Except it did, though. He had many of them. There was always a particular delight at the "logic" of them that distinguished it from standard issue lame dad humor. I've seen the pattern often enough in other mathemeticians and computer scientists i know that I'm confident I'm on to something.

I remember swearing that my keyboard was broken when trying to do my first assignment in vi.

Edit: And just for the record, I don't believe non-intuitive is the same as poor usability. Some interfaces aren't intuitive but once you understand them are very very good.

As the old joke goes, "I've been using vi for the past 8 years. Mainly because I can't work out how to exit from it."

Emacs is super intuitive. Only takes about 3 months to get a hang of, which was much less time than it took me to get a hang of Windows when I first starting using it.

"Emergency vim for Emacs users": http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emergency_vi.html

If a cat jumped onto your keyboard and you cannot exit vi, type the shell suspend command 【Ctrl+z】, which should get you back on the unix command prompt, then you can kill. (by first find out the pid by ps auwwx | grep vi, then kill -9 pid).

This, not sure if he's trolling or not: http://bling.github.io/blog/2013/10/...urvival-guide/

Step 0: Install evil-mode

Step 1: Resist the urge to Google it…initially

Emacs is no different. You can choose to learn only one application, the text editor, but if you do that you might as well just stick with Vim.

agree with this

it's funny b/c it's true

We use join.me for conference / seminar, and teamviewer for 1:1 / remote support / repair. Remote control in join.me is laggy as hell compared to teamviewer, in my experience. But the multi-cast is fantastic. Join.me is also considerably cheaper.

Have you tried Mikogo?

Also meant to mention - there are no ads whatsoever in TV, and one single nag screen at the end of a free session "thank you for using teamviewer" - hardly intrusive, imo.

Had my last day of work today. Not going to go into detailed stories but basically good riddance to that ****ing place. Haven't had leave since January and 4 weeks/year is standard in Australia, so I want to take that but then nobody hires in December, so I might not have work again until the new year. Which is cool with me, my partner is chronically ill atm and I basically have to do everything, so I'm pretty burnt out.

I'll have no trouble finding a job I think, I present well in an interview and was managed for a few months by the ex project lead of Amazon UK back at its inception, who has offered to be my referee. Being referred on by him is basically like having a jobseeking cheat code in a backwater town like this one.

Sorry to hear about your partner's illness, Chris. Good luck with the job search.

Same sentiments ChrisV, best of luck. Sounds like a good reference for sure.

This is the worst part of join.me. You have to do everything at 1/2 speed and very deliberately.

We used to use GoToMeeting. I liked it much better than TeamViewer. No messing around with versioning issues and doesn't seem to have the laggging issues.

ChrisV: sending well wishes.

Good luck Chris! Must feel good.

I've got a couple bonuses lined up in Feb and March, then I may be out the door at my place. After working on interesting **** for 3+ years, there is nothing new on the horizon.

Since we're slow the corporate BS seems to be ratcheting up to surreal levels. We're supposed to create a "30 second selfie". I don't even know what that is but it sounds horrifying. I'm going to make my boss bug me three times before I do it, instead of the usual two. Btw it's amazing how much corporate idiocy you never have to do if you wait for your boss to bug you twice about it.

What are you looking for next? I'd love a full stack node job but doubt that's a thing where I am.

I don't know - maybe contract for a while and take it easy. I haven't done a photo trip in a few years as the only time I've had off has been spent with the gf. I'd like to spend 6 months to a year just driving around the country and Canada taking pictures.

My hope was that my node framework would take off and I could write my own ticket as a consultant. The only users so far are people who have left the company or still work there doing side projects. But I know something like it would help a ton of companies doing node.

Quick follow up on my tweet collection project. I've fiddled with the collection script a bit and am quite happy with it now (it even has real unixy command line options!). Also wrote a small secondary script that monitors if the script is running and restarts it if it's not so the collection should be robust enough for my needs.

I hooked up the 4 TB USB disk today and simply set it as the destination for my mongo data/db (HFS+ filesystem). So when I start the script tomorrow it'll write directly to the USB drive.
I am a bit concerned that this is too much writing for your typical USB disk but I'll just try it.

My only concern now is...do I want to
a) Have one huge collection and just add to it until I'm out of space
b) Create a new collection each month (~600GB/month with indices)

Regexp text searches are also pretty slow. I tested with my 2 day collection (54GB) and it took 12 minutes to mathch /.*merkel.*/ (5 mminutes for /^merkel.* but I'll query for stuff that isn't only at the beginning). Index over the tweet-texts doesn't help (quite good for searching for a concrete string with no wildcards though).

My plan is to just collect and not worry and then create a DB for the actual queries that just has the fields I'll query and will thus be a lot smaller (just id and tweet text would work for starters). I still want to collect everything since all the twitter metadata could potentially be interesting.

I think I'll go with b and start a new collection each new month.

[since queries are so slow I may eventually move to another DB setup alltogether but mongo should be ok as a base store for now, data can be moved to a better suited db later if need be]

I also played with mongodump a bit and you can backup stuff at about 60% the size of the original database. That's why I prefer a new collection each month. It's easier to backup to another disk.

I like the idea of having some USB disks labelled "1% Twitter streaming API Nov.15-Mar.16".

Gameplan for now is just hoarding and when I want to maybe investigate the data a bit...build a SQL Schema and load what's interesting into a SQL database and go from there. Or maybe use one of the "big data DBs" but PostgreSQL seems decent enough.

Glad you're out of a situation you hated. Wishing you all the best.

WTF? I'd say no no no to that. That's just atrocious.

Speaking of BS, I've been waiting for a week to get my Linux to go online at work. I'm thinking about just working in VirtualBox instead, or just walking in with the Linux hard drive claiming I "forgot" the Windows hard drive at home.

Sounds like a fun project, whatever you are doing.

I was at a meetup about Datomic, and I learned that the whole things works on one SQL table for storage. Looked kind of interesting and all, but definitely had a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag.

I have 8 years of professional webdev experience (2 positions of 4 years each; my current title is 'Lead Developer'). I'm strongly considering leaving my current position. I'm talking to friends and getting some leads and recommendations, but a part of me wants to quit and just spend a month or two playing around with functional programming unemployed, then actually start looking in earnest in January. How dumb is this?

I have a nice cushion and could survive a year or longer unemployed. I'm just worried if being unemployed or having a small gap will hurt my chances while looking.

Obviously being unemployed is a negative when trying to find a job because it will seem as though you were fired from the previous job. It's not just a negative in finding a job, but also in negotiating because you don't have a fallback option, not to mention that you may feel pressured to take a subpar offer because you're desperate. You won't have the luxury of taking a long time to find the right position at the right price.

I understand traveling or doing something that you would genuinely have a hard time doing without quitting but playing around with functional programming? Why isn't that something you could just do in your current job?

Even if you actually needed some time off, you could just ask for some unpaid time off from your current job or find the next job first, then negotiate your start date such that you would have a month or two off between jobs. You may have to make up a better story than functional programming; it seems to me reading between the lines, there must be something. I would generally expect your current manager or the hiring manager to accept a request along those lines, unless they see you as a marginal employee/hire.

Here's another good reason to not dual-boot: my hard drive went sparkles this morning. Yikes, I'm scared to try and pull everything off my VirtualBox.

How much of the "must have got fired" stigma is attached to a job you were a contractor for?