geraldew

Data analyst and programmer: SQL (in my sleep), Pascal (in my head), Python (in development), VBA & MS Access (for my sins). Interested in mathematics and computing theory & FOSS.

Public Key

npub1vzg8hxwnpajwfvfxhxswxtjy5tv0z2lepf8nqkltpj7lyc5vk0ese0jtzu

NIP-05 Address

geraldew@fosstodon-org.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxpyrmn8fs7e8ykyntng8r9ez29k8390us5nest04se00jv2xt8ucpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejs3hx92k

Publishing to

nostr.wine

Author Public Key

npub1vzg8hxwnpajwfvfxhxswxtjy5tv0z2lepf8nqkltpj7lyc5vk0ese0jtzu

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Last Notes

2026-07-07 13:23:33 UTC

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@nprofile…v673 Can you perhaps expand on that a little?
I'm still "getting around to" adding copy features to my Foldatry application, but I am interested in what features I might want it to have. A core idea of writing it has always been to make it easy to do things that other tools can't quite do or are hard to make do.
- not that Foldatry is at all like rsync, but rsync was something I tried using before feeling I needed a custom tool instead. https://gitlab.com/geraldew/foldatry/-/wikis/userguide

2026-06-28 11:15:01 UTC

Not that anyone following me here is likely to have expectations, nonetheless I will just say there's quite a lot happening in my life right now, so original posts will be rare for a while.
Reading my feed and occasional responses to it may still happen, likely as a welcome distraction.
It's nothing that calls for sympathy, just some major changes after a long steady period of life.
I'm looking forward to being settled again, hopefully by August, and to then writing/posting more.

2026-05-03 10:57:53 UTC

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@nprofile…3src sorry to nitpick, but by "emphasise" did you perhaps mean "empathise"?

2025-12-23 01:19:37 UTC

From a conversation today, I wrote the following - and I'm probably not the first to think this.
Well, "AI" is a curious variation on Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Becoming instead: Any sufficiently advanced magic is easily misunderstood as actual technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

2025-12-17 11:32:54 UTC

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@nprofile…p7rx yes I was similar.
Hard now to guess when my first trials were, though Progeny Linux was one of them.
I then used Mandrake in parallel for a few years, even doing a shared "home" across that and Windows for about a year.

2025-12-17 10:06:25 UTC

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@nprofile…vrvz so that's a spreadsheet with RPN as the formula syntax and Forth as its scripting language?

2025-12-16 15:01:10 UTC

While I will probably write much more about this when the time comes, the fact that we'll soon be in the year 2026 is reminding me that it was during 2006 that I changed over to using Linux full time at home.
In particular that was with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake - where the "06" stands for June, so that's when my 20 year mark will be.
And while that's mostly been 20 years of unexciting non-drama nonetheless I do feel that this will be quite a milestone to comment on come June.
#Linux

2025-11-30 05:57:57 UTC

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@nprofile…f4xf FWIW as a (very) longtime user of a Roget's Thesaurus, these days I usually cheat and use WordHippo (as in .com)
I started with a Roget's edition from Penguin borrowed from my sister in the 1970s, and my "current" edition proclaims itself as "a new edition for the nineties".
For many years, it's been the first book I ever recommend for programmers to buy, and my code has been littered with archaic short terms for literally decades.

2025-11-30 05:45:07 UTC

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@nprofile…f4xf do I presume "sequent" is too similar to "sequence"?

2025-11-29 05:44:25 UTC

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@nprofile…sxvw @nprofile…lspy @nprofile…9ld8
Quite so: that's part of a larger pattern that I label as "The Law of Inverse Appreciation"
<quote>
A solution into which you put a great deal of effort, skill and experience will receive only minor thanks; but a simple tip that you provide which solves a major headache for someone will garner impassioned gratitude and be praised as incredible work.
</quote>
https://dev.to/geraldew/some-aphoristic-laws-f83

2025-11-11 14:22:25 UTC

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@nprofile…hjyu @nprofile…lcsk well, in the form of VBA I still use it at my work on a daily basis.

2025-11-11 14:18:47 UTC

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@nprofile…hjyu don't know that I'd call it a programming language, but even after 30 years of doing it, I still get a kick out of making SQL do really neat things.
At my work I'm currently playing around with a resurrection of a data spider process I wrote with it over 20 years ago and this time around have been making it generate Mermaid markup for connected node diagrams.
#SQL

2025-11-11 14:09:17 UTC

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@nprofile…9ake my one disappointment with Double Commander is that I wish it could warn me if I go to delete a non-empty directory. Some day I might try writing a patch for that.
While I can say I use Thunar every day, in practice all I do with it is to unmount/eject drives before I unplug them.
Everything else I do in DC. Oh, and my own file+folder tool written in Python (see elsewhere blah blah blah).

2025-10-10 01:45:45 UTC

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@nprofile…6t6n it's possible to eat only half a chocolate?

2025-10-06 14:28:34 UTC

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@nprofile…6t6n does that count as a brown-out?
I used to (back in my IT support and electronic repair days) consider a brown-out to be about the power falling then coming back up again before hitting zero. In the time before switch-mode power supplies that caused all kinds of strange faults.
But a power drop too short to notice? A "blip-out" perhaps?

2025-05-14 15:45:04 UTC

Ah: Perth, Western Australia. A city with so much historical integrity and a rich visual delight from all angles.
Nah, just kidding; here's two example new buildings right where the city meets the majestic Swan river at Elizabeth Quay.
Such rectangular boxes tell you all you need to know about the architectural vision here - i.e. none at all.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/506/929/133/231/812/original/85f3cbceac1851e6.jpg

2025-05-10 11:04:29 UTC

Recent family IT support activity:
- fix an obscure bug/issue in Thunderbird on Windows 8.1
- show relative how to edit the list of payees in their online bank (different bank to mine) (no actually I just did it for them and told them how I did it) (but you guessed that right?)
- fix their inkjet printer having paper feed problems ... by lying on the floor with the printer upside down on a chair above me so I could coax out the pen that they'd dropped inside of it.

2025-04-20 05:38:01 UTC

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@nprofile…s6x2 it's the word "portable" there that got my attention!
When I was routinely using microfiche readers they were quite large. The trickiest part was how the mechanism allowed for manipulation of the microfiche in both broad movement and finely positioned.
So how does a small device provide such variable precision?
Also, some had printers but I have zero recollection of what their technology was.

2025-04-14 14:15:10 UTC

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@nprofile…23jl look at page 236, it clearly shows the title is "Gardens to Feed Our Spacemen"

2025-02-01 12:30:36 UTC

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@nprofile…8f02 @nprofile…0ta0 anyone mentioning the J S. Rohl books on Pascal gets a thumbs up from me.
Despite being a student at the same university, I never intersected with him. After I left there, I bought his Pascal book trilogy circa 1984 to teach myself Pascal (using CP/M Turbo Pascal). I kept them for years but must have parted with them sometime long ago.
Nonetheless, my conception of vital programming concepts - especially recursion - came from his writing.

2024-12-23 01:57:27 UTC

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@nprofile…p3jt a key word in there is "aesthetics" because it is only occasionally that I see anything useful written about actual functionality differences between various GUI approaches and toolkits.
As creator of one application I initially just used the default GUI library of the language, expecting to change later to something else.
But every time I investigate an alternative I give up after swimming through a pool littered with aesthetics instead of practical features.

2024-12-16 11:32:00 UTC

A quick Mastodon usage tip.
If you're scrolling along and see a post that - for any reason whatever - you suspect you might want to find again, bookmark it right then.
It's taken me ages to realise this is the best thing to do, even if you never come back to it.
This is because Mastodon - via web or an app - is quite poor at letting you later search your own feed for "that thing I saw".
But it will be in your bookmark list - at least long enough - most of the time.
#Mastodon #mastotip

2024-12-13 01:33:16 UTC

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@nprofile…795r works well on mobile.
Only flaw I found is that on the About page, the items after "They include:" were too small to make sense of without zooming. Maybe have text to go with them?

2024-11-21 00:01:03 UTC

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@nprofile…gqp6 @nprofile…9rvt @nprofile…795r @nprofile…c8kq
The thing that impresses me is how every single sponsor segment is mostly about interesting aspects of infosec.
I don't know any other feed (podcast, text, video etc) where that is the norm.
Clearly, this is due to Patrick's curation and rapport with the sponsors and yet the line between those and the pure journalism is always very clear.
I've been following tech news for over four decades and I don't know of anything else that is comparable.

2024-11-10 12:19:14 UTC

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@npub14zv…gvhs @npub1m8f…yyjx @npub1886…pzzz Well that will certainly be something for me to note.
I found it tricky enough to write code to do foolproof Unicode handling in generating bash scripts as a possible outcome of my file and folder tool.
If I ever want to have it generate Perl scripts then I will need to be aware of how to do that properly, and how that is distinct.
In my case that's only about file and folder names, not their contents.
Thanks for sharing.

2023-04-29 14:09:25 UTC

FOSS licenses come in two approaches. The distinction is _who_ is granted the most freedom:
- in "copyleft" licenses the emphasis is on the end-user, ensuring that they are _always_ passed the four freedoms;
- in "permissive" licenses, the emphasis is on other developers/programmers, including allowing them to _not_ pass on the four freedoms.
Is disappointing people still mistake this as being a difference between #FreeSoftware and #OpenSource because each has always supported both types.