Learning programming is relatively easy. Learning to write maintainable code, on the other hand, takes skill and experience.

Clerks and accountants used to do amazing things with Lotus-1-2-3 macros because Lotus cleverly leveraged what users already knew about spreadsheets into a Turing Complete set of commands. But often these users eventually got themselves into a jam, or made something that nobody else could decipher.

The funnest job in the world would be to create fake front sites for dictatorial countries. For example, I'd make "CNN.com" grab content from onion.com, and stupid.com content would be used to fill up "Amazon.com".

In "1984", the main character's job was to re-write history with fake BS. He seemed fairly content at that job until he took the proverbial red pill.

"Get off my red lawn!"

Defend your ideas.

That often doesn't fly. You have to choose your battles carefully, and not be seen as "complaining" about everything. Before being "forceful" over an idea that was originally rejected, make sure it's something that really matters and makes a difference.

What's wrong with complacency? You get really used to it after a while even.

Amazon discovered it was for sale when they visited "buy.buy".

I don't buy your argument.

I only know what it is in epoch time.

I'm fine with the chip; that protects me, the bank, and the retailer. I am NOT fine with the PIN. My signature can't be stolen; if someone steals my card, the signature on the sales slip proves it's not me. But if someone steals your PIN they have your every penny.

It happened to me with a debit card. I welcome the chip, but of they add a PIN I'll cancel all my cards and go back to cash and checks, even though they're nowhere as convenient.

I hadn't had any of the accounts I'd used, either, and wasn't sure which one it was. Still got the account back, give 'em a try.

I had cataract surgery on that eye two years before the retina came loose. I did know a couple of guys who had vitrectomies followed by cataract surgery, but the needles don't go through the lens, they go in through the whites (photos at wikipedia). I suspect that a vitrectomy involves steroids; steroid eyedrops for an eye infection caused my cataract.

It wasn't worth the effort, I just cut and pasted from the manuscript. It's bad enough posting journals, I take a bit more care with them.

Ah. You're talking about an unsupported, undocumented trick that appears to be an exploit of a bug. Have you thought about the potential consequences when/if Apple writes this functionality out of the system?

So, no, this won't do.

Under IOS, apps aren't kept in an ordered system collection the way they are in Android. If they're on the device at all, they're somewhere on a page or within a folder, either where you put them, or where the system put them (always on a page) if you have not interfered. And finding them, if you don't know where they are, is a matter of typing the name into the search.

But -- just like Android -- you can have a lot of pages, a lot of folders, and you may or may not remember where a particular app or shortcut is located in your own personal folder/page setup. But then there is IOS search, which can find anything.

Under either OS, if you can't remember where they are, and you can't remember the name, it's down to looking around until you find them.

One of the arguments for folder organization is that if you even know the type of app it is -- for instance, if it is a photography app -- then if you're consistent at install time, you can look just in there, and it will be there, leaving you a lot fewer apps to check through until you find it.

But IOS has low limits on how many apps can be in a folder, and it doesn't allow subfolders, which seriously impacts how well you can really use them for that kind of organization. In my case, IOS's folder paradigm is insufficient to my needs. Android isn't significantly better, either.

And we wonder where the internet trolls come from...
I mean, I get it. Parent want their kid to be safe. But when you remove the whole "do this and you will get punched in the face" aspect of social interaction, then certain behaviors fail to get snuffed out.

We've all seen that comic about when little stephan forgets he is not online. There's a kernel of truth to that.
I'm sure it will help socialize them to the facts of the Internet. Like how to deal with trolls, and how to ignore annoying people, and how you can't tell when someone is a dog.
But I imagine it will hurt their real-life socializing skills.

So... new thing comes a long and it's different. Good in some way, bad in others. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

I was using an old netbook (Atom N270) as a home media server, keeping it running Ubuntu Desktop 9.something. But it was too much of a pain to maintain: keeping it on mains power for a year seems to break the battery-charge-level monitoring, which makes the internal battery useless as a UPS. Too many processes insisted on writing to files every 5 minutes, which was spinning up the hard disk all the time. Also, it got uncomfortably hot with the lid closed all the time.

So I got a second-hand thin client (Via 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB internal flash drive, 1 GB RAM, gigabit ethernet) for 75 euros, installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 and a USB hard disk that has a auto spin-down feature. The 1 GiB "SSD" turned out to be too small for OS and log files, so I augmented it with a 4 GB USB thumb drive, while cursing that it is very hard to find one that performs well on lots of small writes (With 4 kB random block write tests, the throughput of most sticks is less than 0.01 MB/s). This thing takes about 13 W of power while idle (26 euros/year at our rates) and last time I looked, there are no alternatives on the market that have comparable horsepower for much less watts. The server hosts media files (MiniDLNA) and backups (snapshots) of the various computers/tablets/phones. Once or twice a year, I sync the disk with an external USB drive. If my house goes up in flames, all will be gone.

Since my media storage is mostly audio, a 1 TB drive is plenty. When I read here from people that have 40 TB of storage in NAS arrays, I wonder what they are hoarding. At 5 GB per hour of video, that's 8000 hours!

Ubuntu 12.04 server sucks for a headless server. I think it was waiting for a keypress after an unclean boot. (There was a comment on a forum of a guy who had to drive 100 miles to a datacenter to attach a keyboard and press Enter). That one was solved, but now it just hangs during filesystem checking at boot time - some bad boot-order dependency.

Network: ethernet in living room (A/V center) and work room (desktop/printer); wifi elsewhere. Visitors get the wifi password. Non-media file transfers and backups are always over ssh. (It t1urns out that the gigabit ethernet was overkill; the VIA CPU can barely saturate a 100 Mbps ethernet line, with the faster SSH cipher (arcfour).