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Ooops.

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Re: Ooops.

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gosh that's one of the best stories I've heard in a long time. The thing that worries me is that things like this are going to me rarer and rarer - there seems to be less interest in electronics, and less electronics that can be hack-fixed like that.

I am a software engineer by degree, but also took many electrical engineering courses in uni, and I can honestly say that it is starting to make a comeback. Sparkfun, Adafruit, MAKE and many other places are starting to make it more accessible, cheaper and easy to learn. The Arduino has been a boon, providing people with a cheap but powerful microcontroller to get started. While yes technology is getting smaller I ha…

arduino FTW! just getting into it and caused my first electrical fire. :-) good stories.

Re: Ooops.

#232
post #32

Here is the original bug report. https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/issues/123 I've never heard of BumbleBee, but it must be great if a user can have their machine wiped out and still thank the library author for their work.

To be fair, it was only rendering the machine unusable, not wiping out your home directory. A simple OS reinstall should get people back to square one. (Unless the OS reinstall script was botched and formats your disk when you've told it not to, which I've heard the latest Ubuntu does.)

Re: Ooops.

#233
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that just delete the folder instead of emptying it?

I can't get the wildcard character to show up ... it should be x.x

You can prepend two spaces to insert (http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc):

  rm -rf ./*
  rm -rf  *.*
To stay on topic, because of this thread, I just added alias rm="rm -I" to .bashrc, and I have never yet needed -f.

Re: Ooops.

#234
post #99

I hate languages with significant whitespace

Zim'sclassicbook"CodesandSecretWriting"beginswiththisexample ofaverysimplecryptogram:

   EAR LYTOB EDEAR LYTOR ISEM AKE SAM ANHEAL THYWEAL THYAN DWISEM
Ihaveactuallyprogrammedinlanguagesthatdisregardedwhitespacee ntirely.OldversionsofMicrosoftBASICforexampleusedaonelevelpa rserwhichdidnothaveaseparatetokenizer.Fortranalsoignoredwhit espace(asidefromthewhitespaceneededtogetyourcodeintotheright columnonthecard!)withtheunfortunateeffectthatthesetwostateme ntswereequivalent:

    do 20 i = 1. 10
    do20i = 1.10
Thefirstoneisanobvioustypoofthefollowing:

    do 20 i = 1, 10
Which,ifmymemorydoesnotfailme,istheoldFortranwayofwriting

    for (i = 1; i 
withline20beingthecorresponding"}".¶Ihopethiscommenthasbeenh elpfulinunderstandingwhySteveBournethoughtmakingwhitespacesi gnificantinhislanguagedesignwasagoodidea!

Re: Ooops.

#236
post #163

I've done a similar thing a few years ago when I was first starting work on my guild hosting company's code. At the time, the main thing hosted on that machine was my WoW guild's website, which I had been working on for close to a year, and was beginning work on converting the site over to a general purpose guild hosting site. I was doing some work for a client, setting up a mirror of sorts for some kind of yearbook…

I did not have backups or source control There’s an important motto to bear in mind here: data you haven’t backed up is data you don’t want . To be fair, this does bite us all at one point or another, but once it’s got you once you make damn sure it doesn’t get you twice. Also, these days I get shaky just doing FTP deploys. Give me capistrano and git, or even better a direct Heroku push any day of the week.

And, code listings that are not printed out are not backed up. Lets see you accidentally delete toner from paper.

Re: Ooops.

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The habit I learned was: before running any DELETE or UPDATE statement, run a SELECT with the same WHERE. (e.g. if I meant to say DELETE FROM puppies WHERE cute = 0, first run SELECT FROM puppies WHERE cute = 0.) I find I remember to do that because of the direct benefit (getting a sneak preview of what I'm going to delete), but it also means I end up thinking twice about the WHERE statement, so I'm much less likely…

I'm a couple of levels more paranoid than that. First, I'll write the DELETE as a regular SELECT (to preview number of rows), then turn it into a SELECT INTO to save the soon-to-be-deleted rows into a table with a backup_date_ prefix (So old backups can be deleted occasionally). Next, before changing anything, I wrap the statement in a BEGIN TRAN, and ROLLBACK TRAN. After all that, I will finally modify the SELECT IN…

What? No volume snapshot first?

Re: Ooops.

#239
post #163

I've done a similar thing a few years ago when I was first starting work on my guild hosting company's code. At the time, the main thing hosted on that machine was my WoW guild's website, which I had been working on for close to a year, and was beginning work on converting the site over to a general purpose guild hosting site. I was doing some work for a client, setting up a mirror of sorts for some kind of yearbook…

There wasn't any version control software out there 6 year ago? Oh, I've been programming for 7 years, I remembered that I used VSS when I started working. But maybe I was using pirate version and you couldn't afford it.
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