tingley

Good read from last year about how trucks from the current LLV fleet (which at this point are very old) keep catching on fire: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3ezx4/post-office-delivery-...

The police have said they are evacuating the building, but have not identified a threat: https://twitter.com/SPVM/status/1327353175670657024

Credit to the people that wrote and maintained bugzilla, both as software and this particular instance. It's still ticking, much longer than (I assume) they planned it to.

This criticism is pretty rich, given the venue in which it is posted.

A hollowed-out book that contains something other than pages is literally a fake book. It looks like a book, but it is a fake. It is not a real book.

If you are interested in this type of activism, and live in a city that offers its own form of ID (notably SF or LA), you can do this now by signing up for a city ID card. There is considerable concern that the city ID databases will be used as registries of illegal immigrants, so the more legal residents who take advantage of it, the weaker that signal becomes.

Plus, it's nice to have a second form of photo ID sometimes.

In SF, you need an appointment to get an ID. You can make one here: http://sfgov.org/countyclerk/sf-city-id-card

Years ago I worked for a company who was building a piece of networking hardware, and we had bought some code that implemented various well-known routing protocols. This included the TCP/IP layer, but it was just the BSD stack.

Our dev hardware had a boot loader that would use FTP to download the most recent images to finish the boot. After we cut over to this code, we started having an occasional problem where this download would fail -- the box would send a spurious RST and kill the connection. I was one of the protocols people, and it ended up on my plate.

I spent 3 days staring at tcpdump, adding enormous piles of debug traces, and finally going through the code line-by-line with a copy of the Stevens book open on my lap. Eventually I found the problem - they had made one single change to the BSD code, and in so doing introduced the bug. It was compiler-dependent.

Writing this code correctly is hard.

The disparity in disk snapshot performance was surprising.

This is the comment I was going to make. This is an /extremely/ apologetic spin from Owen Williams, and seems very unlikely to be accurate.

For technical positions, this was never a requirement afaik.

For at least some non-technical positions, a college degree was required, although not for any reason I ever understood.

This is not an uncommon SV story archetype, but as many people have pointed out before me, it's one that highlights the concept of privilege with particular clarity. In the US, both men and white people are more aggressive at this sort of bluff than non-men and non-white people, and there are strong implications that this is because it's a much easier bluff for them.

Valencia Street in SF has this, but it's set for 13mph, for bikers.

The extended pregnancy metaphor is confusing and off-putting.

There's not a lot to say. I didn't have any huge role in the project, although the experience working on it was hugely influential in the way I thought about programming. Maybe I'll write it up some day.

As for Hyatt, it just seemed like something he would do as a joke. Blink was a ridiculous feature, but it was a standard, which was a wedge that Mozilla leaned on heavily in those days.

I fixed blink in Mozilla twice (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89065) in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. The first time it broke was a result of Dave Hyatt's rewrite of the style system; I always suspected he had broken it on purpose. The second time seemed like it was just a mistake.

Anyways, a sad day.

When I'm allowed to pick the question, I invariably pick "Which is it?", and the answer is a series of random words.

Now you know, identity thieves.

Margo Seltzer taught CS50 for much of the 90s -- at least '95, '97, and '98 and also, I believe, for a couple years prior to that. (She was on leave in 1996, and Brian Kernighan taught the course.)

This worked for me as well.

Nice addition, although as a marginal Mozilla contributor at the time (and frequent IRC lurker), I remember a few other principals being involved -- notably Ben Goodger and and Matthew "mpt" Thomas, who seemed to me to be Blake Ross's primary co-conspirators. For a while it was just this skunkworks project called "m/b" (for "mozilla/browser", I believe), and there was a lot of implied frustration/drama related to AOL/NS-internal development process (the pinnacle of which was the doomed Netscape 6.)

I would love to read a real oral history of Firefox someday.

This omits one of the most interesting parts of the story, which is how Firefox evolved as an offshoot from Mozilla in the first place.

Also the name of a venerable BBS system [3]. I'm feeling OLD.

[3] http://www.hermesbbs.com/

The end of an era, no matter how minor a procedural change this is. The impact that Eich has had on the average computer user is unimaginable to me.

Thanks, Brendan.

> helping a customer define a process and improving that process with technology 100X.

This, this right here. One of the things that I discovered over the course of my 20s is that this one particular thing gives me vastly more satisfaction than solving any of the "big problems" I thought I cared about when I was 23.

Real Genius by a hundred thousand miles.

I've been using Evernote since October, primarily for straight note-taking (logs of things done during coding, draft emails, records of meetings, etc). I used to use vim + dropbox + grep, but a) I finally got a decent phone and wanted to get it involved, and b) I was having trouble getting a metadata system that was easy and worked.

Evernote is not perfect -- I rely heavily on bulleted lists, and their (Windows) editor has some weird bugs that I run into with some regularity. But it's definitely made it easier for me to manage and retrieve my own information, which is what I wanted.

Silver lining: I discovered m.gawker.com.

I was! But unfortunately I have not had a Mac since 2000 or so. I should really commandeer my brother's laptop next time he's in town. Maybe over the holidays.

Maybe? I'm not sure. I remember Andy Inhatko having the back page for a while, and some other people as well, but I don't remember where those things fall in the timeline w.r.t the merge with MacWorld.

Dvorak could legitimately be described as a professional troll.

Stopping right here to reminisce for a minute.

When I was a kid, my parents bought me a subscription to MacUser magazine, because I was glued to our old 512. I would read the issues cover to cover. (I have particularly vivid memories of the April 1987 issue, which unveiled the Mac SE, the original Mac II, and the release of Dark Castle.)

Dvorak had a column on the last page of the magazine. It was basically an Andy Rooney routine -- he was a grump who liked to complain about messed-up technology. One of the first of his columns I read (some time in 1986) was a rant about his experiences trying to play ICOM's "Deja Vu", a fairly innovative adventure game with a noir theme.

Dvorak claimed to be unable to master the interface (point-and-click!), and described in great detail his attempts to fumble through the first few rooms. I was 9, and I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever read that involved a computer.

At some point he stopped writing the column, and I lost track of him until I was out of college and suddenly he was a notable tech pundit. That has always seemed strange to me.

I'm not sure I buy this argument, because Wired consistently ignores it regards to men. Like in 2005, when they put Blake Ross on the cover (issue 13.02). Or 2006, when Will Wright was on the cover (14.04). Or 2008, when they featured Ray Ozzie (16.12) and Shai Agassi (16.09). Or Craig Newmark in 2009 (17.09). None of these people is particularly well-known outside of tech circles.

I did not go back all the way in Wired's cover archive to verify Royal's claim that no woman has been on the cover "for an actual accomplishment" since Sherry Turkle in 1996. But that is that is a fairly damning data point, assuming it is true.