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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy ‘todo’ list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It’s a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you’ve been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

    Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can’t do with the command line and ssh. But it’s free, so there’s no downside.


  • Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I’d been working on.

    Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it’s a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, “very Github inspired” interface. Time to run some updates…


  • Most common example would be a bicycle, I think - your pedals tighten on “in the same direction the wheel turns” as you look at them. So your left pedal has left-hand thread, and goes on and comes off backwards.

    The effect of precession also means that you can tighten the pedals on finger tight and a good long ride will make them absolutely solid - need to bounce up and down on a spanner to loosen them.




  • Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…


  • addie@feddit.uktoProgrammer Humor@programming.devPsychopath Dev
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    2 months ago

    A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.


  • Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.

    “One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:

    • can’t have the same character more than twice in a row
    • can’t be one of the ten-thousand most popular passwords (which is mostly a big list of swears in russian)
    • all whitespace must be condensed into a single character before checking against the other rules

    We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.



  • It’s a simple alphabet for computing because most of the early developers of computing developed using it and therefore it’s supported everywhere. If the Vikings had developed early computers then we could use the 24 futhark runes, wouldn’t have upper and lower case to worry about, and you wouldn’t need to render curves in fonts because it’s all straight lines.

    But yeah, agreed. Very widely spoken. But don’t translate programming languages automatically; VBA does that for keywords and it’s an utter nightmare.


  • You can write an unmaintainable fucking mess in any language. Rust won’t save you from cryptic variable naming, copy-paste code, a complete absence of design patterns, dreadful algorithms, large classes of security issues, unfathomable UX, or a hundred other things. “Clean code” is (mostly) a separate issue from choice of language.

    Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like this book. It manages to be both long-winded and facile at the same time. A lot of people seem to read it and take the exact wrong lessons about maintainability from it. I think that it would mostly benefit from being written in pseudocode - concentrating on any particular language might distract from the message. But having a few examples of what a shitfest looks like in a few specific languages might help


  • Seems fair both ways to me. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount of pay for a day’s work, as even if the ‘final product’ is only a minute, it will still have stopped him from doing much other work that day. Contrariwise, if he’d been asking for any more, the client would have been able to find someone else to do it just as well at the original price, since the requirement is basically ‘clearly spoken’. Wouldn’t make sense to get Ian McKellen in to interpret this bit of acting work.




  • Really? If it’s a big enough treatment works to warrant a SCADA, then I doubt an automation engineer with the experience to set it all up would be asking this question, but here goes. You’ve a couple of obstacles:

    • every contract I’ve ever seen for industrial automation has either specified which control plane they want directly, or they’ll have a list of approved suppliers which you must use. Someone after you will have to maintain this. Those maintainers will only accept the things that they have been trained on. Those things are Windows PCs running Windows software. They will reject anything else. The people running network security on those machines will have a very short list of the acceptable operating systems for running SCADA systems. That list will be a couple of versions of Windows Server. They will also reject anything else.

    • that’s not nearly enough information to make a recommendation. Which PLCs? Allen Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, …? I can’t think of a job I’ve ever been on where the local HMI hasn’t matched the PLCs. The SCADA software almost invariably matches the PLCs used in the main motor control centre, with perhaps a couple of oddball PLCs for proprietary panels and such like. Could maybe ask the supplier if they’ve a Linux alternative? Siemens will laugh at you and Mitsi won’t understand the question, but AB just might.

    Sorry - I’m a Linux evangelist, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for here. SCADA performance generally isn’t bad due to Windows Server - it’s fine, does what it’s intended to - but because eg. STEP 7 is an appallingly slow and bloated piece of software which would bring a mainframe to its knees. Which is bizarre - the over-the-wire protocol connecting the machines is generally a short binary blob described in the PLC configuration - these bits are the drive statuses, these bits are an int or a float for an instrument readout - and it shouldn’t be at all slow updating it all, but slow it is.



  • That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

    Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

    Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.


  • Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

    • Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
    • Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
    • Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

    Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.