This still stresses me out because my software is mission critical, safety related, and blindly assumes that the calculations will be correct.

There is a reason it is called a scrum.

Hey! That’s my IP address whenever the script kiddies are boasting in chat. How did he get it?

My senior year in high school, my English teacher started the year by having us turn in a list of all of the books we had read. My list was much longer than most of my classmates. He then assigned us books to read and report on based on some criteria (hypothesis: books that would make us miserable). I got assigned two existentialist plays, “Waiting for Godot” and “No Exit.” I think those plays did permanent damage to my psyche.

(Sidenote: a classmate who didn’t read very much got assigned Virginia Wolff. She thought it very unfair that I only had to rea d couple of plays.)

More like “Dammit, my domain auto-remewed again. Oh well, it’s only $12. I’ll cancel next year.” (It’s been 5 years.)

I literally make a new branch. clone, and use an external merge tool (beyond compare) when my branch has fallen too far behind. I don’t trust any of the automated processes.

Unless you work a trade, I would go with Harbor Freight for everything except cordless tools. If you wear the Harbor Freight tool out replace it with something higher quality. For cordless, I don’t know. I have Dewalt and wonder about others. I mostly avoid cordless now.

For trades, see what your coworkers are using. Do you want them borrowing your batteries? (No) Do you want to borrow theirs? (Do you want them to dislike you?)

Negative 20 is in fact less than five and twenty, so I think you are both technically correct.

We add the current year to the copyright dates, the current updates are protected from the time of authorship. So if the copyright says, 2012, 2014, 2022; I would add a 2024. The commit records can be used to determine what was changed each instance, but the update provides notice of when changes were made.

Discerning what is protectable creative expression versus functional and therfore unprotected is an issue for the courts.

The one thing that consistently gets caught in code reviews in my shop is a failure to update a copyright date. I have been tempted to submit clearly crap code just to see if anyone actually is paying attention.

I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don’t particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven’t been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)

Vscode is my favorite. Now there is a sentence I never expected to type.

I do dumb things like edit my network configuration do some stuff and log out. Then I can’t login the next weekend because the IP address is wrong. Also:

Ifconfig eth0 down

And I am booted from ssh.

I asked what Eisenhower would do if he saw the Nazi marchers in Wisconsin and had ready access to a machine gun. I don’t think that is advocating violence. I intended the comment to illustrate how far some Republicans have moved to the right since Ike was president.

Eisenhower is dead. Advocating for his attendance at a Nazi march is nothing more than a thought experiment.

I am a lawyer and I would get down voted for posts explaining the law that contained citations to the actual applicable statute if people didn’t like the statute. Using reddit up votes as a measure of correctness is fundamentally a dumb idea.

They permabanned my 14yo account because my anti-nazi rhetoric was “encouraging violence.” I guess Nazis are a class of humans dumb enough to give them money so they don’t want to scare them off. The post that got me banned had more than 60 up votes when it was deleted and I was permabanned. A reply post in the same vein was not deleted.

I used to litigate patents, and for international searches I have not found an adequate substitute. Depending on why you are searching, searching may be inadvisable anyway, at least in the U.S. if your search uncovers a specific patent (or even arguably should have uncovered a specific patent) and you are later sued by the rights holder for infringement, your actual knowledge of the patent can be used against you to show willful infringement, a damage multiplier. Apparently, companies that know about a patent need to hire competent legal counsel to analyze the patent with respect to their products and give them an opinion on possible infringement. That process can be quite expensive, so it is often better to not search in the first place. I wrote a few opinions over the years, but it was not a common activity. Accusations of willful infringement were pretty common in litigation though, probably about 40% of my cases.

Just writing this quick summary makes me glad I retired from practicing law.

Also, you are not my client, this is not legal advice, I might be a fraud, yadda yadda yadda.

My first Linux installation was done using Red Hat CDs that I purchased for around $20. Probably around 1996. Patching was difficult. Drivers for many pieces of hardware didn’t exist. Remember Plug and Play was pretty new at that time frame. Lots of manual resolution of things like driver interrupt conflicts (boards had physical jumpers that you could move to change which IRQ they asserted). Looking back on it, I can’t believe any of us were doing it. But the eventual payout was wonderful. I can’t imagine what 1996 me would think about how easy something like the latest Ubuntu is. I would probably be pretty awed because I have a decent understanding of the massive amount of work that has been poured into the ecosystem now to make it what it is today.

All that said, I will always have a soft spot for Solaris on an Ultraspark. That shit worked great.

It is not nearly as easy to use as Google, but you can use the Patent & Trademark Offices website to search patents:

https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search

I had an HP laptop in the early 2000s, the hard drive crashed (my wife set some mail on top of it and the mail had a large advertising magnet in it). I bought a replacement. When I opened it up, the hard drive connector was HP proprietary. A replacement drive from HP was $475 for the same size that I paid $80 for an industry standard drive. I bought a replacement laptop instead and have been warning people against HP for the last 20 years. Many people come to me for IT help (entire extended family), so I am sure I have hurt HP some. Their printer drivers are the biggest bloatware crap too. Absolutely scum company.