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leapingdog

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Find a pub that needs you 6 months ago

England & Wales only. The website is a response to new business rates (taxes) arriving this year.

Scotland, Northern Ireland & the rest of the world play by different rules.

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Don't pick weird subnets for embedded networks, use VRFs 11 months ago

I understand your pessimism but believe IPv6 is coming.

I worked on network management software, the kind of software that runs on out of band networks that are unlikely to ever need IPv6. In the beginning IPv6 was a required feature for sales but it was accepted that no one was going to use it so little effort was put into testing it. More recently, it HAS to work. It is being used in anger internally in large telecoms companies.

I expect adoption to proceed at a glacial pace until some tipping point. Consumer ISPs will be the last to adopt it.

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Losing the War 12 months ago

I think it is fair to say that the USA rediscovered war fever after the attacks on home soil. It resulted in the land invasion of two countries.

There's a phrase people sometimes use about a nation's collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor -- war fever. We don't know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the gulf war was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action.

I was unfamiliar with the author but when I read this bit I started hunting for a publication date - 1997.

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The Great Egg Heist 1 year ago

Matt Stoller claims that the USA's problems with egg prices are a result of a European duopoly on hen breeding and USA cartels leveraging exclusivity agreements. I have no way of knowing if that is true or not.

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Why drinking coffee in Iran has become so complicated 1 year ago

Want a fridge? Good luck in market research.

If paralysed by consumer choice I would lean on Which?[0] magazine which is run by the Consumers' Association charity. Perhaps there is something similar in your geography.

In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels.

This reminds me of the grocery store in the film Repo Man[1] which had a few digs at consumerism. I prefer to know where my alcohol is from & who made it but I pass no judgement.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_(film)

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IPv6 Is Hard 1 year ago

They're using it internally. It's probably for the best that the last place they test it on is their customers.

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IPv6 Is Hard 1 year ago

Change at tier one telecoms providers tends to be glacial. It follows hardware upgrade cycles that take ages to plan and implement.

I spent a decade writing element management systems. An element is a network device - switch, router, ROADM, etc. Often you give the customer kit & software and they spend a couple of years assessing it. This software would be installed on secure out of band networks with no route to the internet. 10/8 would have been adequate for the lifetime of the hardware currently in service - 200G stuff. However, that's not how things played out.

When I started working on EMS software IPv6 support was a requirement but it was just a box ticking exercise. No one was actually going to use it. A decade later IPv6 HAD to work for northbound and southbound traffic, on an internal network. Otherwise, no sale. IPv6 is being used in anger in telecoms. I have no idea how long that will take to filter to in band networks.

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Bunkers in Albania 1 year ago

I witnessed some of those bunkers on a day trip to [0]Butrint. The tour guide told us they were constantly being told the country was on the cusp of foreign invasion during the dictatorship.

The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butrint

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Java String.format vs. MessageFormat 2 years ago

The release of Java coincided with the rise of the internet. It wasn't just write once, run everywhere, it meant global interoperability. Mistakes were made of course.

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Java String.format vs. MessageFormat 2 years ago

String.format is much newer - it wasn't introduced until JDK 1.5.

The choice expression is intended to account for different I18N language conventions. Imagine a language where pluralization works differently to none/one/plural. If you don't work on localized applications you can mostly ignore the MessageFormat type.

MessageFormat is often used in conjunction with ResourceBundle and properties files. The string is likely externalized and distributed to translators. That's probably not the case for String.format strings.

In real life you would typically just have "File count: " and concatenate a number. Translators weren't wild about it but they could work with it. Translators are typically not programmers and many would break any complex expression.

All the types in java.text are a bit archaic. They are basically impossible to reuse in a thread-safe manner. MessageFormat delegates a bunch of other Format instances. There's a lot of parsing and state there. Time zone handling is awkward.

I agree about the error-prone nature of this approach. I have written a library[0] that verifies MessageFormat syntax in properties files at compile time and generates typed methods for each property.

[0] https://github.com/autores-uk/autores

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Is Java Still Relevant Nowadays? 2 years ago

JetBrains make IDEs for a host of languages: https://www.jetbrains.com/ides/

Their Java IDE is one of the few they release with a free community edition. There is a commercial version with additional features. I expect this is a result from arising where Eclipse and NetBeans open source IDEs existed.

I like GoLand and IntelliJ. Superior tools to others I have tried.

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Understanding Big Tech Salaries 2 years ago

My silicon valley based employer did same pay bands throughout the UK but people in my regional office were offered roles in lower bands for their skill set compared to London. It was more money for less responsibility compared to local companies so not a hard decision.

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The only tourist in Moldova 2 years ago

I have never been but comedian Tony Hawks' 2001 book "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis" was my introduction to Moldova.

"All I knew about Moldova were the eleven names of men printed on the inside back page of my news paper. None of them sounded to me like they were any good at tennis."

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Age before beauty: Why a decade-old laptop is more than enough 2 years ago

I'm writing this from an older laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X121e from 2011. Intel CORE i3 processor, 8GB RAM, spinning rust disk. I bought it new, it was cheap and I liked the small form factor. It came with Windows 7 but has run a Linux MATE desktop environment for a long time.

From a compute perspective, this specification is adequate for what I use it for - primarily spreadsheets, letter writing and tax returns.

The main problems are with hardware/deterioration. The OS started displaying warnings about the battery so I run it off mains with the battery removed. I looked at replacement batteries but they are either woeful or expensive or both. I don't live in a hot climate but automatic shut-down due to overheating has started to become an issue. Anything CPU intensive is risky. Tweaking CPU throttling and monitoring via sensors hasn't helped. The built in screen stopped working but has mysteriously come back to life.

I've had my money's worth but I wouldn't buy a 2nd hand 10 year old laptop.

https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/pd015763-detailed... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-X121e-N...

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