"Retrofitting performance into existing applications is very difficult technically, and almost impossible to prioritize organizationally."
While this may not be the only explanation for why this trend continues, I think it's *spot on* to explain why this continues in commercially-funded software.
Yeah, Vundle's (presumably temporary) removal caught me off guard today on a fresh install. This, in turn, has caused me to take a hard look at the Vim plugins I was using. Turns out I only needed one...which I wrote. So I'm now just storing that one in the horrible "vanilla" Vim plugin scheme and putting that in my dotfile management.
Just a good reminder that dependencies will always let you down. It's just a matter of time. Oh, and never turn your back on a big company.
I visited the article only to make sure it mentioned the novel "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover.
I was thinking about that book just yesterday. I find something about the way it goes "all in" on a tabletop gaming system deeply appealing. Probably for the same reasons I find pencil and paper RPGs and programming computers appealing.
I'm a huge fan of running web servers in the house - but they don't have to be connected to the Internet to be useful and fun! An Apache instance on my always-on box in the basement [0] serves an incredible number of uses and can be connected to from any computer-like thing on my home network. Old-school CGI scripts can be written almost as quickly as terminal scripts and HTML forms make super quick interfaces. A home web server is probably STILL the easiest way to get files to heterogeneous computers and phones and tablets and...
This is an excellent and entertaining intro to the world of TTYs and I think the first question is a particularly clever way to introduce it:
> The answer is Ctrl+W. Because Ctrl+W is provided by something called TTY, and the other three are provided by the shell.
My only criticism is a pet peeve of mine: screenshots of terminals. I know it's more work to copy/paste and make sure formatting is correct, and you lose the ANSI colors. But it just feels so wasteful and inaccessible (<img alt="tty">).
To expand on this, people needlessly cargo-cult arcane dd commands, but on many (most?) systems, "cp foo.iso /dev/sdb" will do the same thing, but with possibly even better performance!
Haven't had any issues with name.com since switching to them in 2018. Their interface leans form-over-function for my taste (massive waste of screen real estate), but I can always muddle through to the DNS record editing interface in less than 30 seconds, which is all that matters to me.
There's this great quote at the beginning of the chapter I'm currently reading in the book _Designing Data-Intensive Applications_:
> "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work."
Yeah, mixed environments are really tough. Though (most) of my machines are Linux, they often have _some_ stuff that should be the same and _some_ stuff that should not. My solution has been to use the fine-grained GNU Stow approach, which allows me to apply only the bits I need for a particular machine.
The files you're managing don't even need to be text, though, of course, it makes versioning, etc. a lot easier.
I also check the host name in some of the scripts to modify behavior depending on the machine.
I did a write-up about my whole setup (emphasis on GNU Stow + Git) here: