musiccog · HackerTrans

> but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards.

The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives.

I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.

musiccog

3 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for the link to the movie - will check it out on the weekend.

musiccog

3 anni fadiscuss

You comment about 'expressions of emotion' reminded me to tell this story.

We have had wild Rainbow Lorikeets visiting us for over 20 years. In our recently previous home we were up to 5 generations of birds, then we had to move.

There was one who was obviously out of her usual flock, and at the edge of desperation, who allowed me to hand feed her, and she was the first wild bird who decided to come inside and have food.

For over 10 years she came every day, met a mate after about 2 years, and taught him to come and sit beside me on the couch in the afternoon.

Then, over the next 8 years we had many families join us.

She grew to understand us, even appearing to understand us when we were happy, and when we were sad - that little Lorikeet really appeared to be empathic..

When she flew off to die (just last year) she told us in her own way, to look after her husband. The next day, her hubbie turned up disconsolate.. He didn't want water.. He didn't want food.. He just sat in his spot on the top of a chair and cried..

This went on for a week, with us force-feeding him (well not really, but hand-feeding). Over the next few weeks, his visits became less frequent - but at least he was eating.

Smart parrots like Lorikeets somehow appear to share so many similar 'feelings' as us. We even had one who spoke English and had a great sense of humour who understood context.

musiccog

4 anni fadiscuss

I think Metroworks Codewarrior was before Eclipse as I used that for quite a while before Eclipse.

musiccog

4 anni fadiscuss

Anyway, this HN story is about Atlassian screwing up cloud hosting Let's not get away from the story

musiccog

4 anni fadiscuss

Isn't that because you weren't hosting local 10+ users in the first place?

musiccog

4 anni fadiscuss

Another reason to run things locally 'that just work for you' Especially when you are a smaller company/team.

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

I think I originally found it on a /. story sometime in 2012 and tried it out as more organised local txt file documentation system.

And I loved the fact that I could write out the 'plan', test it, and then copy/paste into a terminal.

I really started it as I was compiling from source a lot (still do) in those days, and there were always little quirks that had to be worked out on different platforms.

For example the mysql/mysql-compiling.mm mindmap was created to provide copy/paste installations for Percona-mysql on Linux and OSX.

The weekly/daily mindmaps are my primary working space.

I wasn't running Jira at the time, and Freemind is faster anyway.

When writing something new in a daily node, I can then copy it into the appropriate program/program-function.mm Then I started experimenting with colours and icons and came up with my own system: - green (F3) for search questions - red (F4) for bash cmds - blue (F7) for sql cmds

https://i.ibb.co/GWmfhMf/freemind-mysql-replication-screensh...

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

Sure.

I use freemind but there are lots of other mind mapping programs available these days.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I have mentioned freemind a lot in my posts, but I guess I have never really gone into how I have used it over a really long time. First started using it around 2012 and have been building my local knowledgebase/library ever since.

With full text indexing on I can search a local directory for when I have (successfully!) used something like mysqldump and the context it was used it. Have found this is significantly faster and more reliable then just trusting google/stackoverflow - especially for edgecases I have solved in the past.

I use freemind 0.9.0 (self-compiled) as I have found it is the most reliable and never crashes version. Currently running with jdk1.8.0 with an override script on OSX Catalina.

How I use it:

- program.mm e.g. mysql.mm

Evolved into program-feature.mm

   e.g. mysql-mysqldump.mm

Evolved into program/program-feature.mm

   e.g. mysql/mysql-mysqldump.mm

- as a daily worktracker (week ending on the Sunday)

   e.g. weekend-20121024.mm

Each day gets it's own tree/node:

weekend-20121024

   Mon 18/10

      JIRA-123 Fix database blah.id issue

Each node can then be written out, colour-coded (red for copy-paste bash commands, light blue for sql), and finally copy-pasted in a chunk in order (windows users be careful of selection order).

Just did a wc -l on my 'program' mindmaps since 2012: 2604

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

> It taught very valuable lessons, Especially not to type rm -rf without checking multiple times.

"Measure twice, cut once."

One of the many uses I have for a mindmap in my daily use (Freemind 0.9.0!), is as a place to write out sysadmin/sql commands in a structured way before executing them.

If I can test it on dev before production - great. If I have to run it directly on production, following this method (religiously!) has saved me from any catastrophic (read unrecoverable) issues.

When you are under pressure it can be easy to say 'I don't have time to write out the commands'.

When touching production servers, you need to spend the extra minute or so to write it out.

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

Great read.

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

> Honestly, I almost prefer to start with a blank slate these days

This is about Technical Support training (not programming) and is from my recent experience.

When I was running a small customer service team on a Linux based product, and needed new staff, I thought that the best idea was to get people who had 'significant' experience in Linux.

That was until I discovered (from a bad hire) that people lied about their experience (resumes) and motivation (interview). This was an older guy - he wasn't motivated at all and treated me like a babysitter.. It wasn't about his age - he was just useless - and he had managed to fool me. That hire was my fault..

And although I utterly hate ageism (being 50+), I was turned off by this experience..

The next two I hired were younger guys (sorry ladies, no resumes submitted). Those two (somehow??) took to my particular style of training really well - and were able to take over all but the most advanced cases after 3-6 months of training on a bespoke php application. - one loved all the SQL I could throw at him - another loved getting deep into networking issues and how to solve them

Between us we were able to work through a ~200+ case backlog down to 0 by the time I left the company.

I am very proud of what these two guys put into their work (bash/shell/vi remote primary tools - all mostly alien to them to start with).

Not sure that I could do the same with training a programming role..

Staff (personal) motivation is the key I think..

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

I loved MacroMind (later Macromedia) (later Adobe) Director. Delivered dozens of educational CD's, corporate CD's and many of my own 'experiments'.

One of those was a map for EverQuest to help find dead bodies (it was a big thing at the time), and help swimmers who fell off a ship to get back to land alive. Another was a project to scan every user-authored book in Ultima Online (using basic OCR)

Director was extensible in that you could not only import 3rd party libraries, but write your own modules in Pascal. Much more powerful and extensible than Flash IMHO.

Flash won that battle after the buy-out, and Adobe extinguished Director. Still miss it to create proof-of-concept, simple or amazing cross-platform apps.

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

As an older full-stack/full-cycle developer for many years, this article made sense - and gave quite a bit of hope. If you can't dog-food your product, IMHO developers need to be as close to the coal face of their 'product' as possible. Per the article, assigning a team to a feature has allowed Netflix to get better coding outcomes.

With that said, I can also see a potential downside to this development model. Once a new feature is stable enough, the number of people required to support it has to reduce. Wondering how Netflix solved this?

musiccog

5 anni fadiscuss

One of the things that really pops out to me in the interview on arstechnica is his love of writing 'tools' - so do I..

I had a similar issue when I was working on educational CD's back in the dark ages - 660MB just wasn't large enough for all the voice-over we needed to fit the script we were given.

We couldn't go lower than 16-bit/22k/mono without making it painful to listen to, had to come up with another idea..

The key was to work out that the v/o artist we used had 7 phrasings/cadences, and as there were ~7 questions per section she was already phrasing the lesson correctly.

So instead of having to use an entire intro+question+correct/incorrect recording I could instead splice the intro and correct/incorrect responses (mostly) depending on their location in the lesson.

To just substitute based on position in lesson didn't work though, so the 'Audio Matcher' tool was born.

Allowed us to get over 3+ hours of natural sounding questions & answers audio onto a single CD. (..loved writing and using that tool) (..and yes of course we could have simply gone to production with 2 CD's - but that would have cost 2x as much, required installation and not have been anywhere near as cool)

musiccog

6 anni fadiscuss

I prefer my use of MindMaps, and remembering the index

musiccog

6 anni fadiscuss

In my last year of primary school a teacher brought in a mate he had to give the class a lesson on computers for an hour or two. He brought in a TI99 and we spent the afternoon learning about programming, graphics and 'sprites'(yes he had the expansion)

..after the lesson, I went up to him (Graeme) and asked if he would tutor me after school.

I then spent the rest of the year - (two afternoons a week) learning programming - and have been doing it ever since.

Graeme wasn't what I would call a great teacher - but he gave me the opportunity.

I remember my first program was a copy of a game called something like 'Wild Gunmen' where one or two players tried to get into a situation to shoot each other.

I eventually got a TI99/4a a few years later (as it was selling for $99(AUD). Wrote a flight simulator (dials only) and something that I really loved - an almost perfect copy of Frogger including music! The most annoying problem with the TI99/4a (apart from loading from tape) was that it hated running out of memory - and when it did would just crash. That always meant a reload from tape, optimize something, save to tape, and try again. Lots of fun.

musiccog

6 anni fadiscuss

For an up-to-date comment from Louis Rossman (amazing component level Mac repairs) hit this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPRjVvccQVM

musiccog

6 anni fadiscuss

Awesome - can't wait to try it over the weekend.

musiccog

6 anni fadiscuss

'Customer Support' is treated as a cost-center in far too many businesses. Good customer support can be used as a marketing tool - a differentiator to competitors.

But in the case of bugs and feature enhancements, this requires a more (..and I hate to say the words..) a more 'agile' approach.

In my experience, there is often a big gap between Support and Engineering.

If I were given a choice between delivering new features and fixing existing ones, I would always choose the latter.

Make an existing customer happier, and make future sales more viable.

comments