Now that Yahoo Pipes is stopping, Chris Bernard rewrote his Dilbert/Penny Arcade/W.T.Duck feeds and published source on GitHub: https://github.com/cbenard/comicfeeds/
Learned a new phrase too (handfeste Datenträger) for something a marching band friend of mine was involved in: before he suddenly passed away at 39 he was a “high bandwidth courier” giving meaning to the phrase by Tanenbaum “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway” by driving around magnetic tapes and optical media between various locations for about 600+ km a day.
Who could imagine in the age where ISDN at home (@ 64 kibit/s) was fast, that 20 years later you could have fiber (@ 500 Mibit/s) at home both for like EUR 50/month.
Like Steve Streeting posted: having high bandwidth (relative to the time you live in) makes you stop thinking about your internet speed
It allows you to find new usage patterns. Which is good for imagination, work, etc.
I lied a little. EUR 50/month is for the subscription only. Nowadays that means a permanent connection. In the ISDN days having a permanent connection to an ISP would set you down another EUR 50/month for the ISP, and about EUR 600/month of data usage to the telecom provider.
I did that for a couple of years until cable and ADSL became available. Why? Because it was the fastest way to stay informed (gopher, newsgroups, mailing lists, early forums and web-sites) and get the latest software (mainly over FTP).
For a long time, I’ve persuading people to install English versions of their operating systems (especially on server side) at least for some parts of their environment.
The main reason is that searching for English error messages gives you a much bigger chance of finding the cause than non-English ones.
I’m still standing by that recommendation, but life has become a bit easier because of these two sites that offer quite good translations of Windows Error messages in many languages to English:
It is all about handling values that are not Integers, Overflow values and Nulls. There are subtle differences, in the handling of the methods, and the exceptions they could throw: ArgumentNullException, FormatException and OverflowException.
From the perspective of learning assembly language to get a grasp of thinking at the lowest computer abstraction, it is an ideal tutorial: the 6502 is a very simple 8-bit processor with only 3 registers. These restrictions make programming fun.
Windows Security updates sometimes break old software.
In this case it was an older InstallShield version (not even sure it was 2012), breaking with this message when security updates like KB2949927, KB3004394 or KB3033929 are installed:
ISDEV : error -6003: An error occurred streaming ‘<path>\DiskImages\DISK1\<filename>.isc’ into setup.exe.
An earlier security update KB2962872 even crashed InstallShield 2012 and 2013 during startup.
It raises the issue if security updates are more important than upgrading your tool-chain. For less flexible organisations (not limited to large ones; small ones can be just as inflexible for instance when an upgrade also requires time or skills to be acquired) this can impose a serious problem.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 