Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

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  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • It’s a little more than 100€

    It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”




  • It’s a very flexible language so can find a niche almost anywhere. I know of fintech companies that use it extensively for their back end data processing systems, and I’ve seen some really interesting stuff done with Clojure and Apache Kafka. They’re a good fit for each other - Clojure, as a lisp, is optimised for processing infinite lists of things and Kafka topics can be easily conceptualised as an infinite stream of data.

    Also, when combined with Clojurescript, it provides a single language that can be used full-stack, so could drop in anywhere that you might otherwise use Node.

    But I think one of the best things about it is the way it forces you to re-evaluate your approach to development. It’s a completely functional language so you have to throw away any preconceptions about OO and finding new ways to resolve old problems is one of the things that should be a joy for most developers, even if it has no practical application.



  • Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.




  • How did we let this happen?

    How could we not have done? When electricity was first being proposed of a way of powering homes and industry we couldn’t even agree on a standard for distribution (Tesla vs Edison). The world’s governments didn’t step in because this was a dispute between private companies. Just like governments didn’t decide whether we should use VHS vs Betamax, or drink Coke vs Pepsi.

    And then once a country decided on a standard distribution method they had to pick a voltage, a frequency, and a plug/socket design. Again, there was no real reason for governments to get heavily involved at this point - after all, nobody knew if this new-fangled electricity thing would ever really catch on.

    Can we just start again?

    Sure. But it will cost maybe hundreds of billions. Maybe more than that. It doesn’t matter which plug/socket design you say is the right one for the whole world, most of the world won’t already be using it (just look at the map!). So all those countries are going to have to change not only the plug on every single appliance in existence in their country, but also every single socket on every wall in every building. And what’s the benefit to the countries that have spent al those billions doing that? Absolutely nothing - the advantage and profits will be reaped by product manufacturers who don’t have to produce a variety of connectors.


  • I’m still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

    Maybe the application doesn’t need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you’re not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

    Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

    Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it’s just software - it can’t magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.




  • DigitalOcean’s guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it’s a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you’ve posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you’re not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.