Sunny and hot. Again. Dripping sweat hot. Again. Summer is still here.
Yesterday I started my day sweating in a storage unit. Got that job done, and decided to see my main auctioneer. They are still swamped with their own items, so I’m still holding off bringing them more.
Hit the Goodwill bins on my way home. Didn’t get much, but did pick up a couple of things for me, and a couple for the auction. Went to dinner with my sibling, and had a nice chat. W and the Ds are at her parents’ house for the rest of the week, while I’m headed to the BOL to work.
So today I’ve got pickups to make, supplies to buy, a truck to load, and a dog to drop off at a friend’s house. Then I can head out. By the time I get all that done, I might sleep here and head up later. I don’t want to shift another day, as it’s easy to slip the days… and I don’t know if we’ll have a sunny day later. Or in theory, I could take the wife’s minivan…
I just hope I am not dripping sweat the whole day.
I’ve added a couple of solar panels and an inverter or two to the stacks. I’m bidding on an inverter/charge controller and another panel today. I want to start slapping some sort of solar power system together, so I can start finding the unknown unknowns… as solar has moved up my list. I still need a good source for batteries though. Several of my lead acid leftovers no longer take a charge. Something is sure to pop up soon.
And I’ll stack some more when it does. Stacking is what I do.
nick
The Last Ride of David Boies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/29/delta-hires-david-boies-to-seek-damages-from-crowdstrike-microsoft-.html
83. Geesh.
The Legend of David Boies, Microsoft Slayer, Champion Of The People, Wears Lands End Suits To Court.
(Just don’t mention his work with Harvey Weinstein or Elizabeth Holmes.)
Got popcorn?
I own MSFT stock, but I believe this Kubernetes Hot Skillz culdesac is a dead end which the industry needs to escape.
Are you certain? It could have been a body double.
If the administration pulled a stunt of hiding the death of a sitting president everyone in the administration that participated should be up on felony criminal charges. It would also be the, ahem, death, of the democratic party.
I have no doubt that Spongey is still alive. Fully functional he is not. His mental capabilities are less than stellar at less than 100%. Physical problems don’t concern me, mental issues are a problem.
Spongey will last until January 2025 and will not assume room temperature until after the new president is sworn in. Currently drugs are keeping him barely functional.
What is telling to me is the news coverage. When Trumper and Obuttwad were president every single day something was presented on the news. The president doing something, saying something, going somewhere. Over the last year the news spots on the president have significantly diminished. Now there may be almost a week between images of the president doing something or making some statement.
This indicates to me that Spongey is purposely being kept from the public view. To hide his mumbling and bumbling sometimes incoherent talking. The news, and the White House press machine, don’t want to keep reminding the public that Spongey is losing his mental capabilities. He is walking, and talking, like a very old man with advancing dementia.
Go watch the video. A body double would have been sharper.
Silly me. I stand corrected.
Coffee is brewing. Sunny day. Time to do some stuff and get started.
n
This is what the Dumbo’s consider the average American:
NICE Man Bun: Here Are the Best (Worst) Takeaways from EMBARRASSING White Dudes for Kamala Call (Watch)
I hope this completely backfires with Independents. The Hollyweirdo’s and Dumbo’s are saying Men = Women. When they say MAGA Bad, they forget that is half the country, minus the Independents. They are forging tRump’s legacy as 45/47 POTUS and the man who crushed the only two female DNC POTUS nominees. “Men are not hunters and providers…” Really, just disappear a 100,000 years of evolution. These people are nuts.
– thanks Border Czar! Just exactly who we need here…
I’m betting the “boyfriend” is at least 10 years her senior too.
n
I just tried Handbrake. It wanted .Net also. I thought I had .Net. Well, no joy. I used the default settings.
It took a 4GB file and made a 242 MB files. No sound, the picture is just random vertical stripes.
But VLC can open it! 🙂
I love Handbrake, but it has a boatload of video settings. Pick the wrong one, and you’ll get a giant file or a jaggy one. It has made some old unplayable videos playable on macOS with the built-in viewers. .net not required LOL!
These are the imbeciles and crimmigrants that The Kamel wants to just walk over the border and start receiving welfare. Don’t call them aliens, either. November is gonna be lit.
“Israel Strikes Beirut in Attack Against Hezbollah Commander”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/israel-strikes-beirut-attack-against-193918056.html
“(Bloomberg) — Israel targeted a senior Hezbollah commander with an airstrike on Beirut, a retaliation for a rocket attack in the Golan Heights that killed 12 young people over the weekend.”
“Israeli officials signaled they would not escalate the situation further. The military isn’t planning any more immediate attacks in response to the assault on the Druze town of Majdal Shams on Saturday, senior Israeli officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”
“The strike on Lebanon’s capital happened shortly before 8 p.m. local time and was aimed at Fuad Shukr, according to the officials. It was unclear if Shukr — a senior military advisor to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — survived. He is also known as Mohsin.”
“Shukr is wanted by the US government for his involvement in a bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed about 240 American service members.”
Why was this guy still walking the Earth ? The USMC would do him for free.
Paul, I have never found any video file I couldn’t play on my Android phones over the years, but then I don’t go on the high seas. I use my phone to cast to my Samsung TV wirelessly. It works so much better than the TV UI. I have had several players on my phone, and all of them work fine. VLC is a favorite, but I don’t have it on my current phone.
I tried Handbrake once, on Linux I believe. Couldn’t get it to work. I think I used it on Win 10 with success.
This stuff is too complicated.
I just tried Handbrake. It wanted .Net also. I thought I had .Net. Well, no joy. I used the default settings.
It took a 4GB file and made a 242 MB files. No sound, the picture is just random vertical stripes.
But VLC can open it!
Sounds like you got hosed by the encryption. I would look for decryption programs.
Microsoft is getting hammered after hours for a miss on Azure revenue.
Tomorrow could be ugly even though results otherwise were in line with analyst expectations.
The party will be over if the market thinks that the AI monkey trick that fueled tech this year is running out of gas. Nothing else sells right now.
So I hear that Biden’s body double is Jim Carey wearing a rubber mask. I have been wondering where Carey was lately.
Animation.
Carey announced that he was contemplating retirement from film before signing a contract for another “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie.
Film comedy is dead. Like Westerns, you’ll occasionally get a “Anyone But You” from a US studio, but that’s going to be once every few years.
The press is falling over themselves for the Humper. I expect very biased reporting for the next 3.5 months. The Humper will be shown in a very favorable position with less than stellar moments hidden from reporting.
Of interest to programmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4c6nFGt1iM&list=TLPQMzAwNzIwMjRcKlXoSE1XpQ&index=1&pp=gAQBiAQB
Here’s part of the report the video is based on: Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency
C is syntactic sugar for assembly language.
I’m not buying Rust over C++. When I use the official compiler, Hello World is always more bloated than the C equivalent, and just moving all of those bytes around is going to incur a penalty outside of a CS lecture hall where that part of the program execution will be considered O(n).
Wait for the convention. A lid has been put on a pot full of boiling ambitions.
Today’s mail had two claim forms from MetLife. Looks like the same form. They need to be notarized. I can get that done for free at the courthouse. No mention of what I’m claiming. There must be something, why else would they send claim forms?
Firefly arrived today. “Used” in that it wasn’t wrapped in cellophane or otherwise sealed. Not a fingerprint or scratch on any disc.
The set of movies I bought from MS, well they play on my pc. I tossed one movie across the LAN over to Moa. Moa is missing the “Movies & TV” program. So I don’t know if the movies I bought are locked to this machine or not. Getting the program on Moa is a project for another day. It’s not like I have a lack of DVDs to watch.
I’m kinda wondering when “Movies & TV” appeared on my PC. Moa and Kiwi have the same version of Win11. Neither have the program. It must have come with the movies I bought.
I can watch what I bought, I just can’t do so while sitting in the LazyBoy watching on the 55″ TV with surround sound. If I really really want, I can get the DVD set from Big River for about $130 (price varies with the phase of the Moon and your need of a haircut). I’ll put this in the “White Man’s Burden” file. 🙂 I might be able to run a 50 foot long HDMI cable from PC to TV, but that’s not happening.
Thursday morning is my “phone interview” with SS. I hope it goes my way, if not, I’ll manage. House insurance would be a problem but that’s the way it goes.
Someone is looking at me with “where’s my supper?” eyes. I’d best get on that task.
Well let’s see now. How relevant is this dramatic study of programming languages?
They looked at it from a run-time/energy consumption perspective, which is a viewpoint, but a pretty limited one.
How about TCO (total cost of ownership)? In other words, what did it cost to design, develop, document, test, produce the code, to run the code (however many times it was needed), while performing maintenance and other support, and eventual decommissioning?
Or just focusing on programmer cost, what’s the availability of good C programmers vs. Python geeks?
I propose a new standard of measurement, the Moore. A language that’s 64 times slower than another is 8 Moores slower. That’s how many genrations of Moore’s Law separate the performance.
So a routine in Python is 8 and a fraction Moores slower than the equivalent in C. You could view it as moving 16 years backwards in performance to use Python vs. C.
Of course, if you go down this path, you need to recommend all shell scripts need to be rewritten to compiled language and wasteful web browsers need to be replaced with efficient dedicated compiled client-server apps.
“Saharan dust arriving soon as Houston starts to feel like it should during August”
https://spacecityweather.com/saharan-dust-arriving-soon-as-houston-starts-to-feel-like-it-should-during-august/
“Tuesday
The main difference today, from Monday, is that we’ll see a slightly better chance of some showers and thunderstorms this afternoon. It’s definitely just a puncher’s chance, with perhaps 10 or 20 percent coverage, but you may hear a few rumbles later today. We should also start to see the onset of some haze later today, due to Saharan dust that has traveled all the way across the Atlantic. This should pose no health concerns, and is beneficial for our soils. Sunsets should also be great this week.”
Lovely. More coughing crap up that I breathed in.
A Chromecast won’t work?
Yeah, that’s feeding the Google beast as well as Microsoft, but you’ll be able to watch from the chair.
My real concern with the movie set would be the licensing terms. Can Microsoft and/or Warner revoke the license?
Warner is the next in line to be broken up and sold off in pieces.
I’m not buying Rust over C++. When I use the official compiler, Hello World is always more bloated than the C equivalent, and just moving all of those bytes around is going to incur a penalty outside of a CS lecture hall where that part of the program execution will be considered O(n).
I am not buying that Rust is faster than C++ either.
C Python also has the Global Interpreter Lock which limits threading performance.
Guido van Rossum currently works for Microsoft improving Python performance since it sells more Azure instances.
Lets hope he doesn’t have a big portion of his compensation in stock.
The official Rust compiler is LLVM based, which hooks together C++ objects. Maybe they used the experimental GNU front end.
I kinda-sorta regret passing on Compilers in grad school in WA State after my tuition waiver went away. The class was based on LLVM and taught by someone competent.
That was the last section of Compilers taught in that program. The class is now optional at the undergrad level per ACM.
I am not buying that Rust is faster than C++ either.
The official Rust compiler is LLVM based, which hooks together C++ objects. Maybe they used the experimental GNU front end.
I kinda-sorta regret passing on Compilers in grad school in WA State after my tuition waiver went away. The class was based on LLVM and taught by someone competent.
That was the last section of Compilers taught in that program. The class is now optional at the undergrad level per ACM.
I am also not buying that Fortran is 2.5 times slower than C code. Unless, they used a lot of formatted I/O (input/output). Fortran I/O formatting is incredibly slow even though it is written in C libraries now. The flexibility and handholding in the Fortran run time libraries is simply amazing.
White Hot (Hidden Legacy, 2)” by Ilona Andrews
https://www.amazon.com/White-Hidden-Legacy-Ilona-Andrews/dp/006228925X?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number two of a six book and one novella paranormal romance fantasy series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Avon in 2017 that I just bought new from Amazon. I have the other four books and the novella in the series and will read those soon.
Totally cool start to a new series for me. This makes the fourth series that I have read from Ilona Andrews, a husband and wife writing team. The Innkeeper, Kate Daniels, and The Edge are the other series of books.
The Hidden Legacy Universe is a complex place. The Osiris serum that induced magical powers in humans was released to the general public in 1863 and the world was never the same. The serum was banned after a while but the world was irreparably changed. Families starting breeding children for strength in magical powers with breathtaking results. Magic users are segregated into five ranks: Minor, Average, Notable, Significant, and Prime. The Prime families operate mostly outside the law since they are so powerful and incredibly dangerous.
Nevada Baylor runs a very small detective agency in Houston, Texas ( ! ) that usually works on scammers and divorce cases. She is a 25 year old hidden Prime Truthseeker, she can unerringly tell lies from truths and can sometimes force people to emit truths. Her mother and father started the detective agency but there is a huge mortgage to a Prime Family that funded the effort to try to save her father from cancer. The effort failed and left them with a huge mortgage when Nevada was 17.
Connor “Mad” Rogan is a Prime Telekinetic and a noted combat veteran, famous and feared for leveling a village in the Mexican-Belize war. He is a billionaire with a private army and wants Nevada Baylor very badly. So badly that he bought all of the property around the Baylor household in a one mile radius so he can protect Nevada and her family.
Several of Connor’s employees and protected persons were murdered in a meeting to discuss a large transaction. Nevada is brought into the investigation by the husband of one of one of the protected persons. Where, she finds that Connor is involved and incredibly angry.
The authors have a very active website at:
https://ilona-andrews.com/
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars (I am starting to think 6 stars)
Amazon rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (14,686 reviews)
Lynn
Compilers class
I graduated BS CS 1976 from one the 5 schools in the U.S. that offered CS degrees at that time. Compilers was a graduate class, and they weren’t giving any permissions to undergrads to take it. Unlike some other classes I took.
I continued to be interested, and bought a copy of the dragon book and also “Threaded Interpretive Languages”.
Fast forward about 10 years, and I applied to my Alma Mater for grad school. They told me they couldn’t rule on my application until I made up remedial classwork, which was: Compilers.
Another 5 years, and I went to grad school elsewhere. I finally got to take my compiler class. I worked for Digital Equipment Corp at the time, and I wrote a paper about optimization within the Bliss compiler, and changes made for RISC (Alpha) architecture.
Interesting factoid: The “assembler language” for the Alpha processor was actually a compiler, since humans can’t be trusted to handle coding at that level. Not efficiently, at any rate.
I wrote a rudimentary C compiler targeting Facebook’s HHVM. The bytecode was a moving target back then so the solution was to write the “assembly” in the IM for Hack, Facebook’s PHP flavor, and let the JIT compile to binary before running the code. Performance wasn’t terrible for an interpreted language.
Even Hack’s IM (I forget the exact name) was a moving target. The compiler output stopped running on the VM at some point and I never went back to look at why.
I’ve seen papers about Facebook working on a C++ interpreter which is LLVM based, complete with STL library support. I don’t know if that work has ever gone public since that would be a huge competitive advantage.
At least Facebook tries different things. The big waste of time in the last 20 years at a lot of shops was the Ruby Hot Skillz rabbit hole.
Yeah, and I needed to learn PowerBuilder or lose my job.
I wrote a couple of compilers while in the USAF. Highly specialized. The compilers did use English statements as input, conditional logic, some math, a lot of date math, multiple formatting options for output, limited branching. I was able to make it a one pass compiler using some tricks. The compiler was written in Algol (-68 I think) running on a B-6700, which was a 48 bit word machine. The resulting code was B-3500 machine code, which was digit oriented. There was a lot of partial word references involved to build the target code.
There was no theory involved. Probably a lot of stuff and methods that would make the compiler purists puke their guts out.
It was a fun project. The compiler was about 40K lines of code. And it was fast.
I liked Algol and adapted easily even with my COBOL background.
Jeez you geeks, I have to go back and add the “computing” tag to today. 😉
— took a long time, with many tasks, but I’m headed to the BOL. Too wound up to sleep so I might as well drive.
n
I didn’t even get into where I’ve seen Forth applied lately.
Three guys that have written compilers in one small non-IT blog…
Four. Undergraduate. Bloody useless.
Language speed depends on the application. When I was learning C, my first program did Fourier analysis on a PC or PC clone, probably an 8088. I had already written the program in whatever BASIC Microsoft was shipping back then. The C program took three or four times as long as the BASIC program, producing nearly the same result. BASIC had no problem doing single precision floating point math, while C insisted on double precision. Math co-processors were not common yet.
I managed a major rewrite of one, going from a multipass to a single pass program for HQ SAC in 1975.
busy day:
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/07/30/breaking-hamas-chief-haniyeh-killed-in-tehran-n3792501
Three guys that have written compilers in one small non-IT blog…
I wrote a translator from Smalltalk to C++. Does that count ?
We have a Fortran interpreter in our software. I have extensively added to it over the years. And fixed a few bytestream errors.
I also took the F2C tool and converted it to F2CPP. Works fairly well for Fortran 66 and 77 code.
Language speed depends on the application. When I was learning C, my first program did Fourier analysis on a PC or PC clone, probably an 8088. I had already written the program in whatever BASIC Microsoft was shipping back then. The C program took three or four times as long as the BASIC program, producing nearly the same result. BASIC had no problem doing single precision floating point math, while C insisted on double precision. Math co-processors were not common yet.
There should be a law that requires double precision. Single precision on a 32 bit machine is only 5.5 digits of precision after roundoff error.
RIP William Calley, April 28, 2024
https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/07/30/william-calley-the-only-man-convicted-for-the-my-lai-massacre-dead-at-80-n2177571
No other story was accurate, but this one was?
Arrived safely at the BOL. 80F and humid. Eating some leftover indian food for a snack. I may just shower and go to bed.
First I’ll go down and unlock the dockhouse and see what the lake looks like.
n
My internal backup drive at home finished committing suicide Monday night. It was unaddressable after that and causing major timeout errors for Windows 10 x64 Pro. That WD 2 TB green drive was made in 2010, just 14 years old. It got the screwdriver in the air hole treatment since it has a copy of my source code on it.
I stole XXXXX repurposed an old WD 4 TB green drive from the office and installed that this morning. Came right up. It is a 2014 drive, just 10 years old.
Lake is a bit high, but not too bad. The grass is going to be a b!tch to mow, it’s knee high in places. Nice night, good breeze and fairly clear sky, but I am going to bed.
Lots to do tomorrow.
n
“Netflix-Codes.com”
https://www.netflix-codes.com/
“You probably know that Netflix is using a really strange system to categorize it films and tv shows. Indeed, there isn’t any categories tab… We have the solution, with this site, you will be able to find categories by a little code.”
“How does it work ?”
“Once you’ve found the code for the category that you’re searching, you just have to put the code in the search bar or you can replace the xx in this link https://netflix.com/browse/genre/xx with the code or simply click on the CODE.”
Oh you ain’t seen nothin yet, no baby, you just ain’t seen nothin yet…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13690233/police-clash-southport-huge-crowds-protest-near-mosque-bricks-fireworks-thrown.html
n