Scenario:

• You are an administrator on your machine.
• Your machine is either:
  • In a Windows Domain, and you don't want the domain admins messing with it.
  • Not in a Windows Domain, and you just don't want useless services running.

In this case, what you probably want to do is prevent the Group Policy Client Service from running on your machine. Unfortunately, that's not a straightforward task to accomplish, because if you go to "services" and try to stop or disable this service, Windows doesn't let you.

Greg Young - The Long Sad History of Microservices

From the "Build Stuff" event of April 2017.

Talk begins at 9:45.

Highlights of the talk:

Now that Java 9 is out, I decided to migrate to it my pet project, which is around 120K lines of java.

The first step is to just start compiling and running against jdk9, without using any of its features yet.

This is an account of the surprisingly few issues that I encountered during this first step and how I resolved them.

Issue #1: Object.finalize() has been deprecated.

Screenshot of Borland Turbo Debugger found on the interwebz, possibly the same version that I was using back then.

This is a hacking story from my University years. It ends with a nice bit about human qualities.

"Simple Made Easy" presentation by Rich Hickey from the InfoQ Software Development Conference, recorded at Strangeloop 2011

Watch the presentation here:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

(the slideshow plays alongside with the video.)

My notes on the presentation:

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability" - Edsger W. Dijkstra

Simple vs. Complex, Easy vs. Hard

A couple of weeks ago some of us went to the TechSummit conference organized by LeaseWeb. Here is a list of the talks that I attended, along with a short description for each.

The first presentation was “Shaving my head made me a better programmer” by Alex Qin, which was about what it is like to be a woman, and specifically a programmer, in the U.S. tech industry. (And in the University before that.) She talked about the inequality, the sexism, and the harassment. She mentioned that she once gave a talk in a really big conference about accessibility in the U.S., and afterwards she was asked “How do I talk to women at bars?” The head-shaving part refers to how changing her appearance resulted in being taken more seriously. It was quite an interesting talk, though I suspect that in Amsterdam, she was to a large extent preaching to the choir.