Viewing profile — bm98

That was a great talk! Notice how his entire career got launched from an internship at Tektronix. I love the bit about how he found his own troff macros in use at O'Reilly because …

Thank you for this article. One of the great frustrations of using Magit for Emacs is the inability to read things because the foreground and background colors for various things e…

1982 Atari 800 here (was 8 years old at the time). I remember thinking the same thing at the time. When we first bought the thing, there just wasn't much I/O beyond the tape drive …

>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one o…

Software lifetime is an interesting topic. See for example [1], a 1992 paper that surveyed business applications and found an average lifetime of about 9 years, with a maximum of 2…

_That_ is the question we should be asking. If not, is it because geofence warrants have a higher legal bar if issued to a phone company? Or is it about the level-of-effort?

I always thought the primary driver of the demise of Flash was that Apple simply decided not to support it in iOS Safari. Is that not right?

Walmart. I've been Amazon Prime for years, but whenever I need to buy something with a high risk of being counterfeit (printer ink is the most common one for me), I use Walmart - a…

To me this is the crux of the issue. And it's non uncommon in software development: The developer fails to check for an error condition or raise an exception because doing so would…

Tracking time is part and parcel of being a consultant, at least if you have multiple clients and overlapping work. After doing it for 15+ years, I've tried it all - everything fro…

Standards like SMART-on-FHIR [1] and CDS Hooks [2] have the potential to allow innovation developed outside of Epic and Cerner inside of those products. Both of those vendors even …

Most new mice, yes. I use an original Logitech MouseMan 3-button mouse with no scroll-wheel. I realize I'm an outlier, but no mouse has ever come close in terms of comfort for me -…

Interesting - it's part of the routine childhood schedule in the US but not in the UK. From NHS: "Why isn't the chickenpox vaccination part of the routine childhood immunisation sc…

Time tracking. No matter how many fancy time tracking apps you use, it's still painfully manual. I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I…

> "According to Lee Nackman, Chief Technology Officer of IBM's Rational division (originating in 2003) at that time, the name 'Eclipse' (dating from at least 2001) was not a wordpl…

Interesting to compare this to some of the "old school" solutions for converting web pages to PDF such as htmldoc[0] or html2ps[1]. [0] https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc [1]…

Glaring omissions: 11. Security vulnerabilities and attacks (and the fear of them) 12. Technical debt

In cases where I need to download and install unsigned software that's not available via package manager, I run hashes (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, etc.) on the downloaded file and the run …

I believe the "hoarding the fix" comment was in reference to the patches for Server 2003, XP, and Windows 8 that were released publicly for the first time over the weekend (but had…

I'm a little surprised that the majority of the answers here are Yes! I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bo…

As a web developer, I wonder if this class of accessibility functionality renders the web accessibility guidelines [1] obsolete? Many of the guidelines have to do with organizing c…

It's odd that the status pasted in the parent has disappeared from https://status.cloud.google.com/ , as the page seems to be designed to keep event history - but it's not in the h…

HN seems to have missed the fact that the "foreclosure over 27 cents" story that has been in the political news lately [1] was caused in part by a bill that was sent for "$.3" inst…