outofmyshed

Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were all doing it once we’d figured out the necessary Apache directives. It wasn’t just Flickr, although it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design

ST Writer was freeware and did the job, but Tempus was gold standard, even better than 1st Word Plus.

Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows. Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.

This is terrible advice.

Multi-region architecture is hard, and AWS sure don’t do much to make it easier. Cross-region data transfers are too profitable for them to do that.

Passive PoE getting a lot of stick in the comments, but for one-off point solutions, it’s fine as long as you know what you’re doing.

I have it to run a couple of MikroTik devices in awkward places and not having to run wall warts and flimsy DC cables around the place is very handy.

My next switch upgrade will be a proper PoE+ one, but it’s not justified yet.

If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.

Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.

A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.

Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.

It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.

Well, my employer’s AWS bill is in the region of $20m/year and the additional IPv4 tax is on track for adding an additional $250k to that for no benefit at all.

My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.

Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for general sockets, with a separate one for the kitchen, and usually individual 32A breakers for things like electric ovens and hobs.

Lighting rings are also separate, usually on 6A breakers. We cheap out on cable by not running neutrals to the switches, which causes nerds headaches when they want to install generic smart light switches.

My house is reasonably large (worked hard, all my own money) and has a 20-way distribution board with separate socket and light rings for groups of rooms. It’s handy for isolation purposes.

More recent builds’ rings will be protected by a combination of MCBs and RCDs, or individual RCBOs (now the cost has come down) which combine the two functions and is ultimately the safest option for most situations.

Individually fusing plugs (and in the case of high-draw appliances like washing machines and dryers, protecting with a fused socket) is still a very good idea. And don’t get me started on earthing practices in other countries…

The existence of Elite and Driller running on such limited hardware at all is a product of true genius. Anyone decrying the Speccy doesn’t understand the impact of the price differential on its utility and popularity. No-one I knew had a BBC Micro (although they were in our schools).

Anyone going “just use low TTLs all the time” doesn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with.

I have a commit of ~15bn queries/month with my DNS provider ATM, and if just one busy record has its TTL set erroneously low, it can cost an extra few thousand $ a month in overages. It’s not a great conversation to have with the CFO when that happens. Caching matters.

I only answer the phone - and that includes FaceTime and all other audio calls - to my wife and my mum.

Everyone else - particularly cold-call sales droids - can do one.

Sounds like the author just needed to set a non-default network key.

Powerlines suck, but when you have no other option, they suck a little less than no connectivity at all.

If your VDSL line runs anywhere near your mains wiring, they can cause crazy interference and erroring as the frequencies overlap. Some kit has a notch-out mode to avoid this (Devolo I think).

I looked into MoCA as I have some coax runs in my house that I don’t use, but when I saw how much power the adapters drew 247, I ditched that idea quickly. Instead I used the old coax as a pull rope to pull Cat6 through instead.

If REST APIs are the worst, how does that account for their immense utility and popularity?

I wrangled XML-RPC and SOAP back in the day. It was bad enough when you had exactly the same stacks talking to each other. When you had to interop between systems, ie .NET talking to Java, which was half the point of it all, it was a whole new circle of hell.

Move to the UK. There’s no other way.

nslookup and host both exist. It’s interesting that the author went straight into a programming challenge rather than looking for another program that may already exist on their system and would solve their dig-hate problem.

I tinker with some of this stuff, but almost never deploy it to production. The author, and others who practice this sort of purism, clearly have the luxury of time to dedicate to the hobby. And that’s great. But I have two kids and a wife who works online (as do I) and I just need shit to work otherwise the house doesn’t run and I don’t ever get to have whole days to myself to fiddle about with Nextcloud or whatever.

I have recently started to run pi-hole as I was appalled my the sheer number of awful in-app ads on my TV and my kids’ tablets. It’s messed a few things up but the trade off seems worth it for me.

If a company is worth working for, they won’t be hung up on a candidate having a specific degree if they can show equivalent experience and aptitude, through OSS or similar. In the UK this is common as well as the US at least.

I’ve hired CS grads and they need at least a year to learn how things actually work in practice rather than what they’ve been taught. Often this involves taking the simpler path rather than the more complicated one that immediately occurs to them. This is fine, BTW.