BS: Circular efforts

Subject: BS: Circular efforts
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 24 Oct 18 - 11:39 AM

This one’s happened with some programming dabbling but, not that I can bring another to mind, it seems to happen to me with various things.

Memories from a past project where I used something called Rhino told me that was to be replaced by something called Nashorn so I look up how to use that. I then find that is to meet a fairly abrupt ending so I look for alternatives. I decide on Groovy and having tried it, decided all I needed was an editor pane with syntax highlighting. I find jSyntaxPane does that, so great, all ready to play… Except when I run it, I get the message “ Warning: Nashorn engine is planned to be removed from a future JDK release”. I didn’t know that but the editor part of my solution is using the very thing I didn’t want to use because of its forthcoming demise…

Probably not the best example as it is a touch techy, plus I’ll find an alternative editor but I’m wondering do others find them chasing something round to find themselves (sort of) back to the same point.

Subject: RE: BS: Circular efforts
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 Oct 18 - 12:12 PM

Photobucket was the photo host I used to do third-party hosting of photos to other sites like Mudcat, and in particular in the days when eBay charged for extra photos, I created web pages I loaded to the eBay site and linked photos from PB. It went along swimmingly until late 2016, early 2017 when they suddenly announced no more third party linking unless you paid some huge fee. The annual membership was something like $400 but you had to pay $700 or $1000 a year (sorry, the numbers were just big, but I don't remember them precisely because I didn't consider paying their hostage fee for my photos).

I had three separate accounts there and I dismantled two of them. One was there just to see what would happen next, and in the meantime I started exploring other hosting options. Microsoft has a site/offering called Azure, but when I tried to set that up the system mistakenly connected it to my official work email address (that goes through Microsoft now). I wanted it unrelated to my employer, so I finally (I think) cancelled that. I looked at other offers, sites with web hosting options and space; I tried running stuff through Dropbox and One Drive. Nope. Google doesn't work for it. I had a free account via WordPress so I finally decided to upgrade that to a paid account for about $3 a month, but I still have to figure how to third-party host through it.

Last week I got an email from Photobucket's new management, apologizing profusely and saying all of the old customers were mistreated. They want to do better, and will now charge about $4.50 a month for the lowest level account that permits third-party hosting. I'm not going near it.

Subject: RE: BS: Circular efforts
From: Jack Campin
Date: 24 Oct 18 - 12:38 PM

There is an urban legend that the bloke who fired the One-O-Clock Gun from Edinburgh Castle timed it by looking at the clock on the corner of Binns (department store at the end of Princes Street) with his binoculars. But the Binns employee in charge of setting the clock timed it by listening for the One-O-Clock Gun.

Anybody who's ever applied for a state benefit or official permission for something will have had much nastier experiences of circularity.