Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 9 Posts
  • 618 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Around the turn of the century I built a “middleware” layer for an Oracle to MySQL bridge which enabled legacy systems to keep running while modern and open source tooling could be built.

    The biggest challenge was moving from columnar to row based data … that and compiling Solaris tools using Oracle libraries.

    Oracle is like sendmail, user friendly, just very picky whom it makes friends with.

    I’m getting flashbacks to debugging an Oracle connection file.





  • Writing software is about problem solving skills which improve with practice. Often the process involves breaking down a problem into smaller pieces and breaking each of those down, until you know how to “solve” each problem.

    Writing down each “solution” and stringing them together is then the actual “programming” part of this activity … which brings with it a whole new layer of “problems” to “solve”.

    It’s as much art as it is accounting and the more you do it, the better you get at it.

    Source: I’ve been writing software since 1982.









  • I can’t wait to read the explosion of breathless media reports and “expert” commentary discussing the sudden spate of compromised ID systems and the subsequent finger pointing between politicians blaming each other for this entirely foreseeable outcome while the professionals who kept raising concerns have their uncredited “I told you so” moment.






  • Puppeteer is the tool. It takes some getting used to.

    You can set a bunch of triggers that determine exactly when the screenshot fires, and you can simulate mouse movement and scrolling to deal with lazy loading.

    There’s even time delays that differentiates between human time and machine time, allowing you to have the software act as if it was running for longer than it actually was, which deals with other weirdness seen in web apps.

    You can run it inside Docker which might simplify things for you.

    I ended up writing a node.js app to control puppeteer precisely how I needed to.

    Source: I spent 48 months or so using it for a project that required all of that.