Viewing profile — porlw

This can easily be done with a small shell script and standard linux commands. #!/usr/bin/bash MAILTEXT=$(grep "dbkey" db.txt) cat emails.lst|while read ADDR NAME do mail -s "Subje…

Another reason is that farming machinery compacts the soil. Techniques such as min-till and no-till aim to minimise soil disturbance (to reduce emissions from deep ploughing and im…

grep has a bad interaction with set -e, since it (infuriatingly) exits with 1 if no lines are matched.

I remember back in the day these were used by the A86 assembler to identify code assembled with the unregistered version of the software.

I think it was because in the 80's the US was wealthier and systems with disk drives were a lot more common. People would swap games on disk, and there was less pressure to learn h…

The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author) With this I could easily surface interesting articles…

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?

1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages. 2) I'm in South Africa, I've rece…

It's not really a conspiracy, just the natural outcome of design optimization - any part that still works reliably at the end of the design lifespan is a candidate for cost cutting…

Tyres are breeding grounds for mosquitos, shredding them stops this so this law is having the intended effect. https://blog.epa.gov/2015/08/26/improperly-stored-tires-lead...

There is an interesting series of videos on Youtube about harvesting energy from gutter flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6oNxckjEiE

Ben Eater's Youtube series building a simple CPU from scratch was a real "lightbulb" moment for me. After 40 years of programming (including Z80 assembly back in the 8-bit days), i…

What I find fascinating is that Lisp, commonly perceived as too high level to be practical, is actually at its core (in its original implementations!) an incredibly low level langu…

The problem is latency, which actually will get worse as bandwidth increases. 1 request pulling down 1 Mb can be quicker than 4 requests for 10Kb each.

Typically an architect's design would need to be signed off by a structural engineer before construction begins. The structural engineer would take on the liability for safety crit…

Use my new app! It's a special folder. When you put an app in the folder it will DELETE the app from your phone and store it like a symlink. When you try to open the app from the f…

Soooo... What happens when an errant grep wanders in to the directory holding these persistent pipes?

Double that to get the agency rate, and no one wants an app completely designed by juniors, you'll need at least one senior resource and probably a PM.

The politically correct HR unit for worker resources is FTE (Full Time Employee)

I'm in South Africa, and I'd say realistic rates would be about double.

Eros and KeyKOS had some very interesting ideas in addition to capabilities. Global process persistence meant that you could pull the plug on a running system and start it back up …

In the UK they've had a similar concept called Premium Bonds for over 50 years.

Handling cash costs money too - security guards, safes, deposit runs, counting.

Interesting. I wonder how does this compare to: 1) Buying every month 2) Only buying at some set period after each correction (e.g. market drops x% over 7 days). Are there any onli…