@ovid@fosstodon.org
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ovid

@ovid@fosstodon.org

Well-known software developer. American living in France.

I have a poetic license to kill.

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ovid, to random
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Building a new system? Need it to scale massively? Don't start with

https://ovid.github.io/articles/dont-start-with-microservices.html

ovid, to python
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A little quirk in that I can't wrap my head around. Rounding seems to round up or down depending on whether or not the int() value is odd or even. Anyone know why?

>>> [{n+.5: round(n+.5) for n in range(0,10)}]
[{0.5: 0, 1.5: 2, 2.5: 2, 3.5: 4, 4.5: 4, 5.5: 6, 6.5: 6, 7.5: 8, 8.5: 8, 9.5: 10}]

This is Python 3.11.5.

ovid, to programming
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Whenever I post about , I get detractors pointing out problems with them, or I get people cheering them on.

I decided to write a full article explaining many of the pros and cons you should consider if you're thinking about microservices. It's a bit of a longer read, but it's an important topic that a small toot won't cover.

https://ovid.github.io/articles/microservices-pros-and-cons.html

ovid, to PostgreSQL
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Ever struggle with design? Do you just not get it?

I have a talk, "how to fake a database design", that will explain the basics to you. You can't learn all of it in an hour, but if you watch it a few times and let it sink in, it will help you tremendously.

This talk was in Bulgaria, but it I gave the same talk at OSCON and got 5/5 stars for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1tcbhWLiUM&ab_channel=yapceu

ovid, to animals
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The brothers have decided to take my side of the bed. Again.

ovid, to programming
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Though have their downsides (robustness is achieved via greater complexity), perhaps their single greatest benefit is simple. When designed well, they send and receive data. No shared memory.

That's an entire class of bugs wiped out (except inside the service, of course).

ovid, to apple
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Updated my Pro and it again replaced my backticks with the useless § symbol. I've also lost my tilde. Really, really ticked off that keeps doing this.

Doesn't help that I'm using a French keyboard remapped to a US one and system settings doesn't seem to let me actually set the damned things.

ovid, to random
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Anyone in the UK know how to look up court records? Are they public?

I worked with this man briefly, before he was accused of industrial espionage. One day he just stopped showing up to work. I can't find anything else on the web about it.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/web-intrigue-in-spy-case-3cr60lwjlgf

ovid, to webdev
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Just spotted this in some for some relatively new code: <p class="color-red font-small">

At that rate, why even bother? HTML 3.2 all the way, baby! Bring back the <style> tags! Or HTML 4 <font> tags. Who needs ?

ovid, to Cats
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ovid, to Cats
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Draw me like one of your French cats.

ovid, to Cats
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When you can’t sleep because your cat is hogging your side of the bed.

ovid, to random
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Out of curiosity, I tried a service which scans your CV and makes recommendations for tailoring it. Those recommendations are based on popular CV scanning tools used by recruiters/HR.

I was kind of impressed with the quality of results. I was less impressed that the results it presented to me were for someone else's CV. I then found them on LinkedIn.

I'll be contacting the company to let them know about the security issue, so I'm not naming them here.

ovid, to programming
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

If wasn't dying out, I'd want to learn more and seek work. The world's largest telephony over ATM network ran on Erlang and had 9 nines (!) of availability. That's 31 milliseconds of downtime per year.

Part of why it was so reliable is that it's a language which basically makes you write for all functionality, but with much of the infrastructure support built in. What an amazing technology.

, and are written in Erlang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)

ovid, to Cats
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A friend’s mother was an artist and she used to write obituaries for her cats. They are amazing.

ovid, to random
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I enjoy watching educational videos on Youtube. Some are "soft science," like Veritasium, and "Answers with Joe," while others are "hard science" like Khan Academy.

However, I'd like to see more diverse sources from around the world, from a variety of cultures and perspectives. Most importantly, they should be real education, not woo-woo bullshit.

Suggestions?

Please share for visibility. I want to see a round world.

ovid, to Software
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One of our team leads as a good programmer, but not a great one. The people under him were awesome. So he would have them laboriously explain their technical proposals. They would have to oversimply explanations so that he could understand. It was painful.

It was also amazing how many times this revealed overarchitecting of the code. Best team lead ever.

ovid, to random
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In 2006, when I last lived in the US, I had a housekeeper come to my place every Wednesday.

When I told her I was moving to the UK, she asked me if I would have to learn Russian.

This level of confusion is not common, but also not unknown for Americans.

cstross, (edited ) to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I wish I had a small games company at my disposal because I am visualizing the casual game BABYSPLAT, in which you're kind of playing Lemmings with babies that go SPLAT when dropped: the goal is to keep them from falling through holes in the clouds long enough to convince the blob giving birth to them to Accept Jeezus into her heart. At which point the babies still drop and go SPLAT, but then rise up to heaven on angel wings to the strains of "every sperm is sacred".

(EDIT: READ THE ALT TEXT!)

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross

Given your software background, if you can stomach , you can do this yourself in a few hours.

The guy who created "Angry Pumpkins" did this and even included the prompts he used to generate the game. Unfortunately, they're on the birdsite, but here's the Thread Reader App summary.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1719363262179938401.html

ovid, to Amazon
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Very annoyed with . I pre-ordered "A City on Mars" by @ZachWeinersmith and his wife. The book was released two weeks ago and Amazon still can't give me a delivery date.

Apparently, this is a known issue for Amazon delivering in . :(

dgoldsmith, to random
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25 years ago today, Nov 20, 1998, was the day I came out as a trans woman at work. It was the last place I was presenting male, so as soon as I got home I stopped, and was myself full time. Transition has made me much, much happier than I was before.

The first Transgender Day of Remembrance was held one year later, on Nov 20, 1999.

I'm profoundly grateful that I've been so fortunate, and my heart breaks for those who were not. It's still a brutal world for trans people.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@dgoldsmith Around the same time, in a conservative corporate environment, one of our techs showed up in a dress, a wig, and bad lipstick. I was very confused, not understanding, but just continued talking to her like I did before. She later told me she was grateful because I was the only person who didn't laugh.

Wherever she is now, I hope she's found happiness.

I know the changes in the world are tough, but people like you are helping to make it a better place. Thank you.

ovid, to random
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I think desperately needs private namespaces and and classes. Thus, you could create your own internal Customer class and never worry about stepping on other people's Customer class. So many other languages have this figured out. Perl should, too.

Couple this with lexical importing to avoid transitive dependencies and you're well on your way to building more scalable systems.

ovid, to random
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IVR systems are "choose your own adventure" games for masochists.

(IVR is "Interactive Voice Response," those irritating phone menu systems which say things like "Press 4 to continue to be ignored")

Lazarou, to random
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Being so white, rich and privileged that when your rocket blows up for the second time people congratulate you on the success....

ovid,
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@1dalm @cstross @Lazarou Orion, part of the Constellation program, was killed by Obama after the Augustine Committee found it was not possible to meet ANY of its objectives. A mess, but Obama did the right thing.

Congress was upset about losing so many jobs, so they forced Obama to backtrack, and that led to Artemis/SLS. It's (sort of) an international effort, so it's politically easier to sustain than Constellation.

Yes, it sucks, but everyone would have had the knives out for Constellation.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross @1dalm @Lazarou Also, I strongly suspect that Blue Origin (founded before SpaceX) has struggled because they had too much money and their people knew that if they failed, Bezos would still keep the money coming. Many a tech startup has failed because they made this mistake after getting their initial funding, so they stopped pushing.

The broken government model suffers from a very similar problem (amongst many others, of course).

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