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maurom's comments

maurom | 2 years ago | on: Stable Linux mainline builds for Ubuntu

It would seem so. Been doing that since a while on my laptop for locally compiled stable kernels from kernel.org.

My hacky script has more lines to fetch the signer name from the kernel (once it's been signed) than to just sign the vmlinuz image.

maurom | 7 years ago | on: Windows Server 2019 Includes OpenSSH

Really? It does not seem so. Yesterday I wanted to filter some chkdsk logs on the Event Viewer [1] and I could not do so because the dropdown does not appear if the display DPI was set in 150%

See the rants at:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/415943c7-7...

https://www.tenforums.com/windows-updates-activation/111890-...

I'd love to be able to submit this bug on the issue tracker, if you could tell me where to find it.

And we are talking here about an OS and GUI made by the same vendor. Hugely different from the Linux+GUI situation.

[1] which is another example of a awful legacy interface where by default you can only peek at the first 2 unrelated lines of every log mesage (and even worse: without a standardized format)

maurom | 7 years ago | on: Lobotomizing Gnome

Ditto. Linux Desktop user since 9x (Red Hat, Conectiva, Mandrake, Debian). I've used IceWM, KDEv1, Gnome2, XFCE, KDEv3, Gnome3, KDEv4, Mate, LXDE, LXQT, usually switched yearly. Started using Cinnamon on Debian since 2017 and -so far- never looked back [1].

Cinnamon devs: Thank you!

[1] https://maurom.com/blog/2017/07/04/

maurom | 7 years ago | on: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

Being captivated by the article and diving deep into nostalgia, I just have to recommend an enlighting book about Basic that my parents bought me when I was a child, and that I think it fits perfectly to the topic in question.

Luca Novelli published in the 80s two books called “My first book about Basic” and “My first book about Computers” [1], which are specifically intended to introduce computers and programming to children. After an introduction to algorithms and flow diagrams, the book dedicates a full page to each (GW)Basic instruction, providing an easy-to-understand explanation and -even more important- a small code example (~10 to ~50 lines) in the form of a game.

This means that the whole book is a compendium of interesting games (guess the animal, guess my age, pick a number) that slowly build up knowledge without being boring or pushy, and gives the child tools to build his own games. It may look outdated, but programming hasn’t changed that much since K&R C, so most of the concepts are still relevant today.

Sadly, the few page scans I could find are in portuguese or spanish, but they will serve as an example of the pedagogical approach. I hope anyone interested can find an English copy on Amazon, as it is IMHO an excellent way to teach & learn programming.

[1] “Two children, a dog, and a personal computer explore the history, concepts, and uses of computers, identifying such aspects as binary systems, computer languages, programming, and memory.” https://www.amazon.com/My-First-Book-About-Computers/dp/0914...

Instructions, strings and numbers https://cloud10.todocoleccion.online/tc/2013/10/09/PA0900055...

FLOW DIAGRAMS — AND instruction https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLhzcb3WkAEVrF3.jpg

IF THEN GOTO instructions https://cdn.wallapop.com/images/10420/39/59/__/c10420p196760...

LIST and LOAD instructions https://cloud10.todocoleccion.online/tc/2013/10/09/PA0900075...

Basic and Binary https://cloud10.todocoleccion.online/libros-segunda-mano-inf...

More: https://twitter.com/eduo/status/782934202572472320 http://www.lucanovelli.info/2015/10/07/amici-lettori/

I coded many interesting things in QBasic in my childhood, way before the Internet era: a point-and-click GUI like windows 3.x, a compression format that I thought was marvelous. Later in my life I found I had “invented” Run-Length Encoding, haha.

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