BasiliusCarver's comments

On: Ask HN: Is there a name for the “rebuild it” phase...

[BasiliusCarver]

Love it when you do the “who wrote this” git blame and it was <myself@now-2y>

On: Show HN: My PowerShell pixel art editor

[BasiliusCarver]

Added customizable keymappings and a vim default :p

On: COBOL’s youth culture

[BasiliusCarver]

Nicely presented. It’s fun but the new-user learning curve is definitely frustrating (especially because most of the documentation is super dry). I ended up with this after a while of playing with the language https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/TicTacTOBOL

On: Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

[BasiliusCarver]

I’ve found it pretty handy to run a defragmentation in a guest OS before trying to shrink virtual hard drives. Not sure it affects all virtual drives but hyper-v vhdx can compact poorly if the data is quite fragmented and it’s often easier to defrag in the guest if the filesystem isn’t something you have drivers for on the host.

On: Botspam apocalypse

[BasiliusCarver]

One of the things I’ve done before among the other suggestions is to put a hidden link like /followmeifyouscraping.html in the landing page to get a bit of info about scraping volume and then you can use fail2ban filters to block if it’s visited if you want

[jiggawatts → BasiliusCarver]

I would add that link to robots.txt as an exclusion.

That way well-behaved search engines won’t be affected, but naive scrapers get auto-banned.

On: COBOL Programming Course

[BasiliusCarver]

I had fun a few years ago learning a little bit of COBOL and wish this had been around then because you never know if any of the documentation is relevant to modern-ish COBOL. Feel free to repurpose this version of tic tac toe for learning https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/TicTacTOBOL

On: Show HN: A Simple COBOL Game, TicTacTOBOL

[BasiliusCarver]

Thanks, I might give "Connect FORTRAN" a go next

On: Show HN: A Simple COBOL Game, TicTacTOBOL

[BasiliusCarver]

I wanted to learn a little bit of COBOL so I could have a better understanding of the code underpinning a large amount of the money that flows through our banks. I found it quite enjoyable and it's less scary than I anticipated given the reaction I've seen from a lot of developers. If anyone has pointers for how I could improve this feel free to hit me with a PR.

[tough → BasiliusCarver]

Would you mind sharing any resources you found helpful along the way? Might wanna pick it up on the near future

[BasiliusCarver → tough]

I started by copying a COBOL helloworld program and working through the concepts on https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cobol It's very lightweight but that's what I was after. What I wish I had done from the start was compile with all warnings (-Wall) because it would have caught a few things like me assigning constants to variables (pictures in COBOL) that were not the right size so they were silently truncated at runtime