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yoursunny

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Circa 2006, I was in college, and I got hired to write a webapp for a college department. I didn't know JavaScript could have classes and capture variables, so I made the app with entirely global variables and plain functions combined with `eval`. It's over 2000 lines, and nobody after me could understand it.

I develop experimental software where backwards compatibility is the least of my concerns. To avoid the SemVer nonsense imposed by Go and NPM, I simply name every version to be 0.0.yyyymmdd derived from commit date. If Ubuntu and DPDK can name their versions by date, why can't I?

In case the second sudo wants to ask for password but there's no disk space for logging, it's safer to:

sudo bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeros; rm -f /zeros'

My software has only Makefile, but it works on both Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 11. The Makefile calls meson & ninja & npm.

I tell macOS users to install VirtualBox and then build my software inside.

IFRAMEs still require a top-level page and their positions still need CSS.

I usually use FRAMESET and FRAMEs: they are positioned perfectly in a grid, with no need for CSS or TABLE. There's no postMessage API: you can write <A target=other-frame-name> to navigate to a page in another FRAME.

HTML5 doesn't have FRAMESET, but all the browsers still support HTML4 perfectly.

Several years ago, I wanted to make a huge lookup table in Node.js during a research project, but the program stopped making progress after a while. This incident was detailed in my Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-would-you-need-64GB-of-RAM-for/an...

I incorrectly concluded that Node.js has a limitation on how much memory it could use. After reading this article, I now understand that the real reason is that I'm setting too many properties on an Object, exceeding V8's limitation.

Canistilluse.com 5 years ago

Anything that requires combining a click with the shift and ctrl/cmd keys is not going to go down well with the average user.

These users need to retake the computer literate 101 class.

When I'm in elementary school, we learned how to multi-select in the tutorial system that comes with Windows 3.1.

I don't know why Windows XP deleted these very important tutorials and replaced them with a webpage.

Freenom free domains only grant you usage rights. The registrant listed in WHOIS is still their company. You don't own the domain.

I have a few Freenom domains, but they are only for short-term use (e.g. try out a new ACME client). Nobody should use a Freenom domain on a serious website.

I hope HTTPS-First mode would become the default, so that the full page warning can finally convince my classmate to adopt HTTPS on their website that "does not contain any private info so it doesn't need encryption".

Goodbye, Fleets 5 years ago

I see Fleets as a thing that takes up a row in the Twitter mobile app, but I never clicked it. Now I hope Facebook says goodbye to Stories.

This looks great. It's the smallest ESP32 board I've ever seen.

There needs to be an ecosystem of "hats" such as OLED screens and environment sensors and buttons, so that it's easier to build simple projects.

In 2007, I had a script on my website that records every click and every mouse move. When my classmates are reading my webpages, I'm watching a video simulation of their mouse moves.

My website doesn't contain any textbox, so there's no personal data except IP address. Nevertheless, I more or less know who's reading my page because every student has a static IP.

Nowadays, I don't collect mouse moves anymore, but I have navigator.sendBeacon() for video playback behavior.

Since I switched from ASP to PHP (2008), I avoided file extensions in page URI in most cases, and instead placed every page into its own folder. This is compatible with every web server without using rewrite rules.

When I switched from PHP to static generators (2017), most URIs continued working without redirects.