251–260 of 289 posts
I did some work for a major Australian Federal government department. They had a very secure environment and couldn’t (well, wouldn’t) allow webservices or anything else of that nature between themselves and other government departments. However, they did allow for email. Luckily the ITSM system I had took incoming and outgoing email. They had a stored procedure “hook” for email. I reimplemented the SLA functionality…
Email: the original asynchronous work queue!
In my first professional job, we used PKI-encrypted email as a transport for ebXML messages (order, despatch notifications, etc) between our customers ERP system and their suppliers. And in my most recent role, we received retail transaction data and returned analytics reports via email.
The great thing about protocols like this is that virtual all enterprise systems support them in one form or another. And it’s always been easier to get clients to set up exchanging data via automated emails vs SOAP or REST APIs.
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>Plus, since the pdf generation had to happen server side this is exactly my question: why did the pdf generation need to be server side?
1. Client creates a custom label and we store it in s3 2. They select x inventory items + click print 3. We retrieve and send the label file + inventory data to a service that interpolates the data into each template, renders to pdf, merges them, and forwards it to our printing service. We certainly could do the work on the client, but they're making this request in a context where neither the label nor the libraries…
is the printing service a real physical service?
anyway i'm doing basically exactly this same thing except all client side (i send the serialized "label file" and data to the client) but printing is being done using the user's printer
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Does AutoHotKey function on the login screen?
Nope -- I remap Caps Lock to control, and if I'm not careful I can wind up logged in with it stuck in caps mode, and no way to get lowercase characters without locking the screen, turning off all-caps mode, and logging in again. Luckily, this is hard to do :-)
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Actually, IIS automatically restarts the worker thread once a day by default; meaning most developers are unaware of memory/resource leaks that don't end up causing a crash within 24 hours. Got called in to look at quite a few "random" issues that turned out to be resource leaks that only showed when the site was under enough stress for it to hit the brick wall within the 24 hour recycle period.
The default IIS app pool elapsed time based recycle interval is 1740min, or 29hrs. 29 being the smallest prime over 24. Seriously.
I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…
A company I worked for in the early 2000's produced a reality tv series which was shot on an island about 1.5km out from the city shore. It needed a decent (but rather temporary) Internet connection and our company headquarters happened to be near by, so my colleagues set up a directional WiFi antenna pointed from the building's rooftop to the island. The total distance of the line-of-sight WiFi connection was about…
Now you need to match your experience with the post above about the van stopping in the link's line of sight and tell us: - what wifi you had and - what the bandwith was. We need to solve the riddle if it was wifi or laser link.
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Love that you've updated your page with a reference to this discussion already :-)
I was delighted at being able to cite an independent source saying such a thing was possible! In the 2016 HN thread "Strange bug workarounds" I posted a much gnarlier problem (and oddball solution): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12485921
(I often check the posting history when someone posts something interesting.)
In the midnineties I was hired to improve the performance (and eventually rewrite) a custom in-house search engine. I dipped into the software and there were some quick wins, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to reply quicker than 100 ms. In desperation I just grepped for the number 100 and sure enough I found a 100 ms sleep in the routines handling the connections. Turned out the author had made a mess of his socket…
An SAP consultant once told me that his preferred technique of averting long-winded and pointless discussions about irrelevant details was to insert random delays into his code. That way, instead of discussing irrelevant details, people would get upset about the performance. He would then sigh, dramatically, and say he would see what he could do, remove a few lines, spend the rest of the day reading the news, and - i…