Posts by alegr

Big Falcon explosion as SpaceX successfully demos Crew Dragon abort systems

Re: Causality

Without the capsule and trunk, the rocket loses stability in the atmosphere and will pitch and break.

A user's magnetic charm makes for a special call-out for our hapless hero

Re: A couple of magnetic incidents of my own...

If an iPhone gets into environment with a few percent of helium in the air, it dies. It has an MMS oscillator, which dies when helium seeps through silicon to the oscillator chamber. It will take a few days to start working again.

Re: Floppy drives

3.5" 1.44 media could not be erased anymore with typical ferrite magnets. 360K 5" floppies could still be erased. Not sure if 3.5" 720K media was susceptible.

What's that, Skippy? A sad-faced Microsoft engineer has arrived with an axe? Skippy?

> Fiinally, 4,622 issues were closed by the VS Code team last month during a frenzied bit of housekeeping.

Ha.Here's how they close such record count of bugs:

Visual Studio Feedback System changed the status of the following problem:

"A Git repository can't be opened if it has a remote with no fetch URL"

to Closed - Lower Priority and added a comment.

Thank you for the feedback, but our team was unable to prioritize it at this time as they are working on problems with broader customer impact. You can see details at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/report-a-problem?view=vs-2017#faq. Please comment below if you have additional data or details that will help us appropriately reprioritize this issue. It is possible that this problem has been addressed in our latest version which can be downloaded from: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ . Thanks for contributing to Developer Community.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Robots making unsolicited calls are out there in the wild, already.

It's quite easy to spot them, though. Their speech is too good, very smooth. When I ask them "are you a robot", they respond, "no, I'm not. I'm not allowed to deviate from script.".

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

This is a Voight-Kampff test. In a few words, tell us what you are calling about.

"Let me tell you what I'm calling about...

Opal Fruits, Princess Diana and... PowerToys? Microsoft is dragging Windows 10 back to '95

Just give us back Windows 7 visual style instead of this OpenWin-inspired squareness.

There once was a biz called Bitbucket, that told Mercurial to suck it. Now devs are dejected, their code soon ejected

Re: Git

What would be the value of having file timestamps in the metadata? And how would you make the make behave, if checkouts would bump the file timestamps to the past?

Re: Old school vs new school

The great thing about Git if that you can edit your local history by amending and doing other surgery to commits. Interactive rebase is the greatest thing after sliced bread. Once it gets to the master repo, though, there should not be any history editing going on. This can be enforced by use of code review systems.

Git works in Windows just fine. I even learned to use and LOVE Bash, and use it exclusively from Bash prompt, after being just a CMD.EXE guy for many years.

And its support in Visual Studio is excellent for merges and diffing.

Re: Good. I'll never have to use it, again.

>What sort of monumentally screwed up thinking lead to vanilla `--force` existing?

Personal repositories. I use it all the time to push to my personal build and test machines.

Instead of pushing directly to the common repository, use a code review system. You'll never need to know about --force-with-lease and such crap.

Re: Atlassian!

I've worked with Rational CQ (ClearQuest?), from IBM. Stinking PoS.

Re: That was a close call.

If you can transform ducomment binaries to containing text - for example, modern document formats are just a zipped bunch of XML files, you can use Git's clean/smudge attributes to transform the files from binary format in the worktree, to text format in the repository, diffable, etc.

Re: Git

Git is f-ing awesome. And interactive rebase is the best thing after sliced bread.

The basic concepts of history keeping and tree building are simply brilliant.

I've used: PVCS in mid-1990s - piece of shit. Initially, it didn't even support directories. Could only commit flat snapshots. Later it started to support subdirectories.

Visual Source Safe - was usable and useful for my personal projects and small team collaboration. It had its quirks. Concept of branch as a separate directory was pretty stupid. Files shared between directories was an interesting, but unmanageable concept.

Perforce: stupid ill-conceived concept of workspaces to map the repo directories to different checkout worktree struucture. Branching was so badly conceived (seperate directory, again), that I never ever dared to create them. If I created a branch, it would be global; there was no concept of local repository clone.

Git: Not easy to learn from scratch, but once you get it, it's the best. Hack the code, then slice and dice it to commits as desired, then after debug apply some surgery to those commits, and push them to the review system.