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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.

    I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…




  • Reminds me of that story about Windows’s format dialog. It’s on Xitter, so here’s the text:

    Dave W Plummer

    I wrote [Windows’s] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

    We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

    I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

    Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

    That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!

    I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

    So remember… there are no “temporary” checkins :)