Tony is a Geek

Those of us that remember the world before GitHub (it only came onto the internet scene in 2008), yes, it was like a breathe of fresh air at the time and it really did help to cement having a "free" hosted environment accessible from anywhere where you could store your code, share the code, manage the code and collaborate with others with your code.  It was refreshing.  Before then you had tooling, like CVS that, if you were lucky enough, you could install locally inside a company and have 1001 variant modifications that meant no CVS was the same as another, so headaches ensured.  I'm sure there were other tools, I seem to recall doing stuff with Rational Tooling too. ( We'll come back to these people later on! ) So what happened?  Well, as with all good things, they attract attention.  The original creators also tail off & then look for different and other fun things to do and well, usually somebody in a mega-corp then decides they want to buy the system / ...

Okay, so after wasting a LOT of time going around in circles? ( Which does make me wonder how far & how not-far (!far), we've actually come in the IT Industry, we seemed to have peaked in the mid/late 1990s/early 2000s & then seemed to have gotten stuck & repeated ourselves and gone in a downward spiral - wow, I really do sound like a Gen-X-er! which I am, so get over it )  I often confess I'm no genius, I just keep trying different positions to put the square block into the circle hole repeatedly, until I either wear down the sides of the square or I make the circle more square - such is life :-) What has this got to do with ROS2.  Well, I thought this was going to be a 10minute job, super simple & I could move onto the "good stuff" and do something useful with my time.  Over the years, I have learnt that I tend to spend the time between xmas & new year just doing "installs & setups", I rarely actually get to the point where I "...

Okay...so I've been using Docker Containers since the 32-bit version on really old hardware, I'll see if I can take a photo of the old faithful "indestructible" Panasonic laptop (it's on the shelf behind me) which has got to be quite some time ago.... I believe I was using it to install nodeJS apps into so that I could run many different versions of nodeJS and not screw up my proper OS as believe it or not, sometimes there are breaking changes that occur when you are forced to upgrade external libraries... and y'know, you might not be in a position to have the bandwidth to refactor for those changes... I'm pretty sure that I last used that Panasonic back in 2018, maybe dipping into 2019 - just.  Anyway, it was more of an amusing "prop" than anything else, it was always fun on a GWER train to have the little wifi aerial springing about out the top as I would run a scan of all the mobile phone / devices that had wifi or bluetooth enabled insecurely...