Author: seasoned_geek

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc. A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born. Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy: Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.

Neither Flakon nor Epiphany browsers will play videos

 seasoned_geek  November 7, 2020

This is really annoying. As more and more people and companies attempt to monetize OpenSource we are going to see more and more of this shit. It all has to do with licensing and it is a pain in the ass. You installed either Falkon or Epiphany (also called Gnome Web) because they are somewhat light and have “private” browsing options that will help you keep your identity. While nothing is actually “safe” on the Web, at least in these modes they purge all of the local storage when you close and they do ask sites to not track you. For the non-geek, purging of local storage is really important and not just because you might be looking at naughty…

Github is trashed this morning

 seasoned_geek  November 2, 2020

Gotta love it when you are greeted with an image like that! I tried from multiple computers and multiple browsers. Other websites look and work fine. Github is just trashed. In case you cannot see the featured image. I work up early and had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to leave. Planned on finishing a Fedora 33 dev VM for Diamond (possibly Red Diamond soon) and boom! Can’t get my git. If I could have gotten the source, done the build, and gotten the screen shots, I could have finished the doc.

The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE

 seasoned_geek  October 31, 2020

At long last it is finally out! “A journey through IT history explaining why SDLC Waterfall Model is Software Engineering and AGILE will never be.” As distribution updates trickle out to other retailers you should see it at Barnes & Nobles, BAM and most other online book sellers. As of right now, these are the places Google finds it: eBay (not me) Adlibris Booktopia Amazon Yeah, it kills me that IngramSpark no longer allows authors to block Amazon when you use their distribution. That was the only reason I went with IngramSpark all of those years ago. It was a real shock to find out about it by trying to set up a new title with them. No warning/notification what-so-ever….

CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 17

 seasoned_geek  October 26, 2020

I’m putting this here because I discovered it while trying to fix a rather horrible “busy” dialog in the Advanced Search portion of Diamond. I had to create a GUI “Hello World” application to test this out so I could file a “simple” bug report. According to the doc animated GIF is supported on all platforms. The code for Linux is a tad behind the documentation. When I build and run this on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS I see the following: A sad sad day indeed. What this means is the cool animated GIF Icons8 let me create now has to be busted up into frames. Well fine. I just didn’t have anything to do that installed on this system and…

Sometimes Cheap Stuff Can Really Amaze You

 seasoned_geek  October 24, 2020

Back in 2019 I bought some of these things on eBay. I don’t know why, but my small cheap USB wifi adapters seem to walk off. Normally I hard wire network connections simply because it is more secure, but sometimes you are forced to use wireless. In my office back on the farm I don’t care too much. I care more about it when I’m in corporate housing. Ultimately that is an apartment complex and anyone could be sniffing the wireless for your credit/identity information. With a hard wired connection at least they have to go all the way out onto the Internet to find it or to get into my computer. Why am I praising a wifi adapter? Is…