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Google has Googaplexes but not Gigabytes - Good Enough software?

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  Google has its large numbers such as googaplex : " Googleplex " is a portmanteau of Google and complex (meaning a complex of buildings) and a reference to googolplex, the name given to the large number 10 (10 100 ) There are further such curt identifiers for big, big numbers: A googol seconds is about a sexvigintillion (10 81 ) times the estimated age of the universe. A googol angstroms is approximately 100 trevigintillion light-years. It takes approximately  317 novemvigintillion years  to count to a googol one integer at a time. Unfortunately, at least part of the Google enterprise is still getting to grips with rather smaller numbers, such as the Gigabyte: Since when has a gigabyte just 1000 megabytes? Perhaps this is some kind of IT equivalent of a move toward the metric system? Yet it looks more like a bug. In software there are always trade-offs, the most obvious being Quality vs Productivity, and this seems such an example...  OR is this a case of "good enough&q
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Flamenco Dostoevsky - literary text used to obfuscate copyright content?

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  YouTube - a flamenco guitar video, with bizarre subtitles from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (!). Whilst there is great admiration for Dosteoevsky, and in particular his well-known work of the reckless murderer who commits a crime for no *material* gain, and possibly simply for the *meaning* gained by seeking punishment and so some suffering and discipline - it is not at all clear why this text would be appearing on a Spanish flamenco YouTube video... ...unless of course, the well-beyond-copyright text of Dostoevsky is being used to hide the image or other copyrighted materials... a Crime indeed!
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somebody's been php'in ... - Dangers of source code disclosure for web site security

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Menzis: somebody's been php'in ... A `$` is not always a positive thing to see, especially in the title of your favourite website not be rendered, but a value replaced where this variable $name appears). So, hopefully the general health of the website is otherwise acceptable... More seriously, such  Source code  disclosure  ('code leak thru') bugs can indicate security faults : when code fails to render, it may inadvertently leak algorithm details or even worse connection strings and other sensitive details that a hacker may exploit...
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Lights are on, no license... - Risk of deploying a website with unlicensed software

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Amsterdam lights are on ... but the license lights are out. This seems unfortunate. It's kind of understandable if you have some software on a laptop that has an out of date license. But to build a website that has unpaid for software (Google Maps here) seems doubly unfortunate, and perhaps even a little careless... but the good news is, the website basically still worked...
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Friendly Visual Studio dialog - Presenting errors with good UX

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A friendly  Visual Studio  dialog Microsoft have a mixed history of reaching and maintain UX standards. Although admittedly the standards have risen greatly in the last 2 decades in particular, partly due to the increase in raw CPU and video of typical devices, there were early bad signs with for example the MSDOS prompt and its appalling BAT script environment, compared to the contemporary UNIX OS. Here, Visual Studio has some kind of generic error message, with a horrid modal (blocks all user input) dialog and a matchingly horrid design. Yuk, indeed.
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travis-ty - Time formats are difficult and require OS and application/website regular maintenance (Y2K, 2038, short term decisions and long term issues)

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travis is a great service that provides CI (Continuous Integration) build platform suitable for github based projects. For Open-Source projects, there is a free tier.  - but there was a wee booboo if the end-time of a build is not yet set: This could be case of defaulting to the start of Unix time or 'epoch'. Unix time is measured from the beginning of the year 1970, measured in seconds. An alternative implementation would be to use a null to indicate unknown time - however even the inventor of null considers it to be a mistake. This being a website, the client side code must be JavaScript, in which there is another option undefined, although normally that is used to indicate a bug for example if attempting to access part of the program that does not exist. (for example, a typo attempting to use a function that does not exist). This is possible, because JavaScript is a dynamically 'duck typed' language, where objects and data are accessed by convention rather than by c
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Yahoo: still learning ReactJS ... - Deploying a dev build to a live website

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For frontend web developers, there is a handy Chrome plugin, to inspect the state of the ReactJS website. However, a disadvantage is of course that just about any other ReactJS dev can also inspect your public website. If you happen to have deployed using a *dev* (internal, not really optimized for production) build, then this can be detected by your users. Unfortunately Yahoo Mail! had this issue for a while (but it seems OK now)... Word to the wise: sanity check your production software now and then!
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