dcminter

Ah, you're assuming distributed, which I wasn't. We are not at home to partition tolerance :) Makes sense in the context of the original post though.

Is there a reason why two-phase commit can't work with a DB and a message queue? DB2 and MQ Series used to support this (though they called it "XA" transactions and you had to compile s…

I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunitie…

Why not both? But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philos…

Any time something of popular historical interest like this pops up I think about that. If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least …

Indeed. So far as I recall I had a greyscale monitor that couldn't do more than 800x600. I think it was a 486sx and I probably still had a 32GB MFM hard disk at that point so it was a very underw…

You could run X11 in 4Mb at one point, although I rather wished I didn't.

The City of London, aka "The City", aka "The Square Mile" is not the same thing as Greater London or even what's usually called "Central London." I don't think …

The UK does, or used to, and yes, it was on the plastic wrappers on sliced bread. Sweden has a wire encased in plastic thing that crimps the opening shut instead. Both types are re-usable at least for…

The "signature verification" in the fix being CRC32 is pretty hilariously clueless.

Have you ever encountered the atheist version IRL? Not just in internet bickering? Maybe it was regional - I wouldn't know which region they were from off the cuff. My family is mostly C of E and…

You’re just hand waving over the question of “How did god just happen?” God just magically appeared? See? It's a crap argument.

From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus): Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the stud…

Why is "God did it" a better answer than "it just happened" ? If you prefer the "God did it" you then have to account for where God came from and end up with a set of ans…

I do see, mostly from Americans, self introductions of the form "I'm so and so... and I love Jesus" in contexts that have nothing to do with religion. I've never had anyone bring…

For me at least the post wasn't loading on mobile (Firefox on Android) and looks like others had the same issue. Skimming the article just now on the laptop (Firefox on Linux) I see in the images…

Fair, although I used to prefer the old chonky Thinkpad keyboards to anything else. There was (is?) a Model M style buckle spring keyboard with a trackpoint, but it had the numeric pad, so no good to …

You're likely thinking of trigraphs - alternatives to some characters: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-trigr... …

You know the Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II is a thing, right? It would seem to meet that requirement. What's missing? Edit: Oh, they're pricey - so that, I guess?

Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...

Years ago I used to read his blog on Django and found it quite interesting despite being neither a Django nor even a python user - this must have been at least 10 years ago and perhaps more. When he r…

> The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap. Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that h…

Pre-internet the commercial phone book was actually fairly useful. The "problem" was that most people didn't need it updating as often as the phone book company would have liked.

> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The point of the p…

Ha! This is so delightful. I vaguely remember chipping in some paltry sum on some early plea for donations for this, and getting a random manual duplicate in the post as a perk. Since then I've o…

Yes, we stayed at one near ORF a few weeks ago. We thought the staff were weirdly enthusiastic about a not very good mass produced cookie actually. Might stay there again, but not because of the gimmi…

I don't think this is a good principle to apply comprehensively. The "if you’re often over-committed or too scattered" qualifier is very important. Sometimes you need to get out of yo…

Kafkaesque, a wire-protocol compatible Kafka mocking service. https://github.com/dcminter/kafkaesque Worth kicking the wheels if you're currently using embedded or dockerise…