Some women like tiny faces. Don’t kink-shame.

I wonder if my old app circa 2000 would actually run on Linux/Wine. One of my projects for this winter is to install Linux on one of my Windows laptops. I’ll have to give the old app a try.

It was originally written as a C DLL utilized by a Visual Basic front end. The C DLL used the Win95 API, though, so it wouldn’t have worked on anything but Windows 95 and onwards. I subsequently ported the entire thing to C# but still using the same API to do the actual playing of the audio (I experimented with using DirectSound instead but that was really not appropriate for an application doing its own audio mixing). Now I’m working on an iOS version and I couldn’t give two fucks about Windows at this point.

As a programmer, it’s pretty wild how much of Windows under the hood has remained completely unchanged. I started writing software synthesizer applications back in the late '90s, using a part of the Win95 API called “winOutX”. The functions are kind of clunky to use but they allow you to programmatically create your own audio buffer arrays filled with whatever sounds you’re up to creating and dump them into the playback stream for seamless audio. This shit has remained in place, working pretty much perfectly, for the last 30 years. It was even there in WinCE/Windows Mobile, which allowed me to write software synthesis applications for early smartphones circa 2005. And it’s still all there today.

I like to rip on MS as much as the next guy (not least for them completely dropping the fucking ball as far as smartphones were concerned), but sometimes their incredibly long-term conservatism can work to your benefit.

“I’m serious as cancer when I say that TikTok is a cancer!”

Fucking Federman before the 2024 election castigated his fellow Democrats for daring to use Trump’s actual fucking felony convictions against him as a political tool, because (according to him) Democrats are supposed to be “the party of forgiveness”. Just unbelievable bullshit from him, even worse than his “Trump signs are Pennsylvania’s state flower” comment.

I’m sorry you had to lose your mother to this bullshit.

Escort carriers?

He (King George V) would have done it (in 1911). Asquith (the Prime Minister) told him that his father (King Edward VII) had promised to do it before his death in 1910 and King George assented. Asquith actually prepared lists with hundreds of names on them.

The British House of Lords used to hold the same sort of power with their ability to veto anything passed by the House of Commons. The House of Commons took this veto power away, but unfortunately they were only able to do this by getting the King to threaten to ennoble hundreds of new people and overwhelm the power of the traditional Lords. Our (US) current King would of course never agree to any such thing.

Spend a half hour watching Fox News and you can see the alternate reality that magats are living in. My personal exposure to Fox News is an occasional accidental glance at the TV screens at the gym and even just from that it’s obvious what’s going on.

Slightly negative poll numbers + strongly-worded letter = REVOLUTION!

I’m a school bus driver and I drive across multiple freeway overpasses each day. On most days these have protestors with temporary signs up on the fences facing the highway traffic. The problem is I have no idea whether they’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump since I only see the backs of the signs. One time I could make out “Jan. 6” on one of the signs (this was on January 6th, natch) but I don’t know whether they were remembering the good old days or not.

their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles

The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.

My favorite approach to team processes was to work entirely alone and do everything by myself.

At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.

For all the good suppositories do me, I might as well jam them up my ass.

I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own sin() function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.

The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.

If you’re blonde and hot, you’re an ex-pat, not an immigrant.

“Kitty, here’s what’s wrong with the hyperloop concept …”