Hacker News: brontitall

New comment by brontitall in "Saffron"

brontitall — Sun, 31 May 2026 07:20:03 +0000

Like a time capsule. Last modified date at the bottom of the page says 2007.

Also: > Saffron has been licensed to Adobe and is shipping in all Flash-based products, including Adobe Flash CS3. The Adobe Flash Player is the world's most pervasive software platform and reaches 99% of Internet-enabled desktops.

New comment by brontitall in "'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens"

brontitall — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:38:06 +0000

The form of wording goes back at least to 2014 in The Onion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

New comment by brontitall in "I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D"

brontitall — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:36:12 +0000

FL20 is 2000ft. Did you mean FL200?

New comment by brontitall in "Ken Thompson on How a Disk Scheduling Algorithm Became Unix [video]"

brontitall — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 02:35:38 +0000

Complete (4.5h) interview and transcript are linked from https://amturing.acm.org/interviews/thompson_4588371.cfm

New comment by brontitall in "Alan.app – Add a Border to macOS Active Window"

brontitall — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 22:16:25 +0000

In the default config, tmux panes _do_ have a highlighted border. It takes a bit to get used to how it’s done when there’s only 2 panes though (half the border is highlighted for each pane)

New comment by brontitall in "Installing and using HP-UX 9"

brontitall — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 10:47:53 +0000

It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.

The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.

The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.

New comment by brontitall in "A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years"

brontitall — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 04:49:02 +0000

This almost IS the tar format. It’s just a 512 byte header with metadata per file then the file data. Repeat for each file. The cpio format is similar but the header is shorter. Details of the contents of the headers vary, hence the different flavours. And I believe POSIX added extensible extra metadata fields that are saved as a kinda pseudo file

New comment by brontitall in "Elements of C Style (1994)"

brontitall — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:47:07 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoda_conditions

New comment by brontitall in "iPhone Air"

brontitall — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:33:50 +0000

Interesting! I hadn’t seen that Mad TV ad before. It’s quite reminiscent of this one from The Late Show on Australian TV in 1992. I can totally see people having a similar idea from the same blade escalation process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gStI9ysPrhs

New comment by brontitall in "The new geography of stolen goods"

brontitall — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 23:40:03 +0000

There is the option of PIN to drive. Evaluate your threat model and decide if you want to enable it.

New comment by brontitall in "Try and"

brontitall — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:32:50 +0000

Except in rapid speech, and particularly at the end of sentences, I can definitely hear “should of” being used by some people in local Australian English.

New comment by brontitall in "Replacing tmux in my dev workflow"

brontitall — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:16:59 +0000

On mobile so I’m not sure which case OSC52 applies to, but I use mosh+tmux 8-10 hours a day. Both bracketed paste and tmux selection setting local clipboard work fine

New comment by brontitall in "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog"

brontitall — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 11:11:50 +0000

I think there’s a bug in Figure 3. The unsigned m will always be >= 0 so the while loop will not terminate.

New comment by brontitall in "What Can You Do with a Slide Rule?"

brontitall — Sat, 17 May 2025 09:59:00 +0000

It it common to use a $ for yen, which is what I see, rather than ¥?

New comment by brontitall in "What Can You Do with a Slide Rule?"

brontitall — Fri, 16 May 2025 23:05:50 +0000

What is up with those prices? They are ridiculous!

New comment by brontitall in "Trial by Fire: The crash of Aeroflot flight 1492"

brontitall — Tue, 13 May 2025 09:41:13 +0000

I assume you’re aware that Admiral Cloudberg writes for Mentour Pilot on YouTube.

Also, pretty low volume but also low sensationalism the Australian regulator, ATSB, posts report summaries on YouTube.

E.g. https://youtu.be/dum4SfnX8uk

New comment by brontitall in "Moving Beyond Containers – Introducing Boxer by Daniel Phillips WASM I/O 2025 [video]"

brontitall — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 03:42:20 +0000

I thought WASM allowed capability based permissions for the code running inside, or has that fallen by the wayside, which was my sad expectation?

New comment by brontitall in "How a single line of code could brick your iPhone"

brontitall — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:08:26 +0000

Only in the dial string to ATD, surely?

New comment by brontitall in "Icônes"

brontitall — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 23:35:23 +0000

I can see bathtubs being used in places like real estate sites.

New comment by brontitall in "How a single line of code could brick your iPhone"

brontitall — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 22:55:01 +0000

Huh, TIL. I guess they might have used TIES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequen...