I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.
Sounds amazing. Big fan of his writing style, have two of his books: "Code" and "The Annotated Turing".
I'd be curious to learn about his work habits - have they changed over the years? Has he experienced any procrastination during his career and how he dealt with it? Any advice to those who got bored by the challenges of the modern software industry?
I'm really interested about his work habits as well - added your questions to my list. Right now I'm procrastinating editing my podcast by reading HN :)
Do you have any questions about The Annotated Turing? For me, I'm really interested in the story behind why he wrote it. As he writes in the introduction:
"Turing's original motivation in writing this paper was to solve a problem formulated by German mathematician David Hilbert ..."
I want to know Petzold's motivation for writing this. I know there's a story behind there somewhere especially given how long it took him to write the book :)
Given how old is Turing's paper and how much it was 'dissected' for the book, I would ask the following:
* Any other top papers that inspired Charles (or he found them worthy of serious deep dive)?
* Does he still read modern papers?
The latter is particularly interesting. I don't have academic background, but some of the people I spoke to claimed that there's lots of subpar papers produced nowadays. Obviously, amount produced in every field significantly increased lately, so it would be interesting to learn how someone with decades of experience is able to filter that out.
I had been in the habit of symlinking ~/.bash_history to /dev/null to avoid AFS/NFS writes on every local command execution. When I moved over to the financial industry, it didn't occur to me that such a symlink might look like an attempt to evade monitoring. A year or two in, I realized it didn't look good, but it had clearly been made my first week on the job, so I just left it in place for over 10 years rather than risk looking like I was again monkeying with my history.
I hope and presume they had much better monitoring than scanning bash history, but I'm not bet-my-career confident of that.
Enterprises that requires logging of user actions will very likely not being doing it at the shell level, either through compiled in options, or shell history.
Instead, the Kernel has built in functionality called Auditd[0], which is capable of logging any and all executions, file or socket accesses, and much more. Along with included tooling for quickly finding and alerting on events[3].
Further, if terminal logging or playback is really required (usually not), it's generally done through pam with tlog[1]. Red Hat 8 and above come with built-in tlog support[2].
Thank you so much for the navigation shortcut link! I love these and picked them up from mentors at jobs but never found a definitive guide to all of the ones I could learn.
There's Lazarus project (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) - which is a Delphi compatible IDE. I've used it once to build a simple UI app, and it was a real nostalgic look back in time. Not to mention that it was extremely simple to build the app.
Norton Commander - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander. Not sure how elegant on the inside, but it comes from the era when software development was not so fast paced. And the fact that it inspired so many spin-offs (just to mention few that I personally used: Volkov Commander, Midnight Commander, FAR Manager, and my favourite - DOS Navigator (it had spreadsheet!)).
