Jump to content

Is there any way to change my big name here


satya

Recommended Posts

21 hours ago, kennywtelejazz said:

Sign in . Go to your account  settings . Under the Overview setting (on your left ) you will see a setting for Display Name.

Hit Display Name and it will bring up the settings you need for you to make the changes you want to make .

 

Kenny

Thanks Kenny 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

There you go again, Kenny, giving useful advice in the Coffee House. Careful, such behavior could catch on. And then where would we be?

Hmm.  The House of Useful Advice. How does that sound.  Of course then I wouldn't qualify to partake ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh Yeah ! Please!  Please !! Please !!!  tell me that photo of Catwoman is available as a scratch and sniff ....

Uncle Kenny needs a distraction to help take his mind off thinking about this years upcomming Valentines Day...

There has been some slim pickens over here with this piticular holliday and it has been that way for a while ....

I wouldn't mind one bit if the Ghost of Valentines Day past paid me a vist and showed me a few of the more memorable Valentines Days  I used to have .

 

Kenny

 

Edited by kennywtelejazz
Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Rain said:

I'd recommend being careful with the use of big names. Weaker people tend to drop them, and there are few things as annoying as name dropping. 

Wait...  I thought Rain usually arrives as drops though? ?

 

?

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Since we are on the topic of names:

1) satya, what is your new name?

2) And while we are on the subject of names, for those of us with names that aren't our name, how did you get your name?

I'll go first.

Back in the Jurassic era of the Internet, before these forums, and we had to use Usenet/Newsgroups to converse with each other I joined alt.saxophone

On alt.saxophone there was already someone named Bob Norton and another Robert Norton.

My sister's business partner called everybody by a nickname that he made up, and because I'm a musician, he called me "Notes".

So on alt.saxophone I became Notes Norton. I never bothered to change it, and now that I have a little 'empire' selling aftermarket style and song collections for Band[-in-a-Box, changing it would be foolish. I have a reputation.

How about you all?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Background: "flipping a bit" is a term used by both digital hardware engineers and low-level (machine language or Assembly) programmers. It refers to changing a 1 to a 0 or vice versa.

I've had my handle since the 80's. I was in Sacramento having lunch with my boss Paul and another coworker, Sean. A friend of Paul's joined us and Paul introduced Sean and me as "my top bit flippers".

Paul was known for clever wordplay, and it was just the kind of inside joke that nobody else in the restaurant other than four of us would understand. All of us were adept at a rare skill: programming by literally flipping toggle switches on a control panel where each switch represented a bit in a CPU instruction. This allowed us to hand-enter diagnostic routines such as memory scans into a broken system that couldn't boot into the O/S.

I'd sometimes show off this trick when troubleshooting onsite just to confound the operator, especially if he was one of those know-it-all types who insisted on "helping". They'd demand to know what I was doing, and I'd say "just flipping some bits", as if their system's problem was just a few errant 1's that should have been 0's.

I was just getting into computer-based music at the time (Cakewalk 1.0) and loved the idea that even though I was creating music via software it really all came down to flipping bits. Indeed, all computer magic from Donkey Kong to ChatGPT, if you dive deep enough, comes down to flipping bits.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In the old days "flipping a bit" was far more important!  For those of you that don't program, computers have things called registers which hold temporary values in memory.  Back in the day, these were very tiny.  I started when they were only one byte, or eight bits (two nibbles?) in size!   A TB (a terabyte), which is a common number thrown out there nowadays (usually for disk space), is an absolutely huge number in comparison that holds 8,000,000,000,000 bits!   My current home/work computer has an 1/8th of a TB just for memory (128 GB, or one TRILLION bits!).

We had to know all sorts of creative ways to use those registers that involved moving them all left and right, flipping all of them to their opposite value, etc.  Assembler would have commands like MOV(), PUSH() and POP().  The push and pop commands are the ones that put things onto the stack of registers (push) or took them  off (pop).

I've coded on two really old computers that only had 1k of memory (i.e., 1,024 bits!).  These were the Timex Sinclair and the Pet computers.  You literally couldn't put some of Bapu's thread titles into that much memory since they could only hold 128 characters!

Another term I always liked was "bitbanging."

Oh, and here's some news in my world!  It looks like I've FINALLY found some work!  I'm going to be joining another long-time programmer (who's 66) and doing Filemaker projects.  Although Filemaker has been around since the late 1980's (1987 I believe), it's one of the few languages I had never used since it primarily targets at Apple computers (the only Apple I've ever coded for was the Apple II way back in 1977!).  It's been upgraded over the years and I can now use it with Windows (though they still give Android devices the finger).

It took me exactly four days to get up to speed on Filemaker and I've already created a fully functional app that is going to a client.  Sure, it's not too extensive, but it's got all the GUI polish and correct best practices behind the scenes of a marketable app.  I'm very surprised at how easy it is!  Of course, that said, if you want to go outside of what it provides easily, you can spend a good bit of time creating custom scripts!  I'm just very happy that it looks like I'll have some income coming in again!  I'm also loving the fact that I'm back to getting paid for doing something I enjoy.  I actually got so into my zone that I worked all night Thursday to Friday without even realizing it!

In fact, as soon as I finish checking out other new posts here, I'm off to watch some more tutorials (at 1.75x speed) just to absorb more of what Filemaker can do. ?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...