side, so I reasoned that she was more likely right and defected to the same group. The teacher was deeply annoyed that I apparently didn't have the courage of my convictions; my point, which I understood instinctively even at that age, was that embarrassing a student to make a point was a totally shit way to educate people, and if he was going to place such a high premium on game playing in class, he could call me Kobayashi Maru.

To this day, I still can't remember which is correct - "than", "from" or "to". But I can remember the look on his face, and the fact that after that he stuck with slightly less aggravating teaching methods.

As another commenter here pointed out, it's preferred, not correct. This is the old prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate, as seen among linguists. (Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I just read Language Log.) If you're fretting about the correct this and the proper that (prepositions at the end of sentences, "whom" instead of "who", and so on), you're a prescriptivist, and you may (note, I said may) be making up rules where no rules are needed. I prefer descriptivism (as in: "nauseous" now means the same thing as "nauseated", which is different from its old meaning of "nausea-making", because that's how it's used).

(Edit: "different to" sounded wrong. I could never remember which way that goes.)

Ha! I didn't even notice the error - read it as "Data Mining" two or three times.

This is a dangerous article. I was nodding and saying "I knew it!" so often, I got a sore neck.

Not according to his Wikipedia article, at least.

My theory was that the govt wasn't letting him back in the country because someone saw the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie and decided to enforce a minimum standard...

Coming back to the original post, I wrote a proof-of-concept Braille output program for a daisy wheel printer. Basic idea was: take a line of text input, eg "hello". Convert to Braille ("⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕"), but reverse the dot patterns to make "⠪⠸⠸⠊⠚"). Sandwich a sheet of paper towel between two sheets of paper, feed it into the printer and print the reversed dots using "." and space, micro-positioned.

Theoretical result: raised dots punched into the paper by the daisy wheel, able to be read by a blind person.

Actual result: the proportions were wrong for reading, and most of the time the paper jammed on the roller because of the padding.

Nice idea though.

Are you old enough to remember daisy wheel printers? Basically, the computerised equivalent of a typewriter, with the individual letters on a daisy-like wheel that spun around under computer control to produce slow but "letter quality" printing. When I showed people my handwriting font, they were very impressed and asked if my printouts would be in my handwriting too. Given that the only printers we had were daisy wheels, I suggested that perhaps this would not be happening.

The former government (centre-right Labor party) promised FTTH or FTTP (Fibre To The Home/Premises) but that was scrapped when the slightly-less-centre-and-more-far-right Liberal party got in and proposed FTTN (Fibre To The Node). The "Node" is a box at the end of every street, from which the existing (and rotting) copper network would theoretically connect to each home. Needless to say the idea is profoundly stupid.

FTTH is still available if you want to pay thousands of dollars for your connection, of course. We call this FTTR: Fibre To The Rich.

Pretty sure it was the way hi-res graphics worked on the VIC-20 too -- 22 characters by 8 pixels per character = 176 pixels wide, multi-colour mode where each block of 8x8 pixels had a background and a foreground colour. Deeply freaky.

I learned Turbo Pascal in an MS-DOS emulator running on old green-screen Burroughs smart terminals, circa 1987. I knew the terminals had some sort of graphics capacity because their font changed when they left VMS mode and started emulating MS-DOS, so I wrote a program to rummage around in memory until I found where the font designs were stored. Then I wrote a font editor that changed the standard font whenever I logged in, to a design based on my own handwriting. After that, I took a leaf out of the Microbee computer's books and emulated hi-res graphics: I wrote a program that printed all the ASCII characters from 33 to 255 in a rectangle, set their font definitions to all zeroes, and then selectively set individual pixels back on according to a pattern that assumed the exact layout of characters. Implemented line, circle, flood fill and a few other graphics primitives. Fun!

Looks like you right click on a cubelet to make it active, but in Firefox under Linux that pops up a right-click menu. Double-click would have been a better choice for that functionality.

Logic says that someone who spends more time in front of a computer is less healthy than someone who spends less time in front of a computer. I think it's solid enough logic that the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. But hell, geeks should be able to find actual evidence; that's what geeks do.

I'm amazed he wasn't dead years ago. Seventy four is a good twenty years younger than I kind of assumed he would be. He was only forty when he did the design for Alien? I know he already had his artistic style famous before that, meaning he must have been a wee tacker when he started out. Amazing.

Also: vale. A talented artist with a distinctive voice.

That's pretty cool. I like how it would seem to support literate programming at a lower level than just extensive comments (which always seem to go stale) or long variable names (which often hinder comprehension more than they help it).

My major objections boil down to aesthetics and culture. The themes and layouts that shipped with Drupal 6 and below were all eye-bleedingly ugly, really obviously designed by developers with no eye for colour, layout, white space or typography. In those days, you could tell someone was looking at a Drupal website just from the sound of them rattling through the cutlery draw trying to find a spoon so they could gouge their own eyes out. This carried over to the ridiculously complex menu system and the barely usable administration methods, which made it actively unpleasant to use the system as developer OR user.

I gather D7 has improved on this a bit, though it's still nowhere near Wordpress in this regard.

The main trouble I had with the culture was that complexity was seen as something necessary for power; as in, you can't achieve a result with a simple system. You can only chop down a tree with a Swiss Army Knife; an axe is too simple. This carried over into the disastrous decision to throw out all the code, including third-party extensions, in every major version update, meaning that stuff you wrote and tricks you learned for version N would be almost completely useless for version N+1. I found that idea so totally beyond hopeless that I was forced to throw out what I had spent years laboriously learning and move over to Wordpress, which suffers from none of these problems.

It's a magical place.

Quite a good description of VMware et al, I thought. I frequently need to explain that technology to non-geeks; this is the description I'll be using from now on.

Why on Earth did you find it at all objectionable?

I don't remember, sorry.

Amen, brother! Or sister. Or eukaryotic organisms. Whatever.

So what happened to Squiz? It was the godawful piece of shit that I criticised in the /. post that kinda-sorta lost me my job with AGIMO, so I wouldn't mind knowing how long it took for me to be proved right.

sniuff is right, Drupal is all PHP, through and through.

As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. The speed of development for WP is way ahead of that for Drupal, in my experience at least, to the point where I just refuse to work on Drupal installations and convert them over to WP as a first step.

Gesundheit!

There's a new version of it now, which is an option when you go to maps.google.com. I tried it and gave up because it doesn't seem to work on Tasmanian ADSL - sits and spins, never loads, presumably because the new state government got into the state's internet infrastructure and shot one of the hamsters.

I'm calling that Chester's Law, and quoting you henceforth.

In Tassie now, happily running my own business and not dealing with cretinous managers. But thanks!

AGIMO is funny. It used to be part of the Department of Communications, then it got slurped up by Finance. The people in charge were career public servants, totally interchangeable with no real idea of what the org was doing. What they basically did was develop policy according to whatever the Minister said in Question Time, which frequently led to whole new projects being invented in a rush on a Thursday afternoon and made into unassailable policy by Monday. So in a sense, decision were being made by MPs. Though you're right, this doesn't seem to be suffering from the same problem.