jadero

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Of course, but that just makes the case for security as a foundational principle even stronger.

Mistakes happen. They always will. That's not a reason to just leave security as the afterthought it so often is.

None of the things I mentioned have anything to do with errors and scope creep, but everything to do with building using sound principles and practices always. As in, you know, always. In class, during bootcamps, during design meetings, when writing sample code, when writing reference implementations, during the construction of the prototype that, let's face it, almost always goes into production. Always.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

That is something I just don't get. I'm a hobbyist turned pro turned hobbyist. The only people who I ever offered my services to were either after one of my very narrow specialties where I was actually an expert or literally could not afford a "real" programmer.

I never found proper security to have any impact on my productivity. Even going back to my peak years in the first decade of this century, there was so much easily accessible information, so many good tutorials, and so many good products that even my prototypes incorporated the basics:

  • Encrypt the data at rest
  • Encrypt the data in transit
  • No shared accounts at any level of access
  • Full logging of access and activity.
  • Before rollout, back up and recovery procedures had to be demonstrated effective and fully documented.

Edited to add:

It's like safety in the workplace. If it's always an add-on, it will always be of limited effectiveness and reduce productivity. If it's built in to the process from the ground up, it's extremely effective and those doing things unsafely will be the productivity drain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That sounds ideal. Machines that are mostly maintained by experienced people and a community to help you gain experience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to "general vs specific".

Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they'd ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It's not even that they were particularly dense, it's that they'd seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I've switched from Windows to Linux, I'm getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible "tab ordering", etc.

Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks for your interest!

Apart from here and "self-hosting" and other communities, if you're a glutton for punishment, you can see what's up at https://walloftext.ca. I'm currently in the process of rebuilding everything from the ground up, including an associated mastodon-compatible instance. I've not yet rewritten my project outline to account for all the new stuff I've learned about in the past few months, but it's coming in the next few days.

Just note the most important part of my tagline: "Unstable by nature". Some would argue that applies more to me than the stability of the site and projects. 😛 Either way, chaos is probably the order of the day for at least the rest of this year. (And I mostly take summers off to reenergize by fishing, working in my shop, etc.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Tension. Always tension. My mom had the same battles. My aunt never had trouble.

I suspect that buying a new mid-grade machine or better from a reputable dealer is the secret. I've bought a couple of $50 used machines because I don't want to spend 10 times that or more if it turns out that I'm not going to actually use it. I already do enough of that. 😀

Go find a sewing club and get their advice. That's what I'm doing the next time the bug bites.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oops! I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oops! I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Edit: the bits barely had a chance to dry on my comment when I came across https://rss-parrot.net/

This is a way of integrating RSS feeds into your personal timeline on Mastodon. I don't know how this affects the work I describe at the bottom of this comment, but I bet it has a role to play.


I find it hard to believe that people would like to browse to x different websites to see if an artist has new works, only to find out that they don’t.

RSS FTW!

Every site I've ever created or been involved with in even the tiniest capacity has supported RSS. Sometimes it was enabled just to shut me up.

I'm not sure how to better promote the use of RSS and get people to use feed readers, but I think it is the answer to at least that particular issue.

My personal opinion is that a "platform" should really be just a collection of searchable and categorized feeds with it's own feed. That way there is both discoverability and the ability for individuals to construct their own personal feed on their own personal device (no server required!) while staying abreast of new feeds on the master feed aggregation "platform."

There are innumerable ways for people to get their own content into something that supports RSS and that feed could be easily submitted to the master feed aggregation "platform" to deal with the discoverability issue. For example, Mastodon and most compatible systems support RSS and registration is child's play on any server that allows public registration.

In fact, the "platform" could set up a crawler to automatically discover RSS feeds. If the author has done the metadata right, the results would even be automatically categorized.

Done right, the "platform" might actually run on a pretty small server, because it would be linking to sites, and only pulling summaries from them.

Even comments could be supported with a little creativity. As I said, there are innumerable ways for people to get their own content out there. If there were a standard metadata tag "comment: ", some fancy footwork could produce a threaded discussion associated with a particular article, even if the original author has no internal commenting system. (And my favoured internal comment system would permit nothing but pure HTTPS links to the commenters own content, extracting a short summary for display.)

Side note: I acquired a domain explicitly for the purpose of setting up such a feed aggregation "platform." Now that I'm retired, I'm slowly working on creating it. Everything is highly experimental at this point and, to be honest, shows no visible progress to that end, but that is my ultimate goal.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (9 children)

There was a thread elsewhere asking whether a toggle should show current state or the state desired. There was enough disagreement that it quickly became apparent that, whatever else the toggle does, there should be something external to the toggle showing the possible states, indicating which way to move the toggle regardless of toggle appearance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Sewing for sure, especially machine sewing. I feel like I've got as much time invested in fighting and maintaining our sewing machines as in our Windows machines. 😛

And then there's that whole transition between pattern (spec) and outcome that is oddly reminiscent of far too many of my software projects!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Knowing how a switch works in a circuit and how it's typically represented in schematics, I would guess that moving the switch toward the body of the gun should be off.

But if actually placing a bet, I'd put my money on it being the other way.

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