Fully retired now and one of the things I’d like to do is get back into hobby programming through the exploration of new and new-to-me programming languages. Who knows, I might even write something useful someday!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Why not? The last decade before semi-retirement I had all the different ways to get in touch with me restricted to my phone. My work computer had no email client, no messengers, nothing. I even helped lead the charge to eliminate desk phones.

    That little display may have been the single greatest priductivity booster ever. It stayed on a shelf across the room on do not disturb. The only people allowed past the DnD were my wife and my son. If there really was a work emergency, a manager or coworker knew where to find me to tap me on the shoulder.





  • The Stalwart mail server allows for that. They call them “spam traps”.

    Basically, it’s a real email address that literally never gets used or referenced anywhere, thus assuring any email received is unsolicited by definition. Stalwart’s spam engine uses any such email to help train the spam filter.

    I can’t imagine that Stalwart is only one implementing such a system.

    I’ve never used Stalwart, but it’s the email server I’ve selected should I decide to do what everyone tells me I shouldn’t: run my own server for me, my wife, and the two domains we control. Their documentation is basically a master class in email.





  • I didn’t suggest otherwise. I was merely pointing at a couple of examples where some pretty smart, pretty experienced people used Go to successfully implement entire collections of algorithms in some very performance-sensitive systems. It’s just by coincidence that I chose those examples because that is where my study is right now. Ask me in a year and I might point to your project as an example when the next person is asking for similar advice.

    If Go isn’t going to be fast enough to perform your task, then you’re probably going to be sorely disappointed when you finally get the performance you’re after and then have to stick it at the end of a wire with all kinds of stuff between you and your end users:

    Operating systems, databases, hardware, virtual machines, containers, webservers, firewalls, routers, HTML/CSS/whatever, DNS, certificate authorities, more routers and firewalls, ISPs, modems, more routers and firewalls, WiFi connected machines of all kinds, and random browsers implementing any of several different rendering engines.

    Quite frankly I can’t imagine a language that won’t offer enough performance to meet your needs in that environment.


  • The CSS also came, with the idea that HTML should focus on text information while CSS should do so on the visual design.

    My biggest beef with CSS is that it’s on the wrong end of the wire. What ever happened to the idea that the client is in charge of rendering?

    Or maybe it’s that the clients have abdicated their responsibility: the browser included with OS/2 Warp had a settings page that let me set the display characteristics of every tag in the spec. Thus, every site looked approximately the same: my font, my sizes, my indents, my spacing, whether images displayed (or even downloaded, I think) and whether text split at an image or wrapped around it. And it’s not like I had to customize everything for each site: if you used a tag my browser recognized, my browser took over.




  • That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,

    I think this is the root cause of the absolute mess that is produced when the wrong people are in charge. I call it the “nerd equivalency” problem, the idea that you can just hire what are effectively random people with “IT” or “computer” in their background and get good results.

    From car software to government websites to IoT, there are too many people with often very good ideas, but with only money and authority, not the awareness that it takes a collection of specialists working in collaboration to actually do things right. They are further hampered by their own background in that “doing it right” is measurable only by some combination of quarterly financial results and the money flowing into their own pockets.