Moar cool!!1!!! Moar Fall!!1!!!!!
Or maybe not, we’ll see.
Did get a bunch of small things done yesterday in the relatively cool day. It did get to mid 80s in the sun by late afternoon, but was still pleasant.
Tiny bit of cleaning in the garage, but the result was disproportionately large. Fixed a couple of things. Went through a couple of boxes, sorted and put away the stuff. Went looking for my drip irrigation for my window boxes and couldn’t find it. I might have left it behind at our rent house. I’ll have to get some new parts I guess.
Did some cleaning and rearranging of electronics in my bedroom. It let me put some stuff away that was sitting out for too long. A lot of what I’ve been doing these last few days is just putting stuff away that’s been sitting for far too long. Maybe I can call it ‘getting my house in order’. That sounds better than ‘picking up crep that’s been sitting forever.’
One of the things I did was listen to one of Daughter One’s teachers tearing her a new one about turning off her camera, not completing work, and messing around on other devices during class. My wife thinks she’s gonna have to go ‘in person’ for the next period. Daughter really does avoid the work, is getting insular and unhappy. I am so not interested in her going to school in person, but I do agree that she is struggling to stay engaged. The other daughter wants to continue at home. Unless something changes, I think I’ll have a bunch of new school related stuff to blog about, if nothing else. Hey, maybe I’ll even get pneumonia. Again.
And if she gets sick, she’ll need a test to be re-admitted. One of the other moms spent $[a bunch of money] for a test for her kid so he could return to school and spent a couple of days trying to find one. Sounds nuts to me, I drive past a couple of empty parking lots with tents set up for testing, but the free city tests are few and far between according to her.
I like having the kids home and my wife around. They are less sanguine.
And that’s how otherwise sensible people end up getting sick.
I better concentrate on the things I can control and keep stacking.
nick
*the title? Know your memes, and then https://youtu.be/34CZjsEI1yU
The new normal.
Wife has been subbing for an English teacher the last three days. Someone in the teacher’s family tested positive so the teacher has to isolate. Putting all her class assignments online. Yesterday the teacher contacted my wife on her cell phone, had my wife turn on the speaker, then the teacher yelled at the class for not getting their work done.
As subs we do not have access to the online resources to check the students work. We really don’t even know what was assigned. It makes it tough on us and the kids know it. Thus they goof off on their Chromebooks and there is little, actually nothing, that a sub can do about it.
This virtual learning, as I have repeatedly stated, is going to produce a year of basically no education. There have been warnings from the county school office that students that are not doing their virtual work will be forced back into school. The students are also not allowed to change from in-person to virtual, or back, within a grading period.
The English teacher has to isolate for 5 more days. I am taking the class today, Friday is a “virtual day” (yeh, right), and Monday another sub (a former vice principal) is taking the class.
And that’s how otherwise sensible people end up getting sick.
My wife hasn’t seen a truly random infection, where the patient can’t explain where they picked up the bug. This pandemic has been driven by stupidity out of FOMO combined with spineless authorities offering little beyond mask kabuki to avoid stigmatizing the sick.
The local ISD is forcing quarantine for anyone exposed to a reported case, but that’s only a restriction from entering the buildings, not an order from the health department to stay home.
After the election, the push to run school from home the rest of the year begins. The ISDs have bond issues to win first. The football stadium designs are already budgeted.
–nuclear fusion, STILL just a decade away!
n
@Lynn: What say ye, oh slinger of code?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/10/sourcegraph-devs-are-managing-100x-more-code-now-than-they-did-in-2010/
My last experience was that code constructs allowed me to do more and there were better debugging tools. I feel that the web applications I wrote actually had less code as a lot of the formatting details could be taken care of with a few CSS constructs and a little HTML. Calculations for centering and rendering were easy where it used to involve a few dozen lines of code.
However my stuff was nearly as complex as what Mr. Lynn is accomplishing. A few dozen K lines of code versus his several hundred thousand.
Guest post at Sarah Hoyt’s place that is worth a couple of minutes.
n
My last experience was that code constructs allowed me to do more and there were better debugging tools. I feel that the web applications I wrote actually had less code as a lot of the formatting details could be taken care of with a few CSS constructs and a little HTML. Calculations for centering and rendering were easy where it used to involve a few dozen lines of code.
Depending on language and platform, as developers, we now place a lot of blind trust into libraries developed by third parties which abstract a lot of the details which allows creation and management of more complex applications with fewer man hours.
Client and server side Javascript development, enabling the high degree of interactivity expected by users these days, is particularly bad in this regard. The problem is compounded by the Javascript language always being intended as a hack until something better came along.
GUIs in general have been too difficult across all platforms.
I placed a lot of trust in the COBOL and ALGOL compilers many years back that the compilers would generate proper code. Not always as good as hand coding the actual instructions myself. But certainly much less tedious. This trust has been going on since higher level languages were invented.
I got into a “discussion” many years back, about 1989, with Burroughs about a problem in the code generated by their COBOL compiler. Their code worked but had annoying side effect in certain situations. My findings were presented in an article I wrote for Burroughs World, a trade publication. It was brought up at the semi-annual user’s convention and the consensus was that Burroughs needed to change their compiler. Burroughs did in the next release.
Libraries, compilers, etc. are created by humans and humans will make mistakes. Or the more likely situation is not consider a certain set of events or situations.
What I find particularly annoying in today’s coding are buffer overruns. There is zero excuse for exceeding a buffer length. A few lines of code will solve the problem. Not doing those few lines of code is the result of a lazy developer, perhaps even incompetent. Long gone are the days where adding a few lines of affects performance that much.
For those tasks that are truly resource intensive, video editing comes to mind, get a faster CPU or throw more CPU’s at the problem. A buffer overrun or such other corruption will cause more time and money than a few extra CPU cycles making the task run longer.
There is no excuse for “stupid code”.
Another sad day for the FUSA’s (Former United States of America’s) Military:
Navy SEALs change official ethos to be gender neutral, remove ‘brotherhood’ and more
More damage from Obola’s pussification of the Military.
I tell family and friends they need to be hands on with their school age kids or they will be part of the dumbest generation in quite awhile. COVID has really highlighted what many here have posted: public school is just free baby sitting until a kid is 18 years old. Thank you big goobermint for making going to K-12 mandatory by law. Also, public schools suck in general.
More football stadiums!
HARRIS/biden 2020!
I followed that Diggy Diggy Hole link because the title meant nothing to me. I found out that I still really dislike heavy metal music. At work and among some friends and family I get a few “memes” thrown at me. More often than not, I just don’t know it. I’m usually not interested enough to go and look it up.
I have and read books and I don’t have cable TV. Most of my screen time is watching informational YouTube videos. I very much enjoy a long walk all alone among wooded trails. I’m turning into that old, out of touch with the youngsters, low tech, kind of guy. And I don’t care.
I placed a lot of trust in the COBOL and ALGOL compilers many years back that the compilers would generate proper code. Not always as good as hand coding the actual instructions myself. But certainly much less tedious. This trust has been going on since higher level languages were invented.
Ironically, the compilers are quite good these days. Hand optimizing x86 assembly code has seen diminishing returns since the Pentium introduced the U/V pipes and other performance tricks such as speculative execution, and I doubt a human could beat a properly targeted recent GCC generating object code for an x86_64 chip.
RISC V will be “Game Over” for humans with the variable length instruction words, just as it was for PA-RISC back with the same feature in the day.
The last few Fedora releases built with GCC 10 have been extremely smooth experiences on my 4 GB road machine with a wimpy low end Intel chip. The Fedora 33 beta I installed last night was showing 5 W power draw at idle when I started playing with powertop this morning.
@jlp,
I’m not huge on memes, and
somemost pop culture stuff goes right past me with only the vaguest awareness of it.In this case, there’s like 3 or 4 levels of cool but uselessness embedded in that.
Starting with Minecraft, the game that isn’t actually a game, and seems to consist entirely of the ‘grinding’ part of some games- building stuff so you can play. Then there is the pointlessness of digging a hole, in a game, which is so common that some youtuber (who makes a living commenting on Minecraft-another layer of absurdity) accidentally became a meme, which then got turned into a song, said song later picked up by a freaking METAL band and turned into an earbug of a tune, sung by DWARVES.
It’s almost fractal in it’s absurdity and pointlessness. It sorta caught my mood last night, as I feel like I’m pretend laboring in a freaking game at a pointless task, with people mocking my efforts and having a lot more success from their mocking than me with my original effort! (not that there are people mocking me, just kinda the feeling of futility that washed thru me.)
Anyway…. I’ve been listening to a lot of some sort of subgenre of metal on youtube and it’s not the first time Diggy Diggy Hole came up on the mix.
I wasn’t much of a metal fan, but did like Iron Maiden, Ozzy, and even Guns N Roses back in the day. I’ve always been a sucker for strong female vocalists so I’m really glad to have found some of these bands – Within Temptation, Amaranthe, Battle Beast, Delain, and getting a bit weirder with it, and further from metal, Unleash the Archers, Nightwish, and a few others. Most of the stuff I’m listening to now is about 10 years old, and none of it is by US based artists.
n
Some of the bands don’t take themselves too seriously, like this song
https://youtu.be/S9WWz95ripA
NANOWAR OF STEEL – Valhalleluja
“Great literature has always been a source of inspiration for heavy metal bands.
J.R.R. Tolkien for Blind Guardian, H.P. Lovecraft for Cradle of Filth, The Holy Bible for Stryper and now The IKEA Catalog for Nanowar Of Steel. ”
It’s done in the style of a gospel revival meeting, but praises Odin, and the IKEA catalog (well, it’s a bit despairing the vikings have been reduced to assembling flat pack furniture…)
Anyway, pretty dang funny.
n
[I tell family and friends they need to be hands on with their school age kids or they will be part of] the dumbest generation in quite awhile.
Perhaps this is a feature and not a bug.
At least I am professional enough not plug in an outside wet device into an interior house circuit without an GFCI. Although, I was not professional enough to disconnect the device when I bought the house and moved in.
I thought that the water softener was dead when you bought the house.
Our rental around the corner had a Sears softener well past its 5-7 year lifespan. When I spotted it in the garage and asked the landlord, he had no clue as to whether the unit still worked. Still, the softener was inside and not exposed to the elements.
Probably was, I don’t remember. Still, I should have disconnected it and pulled that dangerous, dangerous, dangerous power line going through the sheetrock and bricks.
Yeah, the Kenmore 350 manual talks all about putting the water softener into a enclosed, sheltered place. Outside in the Texas sun is quite the opposite of that.
Man, I am sore and mosquito bitten today. I sprayed down but they still got me. That 13 inch rain we got last week triggered the fast birth of the tiger mosquitoes. They sneer at DEET.
What I find particularly annoying in today’s coding are buffer overruns. There is zero excuse for exceeding a buffer length. A few lines of code will solve the problem. Not doing those few lines of code is the result of a lazy developer, perhaps even incompetent. Long gone are the days where adding a few lines of affects performance that much.
Sigh. As I see it, the problem with buffer overruns is a training issue compounded by office/career politics — who receives the training — over the last 30 years. Fortunately, Linux has driven development of very good static and dynamic code analysis tools to help mitigate the problem on Unix-ish systems long term, but old code will be around for a while.
On Windows, IBM absorbing Rational for the Rose UML nonsense and neglecting Purify was a huge setback in the cause of squashing buffer overruns. The timing of the acquisition could not have been worse.
I used to have to hand optimize code because of some very critical timing issues. Check reader/sorters. There were just a few milliseconds from the read station to the pocket select station. The MICR information had to be read, then cyphered where to send the item and the pocket select sent to the reader/sorter. Very, very time sensitive. A couple extra instructions could spell problems with missed pocket selects. Processing a couple hundred thousand checks per night there was no time to stop the process because of pocket select fault.
Those days are long gone with the speed of today’s CPUs. A few extra instructions, either deliberate in code, or generated by the compiler are a non-issue. The biggest time consumer, and biggest expense, is the human element. Spend five hours optimizing a chunk of code or buying a faster CPU, the CPU always wins.
A lot of work has been accomplished in compilers over the years. As you stated, some of the CPU’s are so complicated that it would be difficult for a human to make the generated code any better.
I dealt with that on IBM 1401 assembly code. Things called word marks or something like that. Memory fails me on the specifics. The Burroughs Medium Systems had variable length instructions depending on the operation code. Addresses were always fixed length. High order bits allowed for indirect addressing and extended addressing schemes.
Variable length words would be an entirely different realm not meant for mere mortals.
I have written two very language specific compilers. The language had all the good stuff, flow control, math, input, output, decisions, etc. It was interesting to build this compiler. The resulting code had to run in a limited and finite space so quite a bit of time was spent optimizing the output generated. The compiler ran on a B-6900 and generated code for an entirely different platform on the B-3500. A fun project.
I wasn’t much of a metal fan, but did like Iron Maiden, Ozzy, and even Guns N Roses back in the day. I’ve always been a sucker for strong female vocalists so I’m really glad to have found some of these bands – Within Temptation, Amaranthe, Battle Beast, Delain, and getting a bit weirder with it, and further from metal, Unleash the Archers, Nightwish, and a few others. Most of the stuff I’m listening to now is about 10 years old, and none of it is by US based artists.
I listen to many types of music all the time but mostly 60s, 70, and 80s. I have ripped about 200 of my 300 CDs to my home computer and placed on a single USB stick for my truck. I listened to Paul McCartney and Wings’s “Wings Over America” disc 1 and 2 about four times on my trip to and from Abilene. I am fascinated with Denny Laine (Moody Blues) singing “Richard Cory” with Linda and Paul backing him up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12klXN9_Jlk
BTW, Helen Reddy passed away Tuesday. I have her greatest hits in my collection. Awesome voice and awesome songs. My favorite is “Delta Dawn” – “Shes 41 and her daddy still calls her baby”.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918651061/i-am-woman-singer-helen-reddy-is-dead-aged-78
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afsp7MU-nTI
“Mac Davis, country singer known for writing popular Elvis Presley hits, dead at 78”
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/mac-davis-dead-elvis-presley-hits
We lost Mac Davis on Tuesday also. No more “Happiness is Lubbock Texas in my rearview mirror”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hsGfSP9tbQ
“Phil Robertson Is Voting For Trump, and It All Has to Do With One Deal”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvL_tDGEvhU
Phil says that Trump is pro-life, pro-guns, and pro shooting ducks so he is going to vote for him.
Scanner has several teams working today, most seem to be watching for some vehicle or other, then following until they mess up, triggering a traffic stop and search.
DPS asked if anyone had a ‘hand held xray’ available, and someone on the channel did.
There were several mentions of license plate readers and if any had generated hits…
And one chase at 120+ mph…
n
I listen to many types of music all the time but mostly 60s, 70, and 80s. I have ripped about 200 of my 300 CDs to my home computer and placed on a single USB stick for my truck. I listened to Paul McCartney and Wings’s “Wings Over America” disc 1 and 2 about four times on my trip to and from Abilene. I am fascinated with Denny Laine (Moody Blues) singing “Richard Cory” with Linda and Paul backing him up.
The UK still tries to have a record industry. My preorder for the new Cats in Space album goes in tomorrow. The Cats’ last album was a bit disappointing, but their first two CDs still get frequent play in my car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLAyj7eFoko
If you want to hear something really interesting, find a copy of “Enid” from The Barenaked Ladies “Gordon” album and listen carefully to the bridge. The stereo mix enables three distinct, clear vocal tracks to play simultaneously, and which vocalist you hear depends on where you place the center of your attention. Very cool.
I think the Ladies were on the verge of rock godhood when too much weed drove a wedge between Steven Page and the rest of the band. Kids, drugs are bad, m’kay.
Is there a good way for a hobbiest to learn to code for Windows? I used to write programs for some hobbies back in the DOS days, mostly Pascal. But the learning curve for Windows is steep.
https://shopwilsoncombat.com/
has ammo in stock and if there are per box limits, they are pretty high. Prices are high too, but that is what it is.
n
Is there a good way for a hobbiest to learn to code for Windows? I used to write programs for some hobbies back in the DOS days, mostly Pascal. But the learning curve for Windows is steep.
Unfortunately, writing a GUI application in Windows has a steep learning curve ever since VB 6 went away. At this point, I’d say Java would be the route most accessible to a hobbyist simply because so many tools and books are available, and the GUI API hasn’t really changed much in the last 10 years.
I’m not a GUI person beyond professional experience in iPhone development and some dabbling on that platform ever since. If I feel the need for a GUI for anything I’m doing, I’ll cobble together something in Tcl/Tk, cookbooking out of the Ousterhout and Whelch books.
Tcl is an interesting dead/non-“hot skillz” language which isn’t really dead if you consider it is at the core of Cisco products as well as F5’s routers and TiVo’s DVR units. It isn’t beyond hobbyist capability to learn, but the core multitasking philosophy is events instead of threads, similar to Node.JS, and that has its own associated learning curve. Start with Ousterhout if you are interested — it is a very good CS book period and even examples from the first edition still work.
I look at Node.JS as reinvention of the Tcl wheel with much worse syntax. The industry forgot that they even knew how to bang the event-driven rocks together once upon a time.
Of course, Node.JS is a “hot skillz”. I use Tcl at work when I don’t want one of the young’n’s taking credit for utilities I whip out since no one under 40 really knows the language well with a few exceptions.
A friend of mine reloads and has trouble locating primer. Any advice?
“Any advice? ”
–first invent a time machine….
All the intarwebz is full of tales of woe about availability. Or rather lack thereof. Unless he gets it from a friend, or finds some in a small town store, he’s a day late and a dollar short.
n
I have written two very language specific compilers. The language had all the good stuff, flow control, math, input, output, decisions, etc. It was interesting to build this compiler. The resulting code had to run in a limited and finite space so quite a bit of time was spent optimizing the output generated. The compiler ran on a B-6900 and generated code for an entirely different platform on the B-3500. A fun project.
I wrote a Smalltalk to C++ code translator called Act2Cpp in C code. It managed to translate about 60% of our 250,000 lines of Smalltalk code to C++. The hardest part was the typing of all the variables, we did that by hand.
We now have 1.3 million lines of C++ and F77 code. It is continuously growing.
A friend of mine reloads and has trouble locating primer. Any advice?
“Any advice? ”
–first invent a time machine….
All the intarwebz is full of tales of woe about availability. Or rather lack thereof. Unless he gets it from a friend, or finds some in a small town store, he’s a day late and a dollar short.
Things should get better when Trump wins the federal election next month. If Slow Joe wins, head to your bunkers !
You only need two variables, X and I.
@Lynn: What say ye, oh slinger of code?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/10/sourcegraph-devs-are-managing-100x-more-code-now-than-they-did-in-2010/
My last experience was that code constructs allowed me to do more and there were better debugging tools. I feel that the web applications I wrote actually had less code as a lot of the formatting details could be taken care of with a few CSS constructs and a little HTML. Calculations for centering and rendering were easy where it used to involve a few dozen lines of code.
However my stuff was nearly as complex as what Mr. Lynn is accomplishing. A few dozen K lines of code versus his several hundred thousand.
The advertising disguised as an article is correct. But, a lot of software is using purchased or freeware libraries to add more features to their software without adding a lot more source code. We use 5 or 6 or 7 purchased and freeware libraries, I cannot remember how many. I am getting ready to add another freeware library called CoolProp. BTW, adding a library is not free, interfacing a library can mean a lot of interface code.
http://www.coolprop.org/
And yes, we have about 750,000 lines of F77 code and 450,000 lines of C++ code between the four programs that make up our app. A lot for three developers to manage.
“You only need two variables, X and I. ”
–and your language of choice should allow upper and lower case, and consider a space before or after or both to make for a unique name…..
Ha!
n
(and allow subroutines with those same variable names, and consider all variables to be global, double Ha!)
“Amelia’s Farm Fresh Cookies”
https://xkcd.com/2366/
Amelia is mean and deserves Grandma getting back at her. I’ll bet that Grandma does not send Amelia a $5 check for her birthday and Christmas each year.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2366:_Amelia%27s_Farm_Fresh_Cookies
“You only need two variables, X and I. ”
–and your language of choice should allow upper and lower case, and consider a space before or after or both to make for a unique name…..
Ha!
n
(and allow subroutines with those same variable names, and consider all variables to be global, double Ha!)
Note to self: do not try to fix any of Ray’s or Nick’s code.
I remember long ago when Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford mistakenly said that Poland was not in the Soviet Sphere of influence, and was roundly criticized for it. I still remember the toothy grin break out on Jimmy’s face when Ford made that mis-statement.
Now Plugs says that Antifa is just an idea, not an actual group?
Silence from the media.
I placed a lot of trust in the COBOL and ALGOL compilers many years back that the compilers would generate proper code. Not always as good as hand coding the actual instructions myself. But certainly much less tedious. This trust has been going on since higher level languages were invented.
Ironically, the compilers are quite good these days. Hand optimizing x86 assembly code has seen diminishing returns since the Pentium introduced the U/V pipes and other performance tricks such as speculative execution, and I doubt a human could beat a properly targeted recent GCC generating object code for an x86_64 chip.
RISC V will be “Game Over” for humans with the variable length instruction words, just as it was for PA-RISC back with the same feature in the day.
The last few Fedora releases built with GCC 10 have been extremely smooth experiences on my 4 GB road machine with a wimpy low end Intel chip. The Fedora 33 beta I installed last night was showing 5 W power draw at idle when I started playing with powertop this morning.
So VLIW is going to work this time ? I am not holding my breath.
And it looks like the world is heading to ARM for the common consumer chip. Even Apple is moving to ARM chip for its desktops and laptops. I am not sure about their servers.
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-silicon/
“I cry for the mountains and the legacy lost – The Bear Fire” By Dave Daley, Butte County Rancher & CCA Immediate Past President
https://calcattlemen.org/2020/09/23/legacy/
“It is almost midnight. We have been pushing hard for 18-20 hours every day since the Bear Fire tore through our mountain cattle range on September 8th, and there is so much swirling in my head I can’t sleep anyway. The fire destroyed our cattle range, our cattle, and even worse our family legacy. Someone asked my daughter if I had lost our family home. She told them “No, that would be replaceable. This is not!” I would gladly sleep in my truck for the rest of my life to have our mountains back.”
The state and federal governments have not helped him.
My brother-in-law just retired from the DIA in disgust. I asked him last month when he thought the ammo shortage would end. He replied ” Not in our lifetime if Biden wins. They know it’s hard to repeal the 2A but easy to eliminate access to ammo. “
And it looks like the world is heading to ARM for the common consumer chip. Even Apple is moving to ARM chip for its desktops and laptops. I am not sure about their servers.
I don’t think Apple is sure about desktops or even high end laptops. Chipzilla is full of surprises, and, if push came to shove, Intel could poach Apple’s talent here just like Apple poached Qualcomm’s. The better schools are on Apple’s end of town, but the hip places to live are south. Qualcomm is (was?) in the middle, in the swanky shopping area.
Gentlemen
30 y and counting on IT, the last time I programmed something was a CNC on 6800 on collegue, I wonder when I read some of you.
best
I forget, form another discussion on English, this is form Economist
Nawaf al-Sabah, the crown prince, has already ascended Kuwait’s throne. Aged 83, his time in office will be defined largely by his choice of a successor https://econ.trib.al/4C7aWLc
well
this phrase
his time in office will be defined largely by his choice of a successor
meaning what?
Now Plugs says that Antifa is just an idea, not an actual group?
–that is the official policy of the US agencies. And FBI says the biggest threat is homegrown right wing groups.
Now I’ll go back to my “their goals may not be YOUR goals” thesis, and parse this.
if the FBI has gone full deep state, and been weaponized against constitutionalists and trad americans, then they are probably correct, the right wing is the biggest danger TO THE FBI. Not to the Constitutional Republic. But to the deep state coup plotters? Oh yeah.
The antifa nonsense is just typical prog lies. It’s been an organization for at least 75 years. If it has a web site, it’s and org. Hell, Proud Boys was just an idea. Boogaloo Boys are just a meme. Pepe the frog and KEK are just ideas.
antifa.com redirects to joebiden.com antifa.org has one page, “antifa is not an organization” a laugh at DJT and a BLM banner.
n
@ayjblog– meaning he is so old, all he can hope to accomplish is naming who comes next.
wrt programming, the last I did was trying out some arduino programming about 11 years ago. Before that it would have been Pascal in college, which I left in 1990.
Geez I miss Basic.
n
added- however, I’ve done a ton of UI design and testing in the home automation field (and as it applies in office settings).
define maybe := (not true) and (not false);
if I then
X := maybe;
Should be obvious to anyone.
Besides, none of my code needs fixing.
I made lots of coding missteps in my youth. Trying to be clever, out do the chap in the next cubicle, obscure code to protect my turf. Grew out of that after about 15 years of writing code that I had a difficult time understanding.
Now lots of comments. Don’t do anything in one line that can be done in three lines. Descriptive variables. Use as many local variables as possible. I and X are never used as global variables or any module that will not fit on a single screen.
I made lots of coding missteps in my youth. Trying to be clever, out do the chap in the next cubicle, obscure code to protect my turf. Grew out of that after about 15 years of writing code that I had a difficult time understanding.
When I write Tcl at work to avoid having credit given to a young’n for a one off, I thoroughly document and format well, the same as I do any other time. It still doesn’t make a difference — they aren’t interested if it isn’t Hot Skillz.
We have a reformatter for C/C++ checked into our Git repository, and I’m a fanatic about PyLint and Python, never putting anything into production that doesn’t report at least 7 or 8 on the “score” output.
I retired from IT last year after 49 years.
Began as a COBOL trainee at a life insurance firm. Moved to systems analysis but kept my hand in coding. I enjoyed learning new languages from 360 Assembly to FORTRAN, PASCAL, FORTH, ALGOL, PL-1, DATABUS, C (++), Perl, etc. And a slew of microprocessor assembly and machine languages from 8080, Z80, 6800, and 6502 architectures. Got into networking in the 80s and then into IT security in the 90s. This took me around the world and met some very interesting people. But now I just don’t bother with tech much, been there, done that. Moving on.
Update: “I made lots of coding missteps in my youth. Trying to be clever,”
Ditto. Wrote some fantastic self modifying code in the 70s to make things fit into tiny memory spaces. Really bad idea.
I worked with a bunch of early-twentysomethings at a small web design and development shop many years ago. We were horrible with profanity laden comments (which can be quite awkward when they dump to the user’s screen when there’s an error). Heck, we used to program in whatever we felt like. Stuff like “I did the last two sites in ASP. I’m going to do this one in PHP just to mix it up.” One guy got in trouble from a client for redirecting everyone using IE to the NN download site. Still, one of the most fun jobs I ever had and I’m still friends with almost every one of those guys.
Tyler Durden cowardice. Much like an auto industry writer criticizing The Real Life Tony Stark (TM), a journalist with the aerospace beat will have a real short career criticizing Boeing.
Boeing is down to one plane model each at Renton and Everett in WA State, and the only reason Renton isn’t totally idle is the 767 tanker deal.
Meanwhile, at what would have been Airbus’ tanker production facility in Mobile, the company is ramping up to produce 10 planes per month. Unlike the 737Max, the A320 and A220 are not grounded.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/boeing-moves-all-787-dreamliner-production-south-carolina
If the name Everett sounds familiar, it is Snohomish County, where the Seattle Police Chief lived, probably with most of the force, 45 minutes to an hour north of the Capitol Hill “CHAZ”.
Heck, we used to program in whatever we felt like. Stuff like “I did the last two sites in ASP. I’m going to do this one in PHP just to mix it up.”
My official job is writing C/C++ code. We do one offs for bug analysis and production support in whatever we like that is already available in the Linux distribution installed on the server, usually Python or Bash. Fortunately, most Linux distros include Tcl by default.
I may get to find out how well masks work. I had an in-person teaching session today – just to support students who are struggling with the online support. Sat down next to a student who had some questions, worked with him for a few minutes. Then I realized that he was sick as a dog, trying and failing to suppress his coughing.
I don’t know that he has Covid, but I don’t know that he didn’t either. Even if he knows he doesn’t: In the current situation, going to class while sick is just stupid. Color me unthrilled. Dunno if I’m more at risk, but having had pneumonia a couple of times, I really don’t want to find out…
– – – – –
@Lynn: thanks for that list of bands. I like Nightwish, but haven’t heard of the others. I’ll definitely give them a listen.
I chugged through ripping our CD collection, but honestly, we don’t listen to music that much. Now that I have some pretty decent wireless earbuds, I may start listening more. It’s just irritating that the default music app on Android is now “Youtube music”, which is all about selling you stuff. I need to find a really simple app that just plays downloaded stuff, or maybe stuff from my server, and doesn’t do anything else.
– – – – –
@Clayton: Depends on what you want. For hobby programming, I would skip learning the Windows-specific stuff, and just do Java. That should flatten the learning curve a bit. For UI stuff use JavaFX. Anything to do with UIs takes some learning, but JavaFX isn’t too bad for basic stuff. There are a zillion tutorials on YouTube, or you can pick any of a zillion books – whatever your preferred way of learning is.
You’ll make your life a bit easier if you download Java 8 from Oracle. Later versions are more complicated to install. However, if you want the latest and greatest, I have some installation tutorials I can send you, to help with the installation. All the written material is in English – I’d offer the videos as well, but they are in German, so probably not helpful. Anyway, if you want, you can reach me under my name “at” kri.ch
If you like math, I find solving problems on Project Euler to be fun. And it doesn’t require a UI – you just write a program that does whatever calculation is required, and spits out an answer to the console.
He’s old, not expected to do much but appoint his successor.
You’ll make your life a bit easier if you download Java 8 from Oracle. Later versions are more complicated to install. However, if you want the latest and greatest, I have some installation tutorials I can send you, to help with the installation. All the written material is in English – I’d offer the videos as well, but they are in German, so probably not helpful. Anyway, if you want, you can reach me under my name “at” kri.ch
Java 8 is also the last release without Oracle’s new licensing scheme. Commercial users desiring features from later releases will either have to pay up or go with OpenJDK.
I forget, form another discussion on English, this is form Economist
Nawaf al-Sabah, the crown prince, has already ascended Kuwait’s throne. Aged 83, his time in office will be defined largely by his choice of a successor https://econ.trib.al/4C7aWLc
well
this phrase
his time in office will be defined largely by his choice of a successor
meaning what?
Also, all of the countries where crude oil is their number one product are having significant money issues and unsettled populaces. The price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia in January has been largely replaced by a 40% worldwide drop in demand for crude oil due to Covid-19.
And Kuwait is a country in transition from the old to the new. The old are incredibly rich and the young are, not. Not as bad as Saudi Arabia but still bad. All work in Kuwait is performed by foreigners. If the new King is wise, he will appoint a 30 year old grandson to be the crown prince.
Is anyone surprised by this:
California implements state-mandated racial quotas for corporate boards, creates task force to study slavery reparations
Also, is anyone surprised that all the stupid stuff pulled by Chris Wallace and “Plugs and Hands” Biden is being attributed to Trump?
The MSM is getting more dangerous every day. From now until the “election” things will be very bad for the majority of Americans.
We have lost our Republic.
There is always an excuse for anything. In this case: It was written by that stupid coder!
Easiest and fastest?
VisualStudio using VisualBasic.
I hate Java crap!
Is anyone surprised by this:
California implements state-mandated racial quotas for corporate boards, creates task force to study slavery reparations
First, that law is not constitutional and will not withstand any SCOTUS test. Second, why would any company stay in California ? The taxes are too high and the workforce educational level is dropping rapidly.
Nick, your meaning is the third
a) your meaning
b) The future orientation of the kingdom (ie his legate) will be defined etc
c) His time in the office bla bla (long knives)
Lynn
Yes, I have friends who worked in SA and/or Kuwait desal plants, oil and gas, railways, but, and this is a big but, for nationals, they have a generation or two yet with money, and a lot of them dreams with London or Marbella (this later belongs to the Cordoba Caliphate that they still remember), but the bulk are non nationals, and both know that a dangerous time is comieng.
Thanks!!
“Texas grand jury: No action against killer of church shooter”
https://apnews.com/article/fort-worth-shootings-archive-texas-f38e8ef6437e96a9e60fb44662c71494?fbclid=IwAR2cp3Istav6TjDh-WCNVlryiY-Jld3el1GpiEiiOPBWrLIaNdPJIHT7KMQ
You have got to be kidding me. The Fort Worth DA referred this case to a Grand Jury ?
Hat tip to:
https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2020/10/i-didnt-realize-this-was-still-issue.html
To substantiate that, a free tutorial:
– Open VS2019.
– Select Create a new project
– Select Windows Forms App (Dotnet Framework)
– Press next
– Select location
– Press Create
– Click on Toolbox
– Drag Label to Form
– Drag Button to Form
– Double-click button.
– type: Label1.Text = “Hello World”
– Click Debug\Start debugging
– Press Button1
You have now created an app that will say Hello world at a press of a button.
Is anyone surprised by this:
California implements state-mandated racial quotas for corporate boards, creates task force to study slavery reparations
“California, Which Entered U.S. as Free State in 1850, to Study ‘Reparations’ for Slavery”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/30/california-which-entered-u-s-as-free-state-in-1850-to-study-reparations-for-slavery/
“California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state and has no history of legal slavery.”
California….
Gaia is not amused. It is starting to shake it. Maybe they come to their senses. 🙂
… and probably the last comment from me for the day:
If Java implemented proper garbage collection it should probably collect itself.!
Assertive? Yes, I mentioned that recently. 🙂
I got down voted today !
@Lynn: thanks for that list of bands. I like Nightwish, but haven’t heard of the others. I’ll definitely give them a listen.
I chugged through ripping our CD collection, but honestly, we don’t listen to music that much. Now that I have some pretty decent wireless earbuds, I may start listening more. It’s just irritating that the default music app on Android is now “Youtube music”, which is all about selling you stuff. I need to find a really simple app that just plays downloaded stuff, or maybe stuff from my server, and doesn’t do anything else.
Um, I think that was Nick. I have never heard of Nightwish.
I need to find a really simple app that just plays downloaded stuff, or maybe stuff from my server, and doesn’t do anything else.
I use VLC. Simple. Play one piece at a time, or open several and have them play in sequence.
I have a Note3, and the default Samsung player is not bad, but gets cranky at times. No ads or links to the web, but also sometimes rearranges its file list, which makes me unhappy.
I have been through several of the “players” on Windows and Linux over the years, and found all of them stultifying. Some won’t even play a list of files without first creating a play list. Back to VLC.
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – Defense Counsel”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-defense-counsel/
“Chris Wallace had no problem running defense and interference for Biden acting as a moderator in the first 2020 debate. Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.”
Heh.
Agreed with JimB about VLC. It doesn’t try to sell you anything, it doesn’t think it knows what you want to do better than you do, and it doesn’t force you to jump through hoops in order to play a few files in a row.
VLC also gives fine control over playback speed. That’s probably not useful to those who listen to music but for me it’s very useful. I listen to educational and informational podcasts. A lot of podcasts; Lynn commented on the length of my subscription list some time ago, and it’s gotten longer. I generally listen at 2.5X while programming or doing devops, but can slow down the playback in increments if the speaker has an accent.
That said, the cheapie MP3 player I got my daughter does all of that, too. Putting the podcasts in a desired order is more difficult because of the tiny screen but that’s the only drawback I’ve found.
I wouldn’t read this on a full stomach. In fact, I wouldn’t have read it at all, but I was curious how The Stranger, a “progressive” Seattle rag, would slant Boeing’s decision to emigrate production of the 787. Put your traytables in the upright position and fasten your seatbelts!
Get Ready for Mainstream Seattle to Blame Progressives for Boeing’s Departure
Apple “Books” on the iPhone lets you do that. I was mowing the grass today and a book I was listening to/too/two jumped up to 2.5x when I was playing pocket pool with the phone.
“Ann Coulter: Is Chris Wallace a White Supremacist?”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/01/ann-coulter-is-chris-wallace-a-white-supremacist/
“After four months of looting, arson, window breaking, vandalism, intimidation, physical assaults, stabbings, and shootings by Black Lives Matter and antifa, the first thing on the media’s mind is … getting Trump to condemn “white supremacists”!”
“It would be as if, on the morning after Pearl Harbor, the League of Nations demanded that FDR condemn American aggression in the Pacific.”
“Why on earth was Trump being badgered by both debate moderator Chris Wallace and Democratic nominee Joe Biden to denounce “white supremacy”? And why wasn’t Biden ever asked to condemn the nonstop violence by antifa that actually has been consuming the country for more than 100 nights now?”
Of course, with the fact that Chris Wallace is a registered dum-bro-crat, that makes him delusional in my view.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
@Nick, this one’s for you: Hoarders:
I’ll agree with half of that: Stupid.
she would be the first target if SHTF by telling everybody she has a hoard…
@mediumwave, when you live in a country with a culture of scarcity, and you encourage envy at every turn, you get poison like that. HER mistake was breaking OPSEC. I bet the grifter relatives show up in droves when times get tough. They won’t touch it in the meantime, because it’s not fresh or take-out, and you actually have to cook it.
In the US the poison of envy is spread thru the social media machine, and the erosion of self spread thru the lies of progressivism. What used to be a culture of abundance and self reliance has been diminished, and on purpose, and systematically.
n
NB, in my mind “hoarder” keeps USELESS stuff, and stores it to damage it even if it was once useful. Stacks of newspapers, and storing urine in jars comes to mind. “Hoarder” is a mental illness. Nice how they try to conflate mental illness with taking care of yourself and your dependents.
Mountain? That’s a mighty small mountain. And three months’ supply is no more than a good start.
I liked the overlay on one picture: Why are shoppers stockpiling? Gee, I dunno, maybe because they remember being unable to buy food and toilet paper less than half a year ago?
And, yah, she should have kept her mouth shut. If the neighbors or relatives don’t come mooching in the next (planned) crisis, the government will come and steal it.
A final note: Emma’s food supply might stretch a bit further, as she could stand to skip a meal or two.
Emma, a mum-of-two from Lancaster, was branded ‘selfish and stupid’ by viewers,
I’ll agree with half of that: Stupid.
she would be the first target if SHTF by telling everybody she has a hoard…
She has a BB gun …
I’d just like to remind everyone, since there’s been some recent talk about green energy and battery vehicles, that there is a LOT of energy in Lithium battery packs.
Check out what happened to Louis Rossmann’s ebike battery the other night…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCaDz_2YcGQ action starts at 1:10 and continues.
Keep in mind, most of these packs come from china. china. where they cut every corner possible….
n
Uh oh.
President Trump, First Lady Test Positive For COVID-19
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 10/01/2020 – 20:26
Update (0100ET): President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for COVID-19, according to a Thursday night tweet. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” he added.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-adviser-hope-hicks-tests-positive-covid-19
bet he gets some good treatment….
n
One scenario I haven’t really given any thought to is a Pence presidency. God forbid Trump gets really sick or dies before the election. F’ing free for all if that happens.
What’s the market going to do today? I’m gonna say ‘open down’ maybe even stop out. If it goes up that will tell us an awful lot about how people really feel.
n
Being unable to campaign during the next four weeks is bad too.
n
Thanks for the recommendations for VLC – I’ll have a look.
Regarding rioting and violence: I was pretty shocked a few days ago, when the local media ran a piece on violence in Switzerland. Incidents by left-wing extremists: hundreds and rising. Incidents by right-wing extremists: one this year, zero last year. Honesty in reporting, making the left look bad, by the MSM! I almost fell off my chair.
Just for grins, I read that article about Boeing leaving Seattle. The author is a pretentious git. He shows off by working in fancy words, and a bit of (incorrect) German, yet his writing is full of grammatical errors and poorly structured sentences. The article looks like it wants to be an essay, arguing a point, but it just sort of meanders around. The guy is a pretentious git who failed college English.
Learn Python. Pretty easy to code, not as much cruft as Java. Lots of good tutorials and books out there. It’s great for web programming and big data/AI work.
Plus it runs well on things like Raspberry Pi machines.