Deerlux 100% Pure Linen Washable Tablecloth Solid Color from target.com

A short, high-tech, sci-fi, horror story written on the evening of January 25, 2018.

There was a guy who got in a quarrel with his girlfriend, and she kicked him out of her apartment without even throwing his clothes out the window for him. So there he was, naked on the street, not knowing what to do. Out of necessity, he grabbed a tablecloth from a restaurant, draped himself with it, and started to go home, trying to look as if everything was normal and under control.

Simplicity is the art of hiding complexity

Rob Pike, “Simplicity is Complicated”, dotGo 2015

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFejpH_tAHM)

Scenario:

• You are an administrator on your machine.
• Your machine is either:
  • In a Windows Domain, and you don’t want the domain admins messing with it.
  • Not in a Windows Domain, and you just don’t want useless services running.

In this case, what you probably want to do is prevent the Group Policy Client Service from running on your machine. Unfortunately, that’s not a straightforward task to accomplish, because if you go to “services” and try to stop or disable this service, Windows doesn’t let you.

Greg Young - The Long Sad History of Microservices

From the “Build Stuff” event of April 2017.

Talk begins at 9:45.

Highlights of the talk:

27:00 Placing a network between modules simply to enforce programmer discipline

29:05 There is other levels of isolation I can go to. I can run a docker container per service. That’s the coolest stuff right? What that means is I can make it work on my machine so I send my machine to production.

Read more »

Now that Java 9 is out, I decided to migrate to it my pet project, which is around 120K lines of java.

The first step is to just start compiling and running against jdk9, without using any of its features yet.

This is an account of the surprisingly few issues that I encountered during this first step and how I resolved them.

Issue #1: Object.finalize() has been deprecated.

Screenshot of Borland Turbo Debugger found on the interwebz, possibly the same version that I was using back then.

This is a hacking story from my University years. It ends with a nice bit about human qualities.