simontatham

simontatham, 4 hours ago

@andrewducker YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS

simontatham, 3 days ago

@andrewducker when they put that on a VTOL they'll really have jumped the shark.

simontatham, 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Motivation: even if you don't think it's a good idea to actually implement deletion of the linked message, it would at least be nice for a mail system to tell you which one the linked message is.

If someone sends me N very similar messages and N−1 recall attempts, suggesting that they kept redrafting it after pressing Send, I'd like to at least be able to tell which version they want me to reply to, even if I haven't actually deleted the superseded drafts.

simontatham, 3 days ago

@cawhitworth well, what else you could do would be to include a sensible amount of information in the courtesy notification, for exactly the reason I suggest!

All I have to go on is the subject line of the recalled message, which is no help when the recaller promptly sent me a redrafted version with the same subject line. Now I have to look at the datestamps to guess which was the latest draft. (And probably make sure I'm looking at the sender datestamp.)

simontatham, 3 days ago

@cawhitworth "pay for Exchange": I can see how a company might have that attitude (whether I like it or not!), but does that square with @andrewg's comment elsethread that recall only works within the same Exchange server? If that's true, then even paying for Exchange doesn't make it work properly.

(Not that you'd necessarily want someone in Org A to be able to destroy mail on Org B's server, but as before, at least identifying it would still be practically useful.)

simontatham, 4 days ago

@fanf 'entitlement' suggests that your code needs to be a member of the nobility to make this work.

But that can't be right – surely that's for peer-to-peer networking.

simontatham, 4 days ago

@mjd 'develop' always strikes me as a bit vague, perhaps intentionally so. It doesn't say whether you're writing a whole new program, or making major changes to one, or just tinkering round the edges. It doesn't even really promise that you're making it better – only that you're changing it over time.

In that respect it reminds me of 'treat' in medicine, which also seems like a word calculated to vaguely suggest 'doing something about it' while carefully not promising any specific result.

simontatham, 4 days ago

@mjd well, in fantasy fiction and videogames, doctor-analogues are often called 'healers'. That's definitely a word at the 'promising a result' end of the scale!

simontatham, 4 days ago

@unspeaker ah, I was wondering about saying that, but thought it might just be my own bias. Yes, I also see 'programmer' as having a connotation of writing whole programs from scratch.

I also feel as if that's becoming a specialism these days, because there's so much work needing to be done on big existing code bases. You can have a career without writing anything new. (Of decent size, I mean; not counting 100-line utility scripts and the like.)

Hence the use of other words, I suppose!

simontatham, 7 days ago

@a thank you, that's not one I'd seen before.

I'd normally use binomial heaps for that merging application (on the rare occasion that I need it at all). Those also have O(log n) worst-case time for a merge. I can't work out in 30 seconds which structure is better, though!

simontatham, 7 days ago

@a I have to confess that despite being a huge data-structures nerd in most other respects, I've never quite managed to get my head round how a Fibonacci heap works. I understand what useful properties it has, and why that makes it a good fit for e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm, but how it works just never quite comes together in my brain.

simontatham, 8 days ago

@christianp depending on your needs, I actually wonder if something sold as a computer monitor might be a good answer! If you can live with all its inputs being HDMI, then a monitor could handle those just as well as an official telly, and wouldn't want Internet.

It wouldn't directly receive broadcast TV signals, of course, so you'd need a secondary bodge for that (maybe via an HDHomeRun).

At least some monitors come with remote controls, and some have OK speakers (like my last Philips).

simontatham, 9 days ago

@OscarCunningham I'm pretty sure you can transform the hats' HTPF metatile system into a form where each higher-order metatile exactly covers a set of metatiles of the next order down. (Use the 'converged' metatile shapes; use a non-overlapping version of the expansion rules; do some horrible limiting thing that fractalises all the metatile edges.)

But then you still have four different fractally-shaped metatiles, and no way to decompose those into individual hats that are all congruent.

simontatham, 8 days ago

@OscarCunningham in fact, here's the paper I vaguely remembered seeing but couldn't put my hands on yesterday, which does pretty much what I said. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05639, diagrams on pages 7 and 8.

simontatham, 9 days ago

@bignose unfortunately, when you're constrained to talk to an Exchange mail server because that's where your email is delivered to, Outlook is still the least bad option I've found as a client. Using any other client via IMAP adds an extra layer of 'impedance mismatch' which outweighs whatever usability advantages the other client would normally have given you.

(And let's not even talk about the mess third-party clients make of Exchange calendaring.)

simontatham, 9 days ago

@dwm I admit I haven't tried Evolution in the last decade. I found it very flaky about 15 years ago, but probably it's had some fixes since then.

But part of the problem is that any IMAP client talking to Exchange seems to see a confusing lack of data consistency, with emails randomly appearing and disappearing.

I'd almost rather use the fetchmail approach – download each message once, and thereafter work locally. But then you can only use your local client. Pros and cons.

simontatham, 9 days ago

@demoographics that sounds actually interesting, at least for the part where it reads your Outlook calendar and gets the information into a locally usable form. What was your technique for that?

With that part solved, I could use a solution of my choice for the most important thing, namely reminding me when I have a meeting. Then I wouldn't mind opening a browser for all other calendar operations, which are much rarer.

simontatham, 11 days ago

@pozorvlak @mjd yes, I see no reason this couldn't be a real human autodidact with a ~10% baked idea, wanting at least some reassurance that they're talking to someone who won't burst out laughing before they go to the effort of typing up their thoughts. I've had similar communications, before generative AI was a thing.

(Is that an OSS thing particularly? I thought it was good sense whenever there's a long round trip time. E.g. intracorporate email between time zones has the same property.)

simontatham, 15 days ago

@fanf that link automatically redirects to the same thing but with https as the scheme, which seems sensible. I wonder if your retro-links in particular would benefit from an automated check for that?