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Had they just fucking called we both would have been able to quickly sort out who knew what and who was going to do anything about it.

That is actually misrepresenting the problem. A call requires you to drop everything and give it your full attention. It doesn't allow for editing your answer, or asking a careful question. The upside is indeed that you can quickly go back-and-forth. But the cost is that you lose your flow and are out of it for at least another 15 minutes. If I was dug into something deep and you call me around four, I might as well go home since I won't be able to get back in for the day. That's a fairly steep but hidden cost to your two minute call you could've resolved yourself with thirty seconds thinking or a minute or two of searching for yourself.

But the root cause is muddled thinking. This is quite common, and several essays on the issue immediately spring to mind.

There is that and also depending on your job you may even be required to have everything in writing whenever talking with a client or even for interdepartmental communications. Some of it is for CYA purposes but also for dealing with those people who just won't take notes and call you again with the same question the very next day because they already forgot. If someone insists on leaving me a long-winded voicemail I'll just email them and claim that it was garbled or such and to please reply to the email with their question. In my experience the ones who try to avoid email are trying to hinder you from documenting what they said.

Had they just fucking called we both would have been able to quickly sort out who knew what and who was going to do anything about it.

That is actually misrepresenting the problem. A call requires you to drop everything and give it your full attention. It doesn't allow for editing your answer, or asking a careful question. The upside is indeed that you can quickly go back-and-forth. But the cost is that you lose your flow and are out of it for at least another 15 minutes. If I was dug into something deep and you call me around four, I might as well go home since I won't be able to get back in for the day. That's a fairly steep but hidden cost to your two minute call you could've resolved yourself with thirty seconds thinking or a minute or two of searching for yourself.

But the root cause is muddled thinking. This is quite common, and several essays on the issue immediately spring to mind.

Notice how the kids (I'm 40, but I feel much older) treat "texting" like a phone call, or worse: Half-sentences or just loose words strung along across many messages. So they're trying to suck all your attention to them over the text.

Me, I prefer messages like I used to exchange on USENET (and FidoNet's Echomail). Properly interleave-quoted, edited for brevity, to the point, easily readable. It takes quite a bit of effort to make such a thing work but if you do you can get massive content through with lots of detail and nuance.

You don' t get that with a phone call, nor with "texting". You just get lots of attentiongrabbing, and a very low signal-to-noise ratio. This seems to be par for the course for "business" these days. Even before "texting" became a thing, truth be told. Mealy-mouthed "we value your custom so we're putting you on hold" and other such bullshit, not just on the phone. It's everywhere, and besides being full of obvious lies, it's a searing insult to my intelligence.

And now it's not just phone calls and texting, but all sorts of do-overs, do-agains, me-toos, and other imitations. Whatsapp, twitter, facebook, and previously icq, msn, aol messenger, jabber, what-have-you. None of those add anything worthwhile beyond being popular for a while, they just manage to fragment your messaging archive beyond all integration.

So for anything official, I'm back to letters.

They didn't even get to ask the ones who are dead or still in prison did they? What happened to the other 2/3 when they started the study? Even with the people that did respond there is a clear pattern of puzzle games being increasingly more popular over violent types as the person's education level rises.

I am not sure what to make of it all but I am still glad I installed these games on all the machines on my LAN, http://www.chiark.greenend.org...

What about PuTTY?

I use PuTTY to SSH into my FreeBSD box. And no, Netcraft has not confirmed anything.

Get it here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org...

PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys

The second sentence implies some other incompatibilities, in addition to special format for keys. I'm not aware of anything else — could you list examples?

Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again

PuTTY's entire source-code is , whereas Microsoft's own implementation of Kerberos was binary-only and developers had to sign an NDA to learn, how to interoperate with it. I linked to that above — the story was all the rage right here on /. 15 years ago...

I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before

Probably, because, PuTTY provided a perfectly satisfactory solution...

PuTTy is already an incompatible mess all of it's own. It even has it's own special format for keys

The second sentence implies some other incompatibilities, in addition to special format for keys. I'm not aware of anything else — could you list examples?

Well fuck me, time to look up the command to convert that stupid shit again

PuTTY's entire source-code is , whereas Microsoft's own implementation of Kerberos was binary-only and developers had to sign an NDA to learn, how to interoperate with it. I linked to that above — the story was all the rage right here on /. 15 years ago...

I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before

Probably, because, PuTTY provided a perfectly satisfactory solution...

you forgot an 'l' (L) in the link.

Real link:http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

greenend.co.uk may be more trustworthy than putty.org, but neither will get you the official PuTTY release.

ftp://ftp.chiark.greenend.org....

What confusion?

That's where experience comes in handy! It's better to find the reasons Simon Tatham has no time to make a modern Web site page, then click on the links to download PuTTY and the puzzles collection.

obvious shady shit like this malicious version of PuTTY

The problem here is that it isn't "obvious shady shit" as you claim. The official PuTTY download page doesn't look very "official". This makes it easier to fool people into downloading the trojaned version instead of the official version.

WTF is that? Because that's not sgtatham's site.

In this particular situation; because at first glance the main download page, site and URL doesn't look "official" at all.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org...
It would be pretty easy to confuse a slightly more modern looking page for the "main download page".

Because if you use goto in a class assignment, you lose points.

If the assignment is "Implement a coroutine mechanism for C", why would a sane instructor dock the student for making something like this clear wrapper around goto ?

Yes, there is.
Fork OpenSSH? Nope, not a bad idea. PuTTY is also nicely MIT licensed, so it would be great for Microsoft to do this.
Drop Telnet? No. A Telnet client is close enough to a raw TCP client that Telnet is useful as a handy way to send TCP traffic for TCP troubleshooting. As long as some TCP traffic isn't SSH encrypted, keeping the Telnet client is useful.
And having a Telnet client that is readily available but only after going through a tedious process to "Install" it, is just plain annoying. I regularly wish that Vista (and subsequent) hadn't done that.

And if anybody doesn't understand: The goto statement is considered harmful, except when it's not. When used in situations where structured programming (while and friends) expresses the intent more cleanly, it's harmful. But when used as the backend of a coroutine macro library, it's not. And when used to jump to cleanup code in exceptional conditions, as seen here, it's not.

For a long time, I wasn't aware of any easy way to automate downloading files. I could automate by writing batch files thanks to my old DOS skills, but the best command line program for that was FTP. FTP did support input from a file, but didn't necessarily handle firewalls well. I could run the web browser (IExplore.exe) to point to a file, but then the user was prompted, so that wasn't automated. That was in the 1990s.

More recently, I took a look at this again and found that I could use VBScript to use an HTTP object, and could automatically download files with HTTP. But, since Windows Script Host is not being developed (Microsoft has known bugs that'll freeze a program and won't fix them), that's not a solution I have been feeling real comfortable with.

If this thing supports some decent security, permitting downloading of remote files, this could resolve one of the must-gets that I always want before I really feel that a Windows machine is decently customized for me to be a bit comfortable with it.

Now, the other really-super-cool thing that would be useful is a way to remotely control command lines. A built-in SSH terminal would allow me to interoperate even more, so I can control precious machines on the other side of the Internet. PuTTY is PuTTY's License is like BSD / MIT / similar, so Microsoft could include that just as well as they included Telnet.exe way back in the day. Obviously, Telnet.exe is worthless (because of the biggest problem which is security, and nobody liked it anyway because it didn't handle screen-cursor control codes suitably). If Microsoft can just add that feature next, it will eliminate much of the must-have downloading that I frequently feel a need to start doing whenever I start heavily using a new machine.

But who on Earth would risk their life riding a bike, (...), when professional idiots kill bicyclists riding peacefully and safely?

Who would risk their life? That would be Spike. He's Spike Bike. He hates cars.

If the graphics break again and the network is up then try PuTTY.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org...

Take a look at some Palm code.

If the hideous restrictions and limits there don't put you off, then find out what they recommend to compile.

Flashy IDE's probably aren't going to be easy to find, there weren't many around in the first place and the majority of stuff I know is just command-line compilers which can plug into any IDE (if you're brave enough).

All I remember of Palm coding was having to break C files into tiny parts, jam them together and hope the individual object files never went over a certain size because the linker had to play all kinds of tricks to load them.

Take a look at something like this:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org...

The base code of which is generally easy to port (Simon Tatham's PORTABLE Puzzle Collection). That Palm version is quite a pain to compile even with the right tools.

One can implement coroutines in C.

I think the RT has a place in the market, but MS priced it way too high to begin with. For $300 with keyboard and allowing installation of non-MS Store apps could make this device useful. It comes with MS Office with OneNote (albeit crippled without the ability to record meeting audio). This could have been a great, affordable tablet for business users and students.

MS didn't include Outlook; didn't include the killer sound recording feature of OneNote - instead recommending running a sound record app while taking notes - WTF?; made it difficult for PuTTY or apps like it to even consider porting to the platform - see http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/winrt.html

Other smaller issues like going with 16:9 instead of 16:10 makes trying to read a document in portrait orientation difficult. MS might have had a tablet for masses and students,but managed to fumble another opportunity by trying to out iPad the iPad.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html should be mandatory reading for (would-be) bug reporters.

If you like puzzles, specially hard ones with some nice math and logic try Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzles. I'm currently addicted to sign post, but I can recommend net, light up, and loopy. Depending on the difficulty level, you can spend any kind of time doing them. The puzzles are awesome since you can pick pretty much any difficulty and enter your own parameters. For net I prefer a 25x25 grid, but for signpost I'm currently working on a 7x7.

They're available in android in a really good port. But stay away from the IOS version, you have to pay and it's garbage.

I already got one, and I can display it any non-glossy, non-touchscreen display I choose. Glossy, touchscreen displays will indeed stay on the retailer's shelves.

... they had introduce the strange "yield" keyword to help alleviate the issues caused by this feature.

Or, from a different perspective, they reintroduced a concept (coroutines) that BCPL had but C dropped, forcing people to use obscure hacks. What that has to do with properties, I don't know.

http://www.putty.org/

The page is simple enough, I'll let you figure it out.

Note: I've never used it - yet.

I'd double-check that URL. The official site is and has always been: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

there's usually a way to ask the OS never to swap a program out, it's seldom exposed to the user.

This is why I don't use PuTTY's pageant on windows without disk encryption. It specifically states in it's faq that even with the functions it has available, it cannot guarantee that windows won't swap it to disk.

How to Report Bugs Effectively

This is one of the best articles I've read describing how to report a bug. It's written by the developer of Putty. The instructions are clear and get to the essence of what is required to be able to find the bug so it can be fixed.

Simon Tatham has a good writeup about bug reporting. It's a great article, well worth the read.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

But, if you won't read it, here are some one/two-sentence points from that article:

• Give the programmer some credit for basic intelligence: if the program really didn't work at all, they would probably have noticed
• One of the very best ways you can report a bug is by showing it to the programmer.
• If you have to report a bug to a programmer who can't be present in person, the aim of the exercise is to enable them to reproduce the problem.
• Describe what happened. Tell them exactly what you saw. Tell them why you think what you saw is wrong; better still, tell them exactly what you expected to see.
• When something goes wrong, immediately stop doing anything. Don't touch any buttons at all. Look at the screen and notice everything out of the ordinary, and remember it or write it down.
• Using your intelligence to help the programmer is fine. Even if your deductions are wrong, the programmer should be grateful that you at least tried to make their life easier. But report the symptoms as well, or you may well make their life much more difficult instead.
• Say "intermittent fault" to any programmer and watch their face fall.
• Be specific. Be verbose. Be careful of pronouns. Read what you wrote.

Or Simon's summary:

• The first aim of a bug report is to let the programmer see the failure with their own eyes. If you can't be with them to make it fail in front of them, give them detailed instructions so that they can make it fail for themselves.
• In case the first aim doesn't succeed, and the programmer can't see it failing themselves, the second aim of a bug report is to describe what went wrong.

• Describe everything in detail. State what you saw, and also state what you expected to see. Write down the error messages, especially if they have numbers in.

• When your computer does something unexpected, freeze. Do nothing until you're calm, and don't do anything that you think might be dangerous.
• By all means try to diagnose the fault yourself if you think you can, but if you do, you should still report the symptoms as well.
• Be ready to provide extra information if the programmer needs it. If they didn't need it, they wouldn't be asking for it. They aren't being deliberately awkward. Have version numbers at your fingertips, because they will probably be needed.
• Write clearly. Say what you mean, and make sure it can't be misinterpreted.
• Above all, be precise. Programmers like precision.

Unless of course you search for it on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, or probably any other search engine, in which case it's the first result. And, unless you actually read the page you're downloading from, which states "The official PuTTY web page is still where it has always been: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/"

Unless you don't know what PuTTY is, you'd almost have to try to download it from the wrong place.

I know zip about other projects, but I was hacking on Maxima for use in my robotics assignments and something is to be said for conciseness of Lisp's way of dealing with data structures. Something more is to be said for macros: the programmatic generation of code (they are nothing like C macros). Of course you can generate code in C, but it's a shitty experience, and you have to roll it all yourself. The C/C++ languages do not come with any sort of a data structure to express themselves. Even Python has an ast module. I've found that programmatic generation of code is a big win in embedded world, especially on small microcontrollers (RAM in single kilobytes, etc). Most platform libraries become quite bloated if you want to truly fully support all peripherals, even if a typical application only uses a small subset of the functionality. The compilers are usually too stupid to properly optimize it, even if a fairly rudimentary constant propagation would indicate that 90% of the library is dead code. With macros you can easily generate just the code you need. Macros can easily and cleanly replace external tools like lexer and parser generators. They are also great for implementing extra language features. You don't need hacks like Duff's device or coroutine horkage. LISP is powerful enough that you can have features like yield implemented in a library.

In the end, it's all about ease of use. Even though I do a lot in C and C++, I detest their verbosity. I mean, come on, ML family had type inference for three decades! Heck, I have worked with a structured basic running on CP/M Z80 that had rudimentary type inference (although didn't have algebraic types). You didn't have to assign types to your variables, and if you tried adding an integer to a string it would balk -- not at runtime, but before it'd accept the new or modified line of program! Variables were assigned types at first use, and if you had a function returning a value (yes, it had functions, but sadly no tuples), it knew what type it'd be based on the code inside of the function. That was in late 80s! Then you come to C++ and get to experience template metaprogramming -- sure it's powerful, but it feels about as expressive as programming a Turing machine directly. And metaprograms are interpreted by the compiler, in a very inefficient way.

It's the usual scenario, you pick the idiot:

1. OSS evangelist throws sales pitch at newbie
2. Newbie starts using OSS, tries to file a bug
3. "Scratch my own itch" developer tells him to get lost

That's easy; the "Newbie" didn't do his "caveat emptor".

Exactly the same things apply no matter how much you pay for a copy of software. If you were buying the physical medium (or paying the cost of a server) the price would be tiny or covered by the adverts (or something). What you're paying for is a bribe so the author will come back and do something to fix your problems or make something even better. With free software the author has stated they're not particularly interested in getting cash (or don't expect to get enough for it to be worthwhile) so you need another way of getting their attention.

Sometimes flattery works; but they tend to be pretty good at spotting saccharin. Of course a newbie bug report often starts off: "This software is crap!", this is not a good start. Other times nothing can work, because just a "bug report" is never enough, the developer has to be able to reproduce the problem. I expect this is the issue for the Linux kernel developers in respect of the virtualbox module. They never use the module, they use physical machines or kvm (and used to use vmware).

One last thing; don't let this put you off from sending bug reports, it may be that just the information you can send is enough for this bug, this gets much more likely if you can send an effective bug report.

I use PuTTY daily.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#faq-meaning

A.10.3 What does ‘PuTTY’ mean?

It's the name of a popular SSH and Telnet client. Any other meaning is in the eye of the beholder. It's been rumoured that ‘PuTTY’ is the antonym of ‘getty’, or that it's the stuff that makes your Windows useful, or that it's a kind of plutonium Teletype. We couldn't possibly comment on such allegations.

In SecureCRT (even non-secured one), I use its sz and rz for Zmodem file transfers. I don't need to load up SFTP, SCP, etc. especially when in a hurry.

FYI, it is already in the wishlist, but it is years old and low priority. Le PuTTY exists, but it is an ugly hack and old (last updated in 2006). :(

If you really really want to donate, they have a paypal account for that sort of thing. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#faq-donations

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

The whole site seems to be slashdotted at the moment. Putty must have a pretty impressive user base...

And for those people who don't have the intellectual desire to tinker away at a shell, Simon Tatham has a few puzzles for you:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

I accept no responsibility for loss of work months due to the use of these puzzles.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

http://edna.sourceforge.net/

Open up a port on your router, say 9040 or something

Set edna to use port 9040

Use ssh (or putty if you must ) on your laptop (or mobile device) to forward port 9040 to wherever you are.

Enjoy your music.

Yeah, because Windows runs ssh right out of the box

Of course it does:

1. Connect to the Internet.
2. Download ssh.
3. Run ssh.

Or did you mean run ssh as a server? In that case, Windows has RDP.

Reminds me of Simon Tatham, creator of PuTTY.

If you wanted a PC software emulator in the 80s, you needed an Acorn Archimedes:

Here's some advice that I find useful when reporting bugs:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

There are some non-obvious things in there, such as trying things that clearly won't work, if asked to by the programmer:

Somebody reported a bug to me once, and I asked him to try a command that I knew wouldn't work. The reason I asked him to try it was that I wanted to know which of two different error messages it would give. Knowing which error message came back would give a vital clue. But he didn't actually try it - he just mailed me back and said "No, that won't work". It took me some time to persuade him to try it for real.

In that case, the developer failed to communicate relevant information. He should have explicitly said from the beginning that he needs the text of the error message to diagnose what the problem is.

Here's some advice that I find useful when reporting bugs:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

There are some non-obvious things in there, such as trying things that clearly won't work, if asked to by the programmer:

Somebody reported a bug to me once, and I asked him to try a command that I knew wouldn't work. The reason I asked him to try it was that I wanted to know which of two different error messages it would give. Knowing which error message came back would give a vital clue. But he didn't actually try it - he just mailed me back and said "No, that won't work". It took me some time to persuade him to try it for real.

interfacing with a woman's nipple is hard-wired; it's instinctual.

That's disputed. Some mothers report that their children take a while to learn to suck. But even if it is hardwired, there isn't any computer interface that people are hardwired to use.

BTW, so is sex. It's hardwired into our beings.

I read an anecdote in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* by Dr. David Reuben about a couple who saw a doctor because they were unable to conceive. It turned out they were doing it in the wrong hole. And it is not the only time it's happened.

* but were afraid to ask

FTP would be dead if Microsoft would adopt the SSH suite, since SSH has the exact same capabilities as FTP. SSH is the swiss army knife of encrypted networking. Port tunneling is very useful. Less known, but also very nice is the ability to use pipes like this:

echo "hello" | ssh remote_host "cat > hello.txt"

You could use it to make a large backup without consuming disk space on the local machine.

tar -zc directory_to_backup | ssh remote_host "cat > backup.tar.gz"

It also works very well with rsync. Combine with hard links for a great backup strategy.

I like to see the surprise from Microsoft centric developers when they discover what SSH can do. They seem to all have this false assumption that it's just for getting a shell on a remote UNIX system.

Though I haven't kept up with SSH development on Windows, two applications I've used on Windows are: WinSCP and PUTTY sshwindows also looks interesting as I use cygwin + SSH

I don't game on my phone, as I use a corporate cell phone. But I do game on my Nokia N810. ScummVM, some solitaire games, and Simon Tatham's puzzle collection are installed. I play when I'm usually stuck somewhere waiting for something beyond my control, like a doctor/dentist appointment.

I don't know about €2 coins, but loads of £1 coins are counterfeit -- perhaps 5%. The €2 (and 1) are bi-metallic though, so presumably harder to fake.

Under UK law (as that page explains), once you know a coin is counterfeit it's illegal to give it to anyone (except the police) or to keep it. Daft, but it means it's in my interest not to identify counterfeits. (Unless, possibly, I checked every time I was given change. But that's not realistic.)