kqcso

THANK YOU! That was it.

Agreed. Sometimes context comes from more screen, not less. I receive a lot of cropped screenshots that show the “problem” but hide the surrounding context, and they often exclude things that would make a solution immediately clear from a shot of the full application window.

If you are looking for nice Windows-only open source photo editor with lots of Paint and Photoshop-like features, I recommend PhotoDemon:

https://photodemon.org/

No question, I just wanted to thank you for your work on what became VB. I'm still using VB6 to pay the bills today, believe it or not!

It's an app I coded myself over the better part of 15 years now - it's nothing too exciting, just a LoB app for contract administration with a small but dedicated user base. The version I worked on before the current one was a local-only app. The current version was developed to be client-server. Toyed around with doing a web app all those years ago, but it didn't feel like the web as an app platform was quite there yet. I also had a fair amount of legacy code that was still useful that I didn't want to throw away completely.

Anyway, after focusing so much time and effort on the client-server apps, it is finally time to focus on a web front end (only 10 years or so late!). So I've written a middle-tier (running under Wine) with Nginx in front it. The middle tier translates JSON over HTTP->COM calls, then translates COM->JSON over HTTP on the way back. It's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, but it works and the approach has meant I can keep a tonne of existing code and keep adding features and improving existing features, which has been nice.

Agreed, it can be a challenge to debug. I probably spent a couple weeks getting everything working for my app server the first time around. It helps that I control the source code though, so I can lean on some old fashioned text logs to pinpoint problem areas. Wine updates can sometimes break things too (had some problems with early 6.0 releases breaking the network stack), so it's important to hold Wine updates and test new versions thoroughly before updating.

I'm a bit nuts, but I run Wine headless to host a niche product server for software developed on Windows many years ago. Using Wine, I can have one profile/prefix per customer, and run multiple customers on a single box without needing any Windows licenses. The way the original server was developed only expected a single customer per box (since they would be running it on their private network), but many customers have opted to have me host it for them, and a big rewrite was out of the question.

It's been working out nicely for many years, with only a few bumps and bruises in the early stages getting everything stable.

I think the main similarity between TikTok and traditional social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect. Once you've bought in, you see how amazing these peoples' lives are and you want your life to be that great too.

IMO it's all an illusion, but it's not much different from seeing a friend, family member, co-worker. or a prominent business-person/celebrity being more successful than you. The interesting (scary?) thing about TikTok is that it hyper-compresses that environment into a few seconds, then constantly bombards you with it via a neverending flow of videos. It's like keeping up with the Joneses on amphetamines.