don-code

8 ms·

91.
by don-code 3y ago
There are actually a number of lighthouses in Boston Harbor. Historically, there had been many more. Some are described at the National Park Service website: https://www.nps.gov/boha/learn/historyculture/light
92.
by don-code 3y ago
This, unfortunately, is on point. It does seem to be getting harder to listen to music, but I also think it's because our expectations around _how_ we listen to music are increasing in scope. I have an FM radio in almost every room, an
93.
by don-code 3y ago
I'l also give a shout-out to Airbyte ( https://airbyte.com/ ), with which I've had some limited success with integrating Salesforce to a local database. The particular pull for Airbyte is that we can self-host the o
94.
by don-code 3y ago
On the other side of this, that ephemerality is sometimes worth being preserved. Since the 1970s, Boston DJ Oedipus has put on a Christmas Eve show from 6pm to midnight, with Christmas music from around the world, and even just from the loc
95.
by don-code 3y ago
FM stations up to 91.9 are allocated for non-commerical use. This is where you typically find college radio, NPR, and so forth.
96.
by don-code 3y ago
The law around digital transmission only applied to full-power broadcasters. Some low-power analog stations were allowed to keep operating until 2021.
97.
by don-code 3y ago
WITR Henrietta / Rochester here - we had a 705-watt transmitter on top of the dorms that was good for about 15 or 20 miles.
98.
by don-code 3y ago
> The wet spot on your dial See, that's the kind of culture I miss. One of WFNX's greatest-of-all-time bumpers was, "WFNX... It's 'WBCN sucks!', spelled backwards."
99.
by don-code 3y ago
The Boston radio dial feels like it's been bled dry of culture in the last decade. To name a few of the old stations, WFNX and WBCN had a marked impact on the city's music scene, beginning in the 60s and sadly coming to an end aro
100.
by don-code 3y ago
This is wholly unsurprising to me - the tachometer on my BMW is audibly out of sync with the engine.
101.
by don-code 3y ago
Indeed, PPP has a multilink feature which an bond packets from multiple modems into a single bitstream. Both the client (your machine - Windows 98 could do it) and your ISP needed to support it. I remember trying this a few times while at m
102.
by don-code 3y ago
Former CloudHealth early engineer here. That's nothing new. This started almost in tandem with the VMware acquisition - the company culture had been all about small- to medium-size customers, up through the point where due diligence st
103.
by don-code 3y ago
You're probably thinking of robbed bit signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaini
104.
by don-code 3y ago
When I was younger, I connected via 56k modem over the PBX at my parents' shop. My connection speeds topped out at 33.6k. Under the hood, V.90 (the standard for 56k modems) expects that there's only a single digital-to-analog conv
105.
by don-code 3y ago
I for one am actually pretty glad to see the role commoditized. Software's one of few roles where you need the deep theory component (a CS degree) to practice (land a respectable gig). My impression is that this is because we, the soft
106.
by don-code 3y ago
Norton Ghost could do something similar, but with UDP multicast. You'd boot a room full of machines to Ghost, have them join a multicast group, multicast an OS image to them, and then have the host machine just send the image out once
107.
by don-code 3y ago
I also believe this. The counterpoint was made to me by a close friend who prefers to call (I also have friends who _only_ call) - "you really only engage people on your own terms" - which in some ways makes me a bad friend.
108.
by don-code 3y ago
My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port. This machine had a physical power switch. You could n
109.
by don-code 3y ago
We've been using Helmsman ( https://github.com/Praqma/helmsman ) for the same use case. It supports some other creature comforts (automatic fetching of parameters from AWS SSM, chart ordering, etc.) and seems a bit
110.
by don-code 3y ago
At a startup I worked for, we had a cheap wireless microphone and speaker from Craigslist that we used for all-hands meetings. The UX for anybody remote (pre-pandemic, but board members did like to dial in) was terrible - IT would just plac
111.
by don-code 3y ago
There are two alternative behaviors I can think of: 1. The service operator prerenders link previews on its own servers, then sends them to the client, which means that it needs to be privy to the contents of messages. I suspect this is alr
112.
by don-code 3y ago
I developed a pathological need to monitor Slack at all hours. It was largely based on the culture at my company (a startup, at the time) - while there was no written rule to install Slack on your phone, responding to Slack messages at 10pm
113.
by don-code 3y ago
That I know of, photography is still prohibited on the MBTA in Boston, but you see it all the time. I think the Overton window has shifted to the point where the ability to take a photo is now assumed to be a given, and enforcement otherwis
114.
by don-code 3y ago
As an engineer, I've never personally understood the desire to release anyway, even when a system has known critical deficiencies like this one. Sure, perfect is the enemy of good, but I'd also argue that inoperable is the enemy o
115.
by don-code 3y ago
When I was young, I worked at a company that said things like "we are family" - and knew exactly how to manipulate with it. I'd had a pretty rough year, my last year there - a recent breakup, a deteriorating domestic situatio
116.
by don-code 3y ago
Sadly, to my current understanding, my alma mater still does this. At the time it was extremely convenient - we had labs full of Solaris and Linux boxes, which could be remotely accessed from home without any issue. And I also seem to remem
117.
by don-code 3y ago
There's another failure mode not described here: "product management doesn't understand the change". I'm in the (perhaps enviable, perhaps unenviable) position of getting a small subset of my marching orders directl
118.
by don-code 3y ago
Massachusetts has a concept of "managed competition" to avoid exactly this: http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download
119.
by don-code 3y ago
The data doesn't need to be used now, today, for this purpose. What happens when an insurance company foists a new privacy policy on you, the insured, saying that it'll be using back data that it's collected for new purposes?
120.
by don-code 3y ago
Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors. For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, w

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