"The problems have emerged across the world, but was first noticed in Australia, and possibly felt most severely in the air travel industry.
There are delays at UK airports, with long queues reported at London's Stansted and Gatwick.
Ryanair said it had been "forced to cancel a small number of flights today (19 July)" and advised passengers to log-on to their Ryanair account, once it was back online, to see what their options are.
British Airways also cancelled several flights.
Several US airlines, notably United, Delta and American Airlines, grounded their flights around the globe. Australian carriers Virgin Australia and Jetstar also had to delay or cancel flights as departure screens went blank at Sydney airport.
Airports in Tokyo, Amsterdam and Delhi also said services had been affected.
Meanwhile, the problems have also hit trains, payment systems and healthcare providers.
UK railway companies reported delays and said they were experiencing "widespread IT issues".
Payment systems - many shops could only take cash. In the UK, supermarkets including Morrisons and Waitrose spent the morning unable to accept contactless payments. It was the same in Australian supermarkets including Woolworths and Coles, while financial institutions such as the National Australia Bank were also affected.
Healthcare - Israel said 15 hospitals had switched to manual processes, although this did not affect medical treatment. Ambulances were told to take new cases to other hospitals. In the UK, some doctors' surgeries in England reported issues with booking appointments.
As the full extent of the disruption became clear, more firms and institutions started reporting problems.
The US state of Alaska warned that its emergency services were affected.
Broadcasters were also caught up in the chaos, including Sky News in the UK, which spent several hours off air.
The London Stock Exchange said it was working as normal, but there were issues with its news service, used by companies to report market-sensitive information in a timely way.
And Poland’s largest container terminal, the Baltic Hub in the northern city of Gdansk, said the outage was "hampering terminal operations" and asked companies not to send containers to the port."
Could plausibly have read, but also likely to blindly recommend without having read them (I've done that myself, only ever skimmed either): The Mythical Man Month, Code Complete.
Very unlikely to have read: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. (I'm moderately sure Donald Knuth has read these, but beyond that, dubious. Personally I've read their titles on a shelf three times now.)
I read Code Complete twenty years ago and it was a revelation. Revisiting it recently, it seemed dated and bordering on irrelevant. It wasn't that the ideas weren't good, they were just incorporated into modern language and API design. It won. People code like that now.
Yeah, just finished that one (Dream Machine) myself, excellent book. The other main one I know of is Dealers of Lightning, which centres on PARC specifically. Also quite a good book.
Another is Fumbling the Future, which discuss the apparent failure of Xerox to capitalise on their computing research (as you'll know from having read the Dream Machine, the reality is a bit more nuanced than that). Haven't read this one myself, not sure how good it is, seems well-received though.
Finally, Alan Kay is quite active on Quora these days, and often talks about PARC-related material: https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
(At some point I recall him mentioning the Dream Machine being one of the best accounts of PARC's history, btw.)
Yes - Twine is for what's called "CYOA" (after the old Choose Your Own Adventure book series) or "choice based" interactive fiction. That type of IF has its origin in gamebooks, and generally consists of sections of text that you move between by picking from a list of choices ("to open the door turn to section 223, to run away turn to section 543", that sort of thing). Digital tools can add more dynamic elements, but generally it's rooted in the experience of reading/playing a Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure type gamebook.
The other main type of IF is the "parser" kind - that's the Infocom style where the UI is a bit like a command line, you type arbitrary commands, and get dynamic feedback. The main tool used nowadays for making that type of IF is Inform 7, though there are others.
I use a Fnatic MiniStreak mechanical keyboard. Somewhat cheaper than the top end brands, but still very good. There is software if you want to configure LEDs and macros and such (it's gamer gear, so it's bedecked in coloured lights), but you don't have to install it.
Mind you, that's true of most Logitech gear too - it'll work fine with basic Windows drivers, you don't have to install that G Hub Pro whatever-it-is stuff.
Some of their mice also have on-board memory for settings - you can configure them once using the software, write the config to the mouse, then not bother with the software again.
- Notepad++ (as a general text editor/manipulator, I have a separate IDE).
- Google Maps (don't know if that really qualifies as a "tool", but it's one of the highest-utility things I know, either way).
- Discord (have never used the public side of it, but for private comms for a small group of friends keeping in touch and gaming, it's proven an incredibly effective solution).
- Paint.NET (I don't stretch it, but as a "better Paint" for very basic image manipulation, it just works).
Those are the ones I'm particularly fond of. I do use other tools heavily that I like but don't evoke as much appreciation - Visual Studio, VS Code, Chrome, Excel, Google Docs, Outlook, Teams - I'm not sure if those are good-but-not-great or I just take them for granted too much.
