Mark Fling

She flew from the airport on St. Thomas U.S. Virgin Islands to a helipad on Epstein's private Island Little St. James, a distance of 10 miles. Bell 430, I believe.

I'm thinking you've never lived in a big-iron mainframe environment. We'd have non-scheduled "IPLs" once a week with MVS, way less often with VM. There was much less integration at the operating system level of major systems like communications and transaction processing. Great times.

I loved APL. 5 lines of code could plot your trajectory to the Moon or forecast the stock market in the morning. Only more terse language was Forth.

Old skool Win32/64 systems programmer in C/C++:

1) Windows UWP component library to interface with Extensible Storage Engine (ESE).
2) Win32/COM component library to call same-machine inter-process using ALPC.
3) Kotlin Android mobile applications (various).

Too embarrassed to publish on github.

Imagine having to write assembler for an IBM mainframe with (egads!) 8 megabytes of memory shared with a dozen other running programs. Figure the system might give you 512K, at most, to execute on a good day. You learned real quick to code tight and fast. I sure did.

What killed the full-size American wagon were SUVs. We owned the last GM wagon - a 1996 Buick Roadmaster - for 17 years. Got thumbs up right up until we sold it. Great space, fake wood paneling LT-1 V8, seated 8, including 2 in the "way back". Took a 4x8 sheet of plywood with the seats down.

I'd say the Bora was the better looking.

I'd kill to have my old '72 Stag back. Galactic levels of insanity, yes, but so worth it.

John Cleese was a comedic genius. I still smile recalling that maniacal scene.

In the mid 90s, Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan's first wife and 40s/50s actress came to our front door and asked to use the phone. Her driver was lost and she needed directions. Dressed to the nines, super nice and apologetic.

Looks good. I feel your pain with WinRT and XAML. Trying to debug and locate some obscure "property missing' in one of my many XAML files. No help from VS.

Those poor wheel bearings!

System 370/168 mainframe running MVS/TSO with a whopping 8 megabytes of memory. Programmed in Assembler and PL/I (anyone remember that one?).

Don't you mean "370"? The picture has a 1960 System 360. I'll give IBM kudos for their industrial design. Damned expensive, but sexy as hell from a corporate perspective.

Jealous of you Stag guys in the UK. Miss my 1971 Mark I in white, wires and OD. Looking for one here stateside but they're getting rare.

Same set of instruments in my long gone Stag. Damn I loved that car, wretched as the mechanics could be. Peak British.

I've been writing component DLLs for years, both COM (using ATL) and WinRT (using WRL). Public interfaces, C++ implementation classes. The WinRT/UWP DLLs ship with a .winmd file eliminating the need to run regsrv32. But yes, splitting the ABI and implementation takes a bit of work.

Elon and this idiot don't realize when they fired all the maintainers this would happen. Maintaining FAA navigation, communication and computing infrastructure is *ongoing*, and not a one-shot deal. Calibration and certification of radars and navigation equipment is constant.

Ah, 3279 GDDM graphics. As one of the few mainframe systems programmers at my company I was granted one of these exalted devices. Now I understand my subconscious preference for dark mode.

And within Windows itself, Win32/64 is such a different beast from UWP.

Mark, not to worry. They'll never get past JCL.

Yes, and you were very careful with your allocations and pointers lest you receive a 3 inch stack of fan-folded dump printout back from your job submission. 😉

And get Vance as a replacement? Yikes! We're doomed!

What? Nobody told me LLMs were available when I was writing in the 80s. Damn!

An old school tombstone comment block in C++

Call me ancient, but I've discovered if it isn't in the code, it's usually lost over time. I like the old school format - don't need no stinkin IDEs.

In WinUI, XAML for both the packaging and UI is probably the hardest obstacle. The C++ language extensions for WinRT are a must.

In C++, I use "_In_ const type* const pValue" a lot on my setters. Makes everything immutable. You're right though. Every time I've got to stop a second and think "Okay, where does the const go."

I still can't fathom the aversion to simply checking pointers before use and bounds checking an array index in C/C++. Throw in a bunch of "const" everywhere and you're good.

These firings affect navigational infrastructure which by law needs to be periodically inspected and recertified for accuracy. Watch. Flights start to get cancelled due to equipment being out of service. "Folks, we've cancelled your flight since the destination airport is IFR and the ILS is down."

Yeah, if you put it that way, sounds dumb. Stack probing your way up to a gig in 4K pages sounds nuts. Good practice says you wouldn't alloca more than 4K-1 bytes.