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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

    At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.









  • Keep in mind that it has been decades since I last used Kermit, but I’m pretty sure the use case it was originally designed for was…

    Connect to a serial port, which had a modem attached. Talk to the modem and get it to dial a number. Presumably, the remote end answered and the port attached to its modem would issue a login prompt. Negotiate the login and then issue a bunch of commands to change directories and then launch Kermit on the remote system. After that Kermit to Kermit communications took over until you terminated the session. Finally, log off the remote system and hang up the modem.

    All of this stuff could be done via scripts. I seem to remember that it would actually wait for a response, and then parse the response in the script. I don’t remember ever doing polling loops.

    If you’re on a *nix box of some type, it’s totally possible to open up a serial port for manual I/O even in something like a bash script. Even if you have to reverse telnet to a terminal server.





  • That used to be really true when I was a kid in the 79’s, but not so much today. Back then, a quality guitar cost way more than the cheap stuff and the cheap stuff was rubbish.

    Nowadays, with CNC machines everywhere, there are lots of modestly priced guitars that are very playable. The junk that we used to have to settle with back in the day only exists in the realm of “toy” instruments that almost aren’t intended to be played.

    Seriously, $300 can get you a very playable instrument, especially in electric guitars.



  • From a practical perspective, I think that viewing SRP as referring to “direct” responsibility is good enough for making programming decisions.

    Take the example from the Wikipedia entry. A module that compiles and prints a report. If that was split into 3 modules: one that compiles; one that prints; and one that delegates to the previous two modules to produce the output, then you would have achieved SRP. Yes, the third does two things, but it delegates them and is therefore not directly responsible for them.

    At the same time this holds with the spirit of the official definition. Each module is only responsible to one source of change.

    At a certain level of detail, your sources of change start becoming other modules and not users or Product Owners. Then it’s harder to think about SRP the “official” way. But direct responsibility is easier to make decisions on.