sjm-lbm (u/sjm-lbm) - Readit News

sjm-lbm commented on PHP: The Toyota Corolla of programming deprogrammaticaipsum.com/... · Posted by u/secstate

bigstrat2003 · a month ago

Honestly the author doesn't even make a great case that PHP has improved since 2009. His arguments mostly seemed to be "don't use the old busted way, there's a better way now". But if you have to go out of your way to remember to not use the old busted way, sooner or later you will shoot yourself in the foot. Having good defaults matters, and the author seems to ignore that.

sjm-lbm · a month ago

I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.

I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.

sjm-lbm commented on Vanishing home field advantage in English football blog.engora.com/2025/07/v... · Posted by u/Vermin2000

jazdw · a month ago

The Goodison Park (built 1892) away dressing rooms are really Spartan and uncomfortable. They are poorly heated, are right under the stand (noisy), there's only one toilet etc.

I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.

sjm-lbm · a month ago

Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).

Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.

sjm-lbm commented on Kea 3.0, our first LTS version isc.org/blogs/kea-3-0/... · Posted by u/conductor

Helmut10001 · 2 months ago

I have been using Kea on pfSense CE for a long time — I think it was version 23.0.x. Or you mean 3.0 in particular? I also have OPNsense and I am not completely convinced of their aggressive update strategy yet. For a firewall, I prefer stability over features. Jumping to the newest releases every month can have tradeoffs.

Note: in general, both OPNsense and pfSense are excellent. I have never had any problems with either one.

sjm-lbm · 2 months ago

I use pfSense CE, and rely on DNS entries to be automatically created for DHCP addresses. That worked fine for more than a decade, until they made Kea the default a couple of years ago (or did they just put a bunch of notices in the interface that old DHCPd was deprecated? It's been long enough that I don't remember).

Anyway, at the time Kea (at least in pfSense) wasn't able to do that, which caused things to break for me for a bit. It's a small thing (and, I mean, totally fair with free software) but the fact that they pushed an update to Kea before Kea (again, at least in pfSense) was at feature parity rubbed me the wrong way and has kept me from using it since then.

(edit: on the off chance anyone cares, I decided to check and it looks like this issue has been fixed as of pfSense CE 2.8.)

sjm-lbm commented on Omnimax computer.rip/2025-06-08-O... · Posted by u/aberoham

rjmunro · 3 months ago

"Back to the Future: The Ride" was also an Omnimax dome system, but with moving platforms instead of seats. It was installed in 3 locations, with 2 screens at each, so a total of 6 screens.

I'm not sure if any later similar rides used a similar system, (for example Disney's Soarin') or if they are new enough to be digital from the start.

sjm-lbm · 3 months ago

It's not at all a similar ride, but Epcot Center's Horizons (at Walt Disney World) used two Omnimax screens back to back as part of a dark ride. There's a map showing what that looked like here: https://parklore.com/main/horizons/3/

sjm-lbm commented on Omnimax computer.rip/2025-06-08-O... · Posted by u/aberoham

madcaptenor · 3 months ago

I miss the Omnimax they had at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. They closed it during the pandemic and it never reopened.

sjm-lbm · 3 months ago

I sort of wonder how many of them had this exact fate - the Ft Worth Texas one was in the exact same situation. My understanding is that both parts to maintain the projection system and people with the knowledge to operate it were getting very rare, and the people largely retired when the pandemic closed the theater. Since a lot of the Omnimax screens were build during a similar range of time and would have had similar challenges, I wonder if that fate was common.

(luckily, the Ft Worth theater specifically was converted to an LED screen and recently reopened)

sjm-lbm commented on The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst glthr.com/myst-graph-1... · Posted by u/tobr

chungy · 5 months ago

Conceding that it was a technical necessity, the replacement of live actors for in-game CGI rendered characters feels off in the Riven remake to me. Necessary because now you can walk all the way around them, the game can't assume a single viewing angle for videos to play out. Nor would it be practical to record new actors playing the roles (the old assets must surely be too low-quality to pass in a modern game, even if they go back to the source).

Part of Myst and Riven's charm in the 1990s was the immersion it offered, the world felt real, and the actors playing out characters added to it. The original point-and-click format feels dated today, but at the time, it was convincing enough to be believable.

sjm-lbm · 5 months ago

Yeah, I do agree with that. Honestly part of me wishes they would have used the old assets - put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler, and lock the player's position while the video plays. I mean, your position was locked in the original game.. so that should be possible without breaking things, right?

That said, I really do think all of the tradeoffs that they did make were understandable - pretty much like you said. Doesn't keep me from being nostalgic for the 90s, though.

sjm-lbm commented on The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst glthr.com/myst-graph-1... · Posted by u/tobr

Svip · 5 months ago

> Don't mistake this for "Real Myst: Masterpiece Edition", which is (sorry Cyan), not very good.

I know you link it further down, but there are two Masterpiece Editions, one for Myst (1999) and one for realMyst (2014). The one you link is the MPE of Myst, and technically not the original 1993 game, though as far as I can tell, it's just an upgrade of graphics and sound, whilst remaining faithful to the original.

I couldn't get realMyst to work back when I got it on GOG, so I'll admit I haven't tried it (nor its Masterpiece Edition), but I did enjoy the 2021 remake, although I noticed that even though it had been over a decade, I sped through that game (I mention this, because I actually visited it after having played the 2024 Riven remake, where the changes to the puzzles did stump me from time to time). Though, personally, I am more of a Riven fan.

sjm-lbm · 5 months ago

Since we're getting pretty far down the nerding-out-on-myst rabbit hole: the original version of realMyst, at least for Windows, had some bug that would cause it to immediately crash on any system with a multi-core CPU. At some point someone released a patched EXE that fixed it, I have no idea if gog and/or Steam ever released an official patched version.

Also, while talking about remakes: Riven got a remake last year, and it's fantastic. The sprit of the game is entirely intact, but they made changes to some puzzles that both make the experience fresh (for anyone that played the 90s version of Riven) and much less annoying (for any first time players). Can't recommend the Riven remake enough.