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I am constantly surprised how what I think are my boring articles actually do better than the sexy ones.
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Sexy is a risk; boring is a promise.
Ask any female.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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honey the codewitch wrote: But now I had to choose boring/fast over cool/slow and that makes me a little sad.
That would depend on why you're doing this. If its for fun, I'd go with cool. Cool is fun. Cool is rewarding. Cool is, well cool. And sometimes, cool teaches you things that boring doesn't. OTOH, if there's an eventual customer in mind then maybe boring/fast is the right decision.
Speaking of performance, what's the difference in speed we're talking here? Is the performance difference noticeable, or can you only really tell by running performance analysis. Are we talking micro-seconds in a real-world situation, or seconds, or even tens of seconds. If you're looking at less than 250/300 ms for a given work-load, maybe Cool/Fun is good enough. If the difference can be measured in eye-blinks, why be boring?
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That's a good point about perf. I've already released the sexy lexer though, and I need the reliable one so i think i'll finish it up
Real programmers use butterflies
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Then they'll incinerate it.
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Maybe we can get a time lapse video of that, too.
What goes up must come down!
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well it's being built for victims of the latest deadly disease that china produced (then covered up for a month) it's not as silly as it sounds, more people have died than recovered (ignoring the bogus "official" figures.)
this is also the same country that built high speed rail lines also very quickly, and there were inevitable disasters (also more than reported).
throw in Feb is their coldest month of the year: it shouldn't (but probably will be) paper thin construction - how long can it last? Nevermind it's being built for the poor masses, them the central government considers valueless anyway. anyone important gets the bug they'll commandeer [with some lame excuse] an existing high class hospital in Peking.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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Please at least try to make an effort to keep extremist politics and fake news out of the CP Lounge.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Please at least try to make an effort to keep extremist politics and fake news out of the CP Lounge. Because that distracts you from thinking of new off-topic replies/brain farts on "Insider News" ?
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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At least there's nothing vicious or nasty in anything I post. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Please at least try to make an effort to keep extremist politics and fake news out of the CP Lounge.
and the what did you call it, "fake news" I posted is now common knowledge and in fact even worse.
Don't worry, I won't mind if you take your foot out of your mouth.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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"China" didn't cover anything up, the local governor/mayor did, but only for a matter of days. The people involved in the cover up have been fired and/or arrested, and there's a good chance that a couple of them will be executed, for causing the deaths of many others.
"China" didn't try to hide their one and only high-speed rail crash (that happened at low speed), "officials" did -- it's hard to tell which officials, because they were very quickly fired, prosecuted, and imprisoned, along with the people who made money out of cutting corners in the construction. I've been on several of the newer trains (topping 450kph), and I've never had a more comfortable ride -- or quiet, everyone speaks in whispers, because it's so quiet.
The prefab wards used for the quick-build hospitals are better equipped and more comfortable than many hospitals that have been around for a while.
So yes, the bullsh1t you spouted was fake news; and the way you spouted it was dumb-hick style racist and offensive.
And yes, there is a Hell of a lot of corruption at regional/gubernatorial levels in China, the rooting out of which has been one of Chairman Wu's main objectives, since he took office (and if he says it's one of his main objectives, you can believe it, because he's not an inveterate liar, like some countries' leaders), but when you compare it to the corruption at regional/gubernatorial levels in countries a fraction of the size/population of China, you realise that it's not particularly exceptional.
I love the way that people who have never been to China, know absolutely bugger all about China or its people, and have even less of a clue about how the country works, decide that they're experts on the nation after watching a few propaganda films from organisations with vested interests.
Don't bother to respond. I'm not interested in hearing more of your parroted propaganda, and I won't read it -- and when I say I won't do something, I don't do it; I'll bet you wish you could trust the word of your great leaders as much.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Six days, 15 stories: [^]
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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Holy cr@p; you go away for a week's holiday, and when you come back, the geraniums in your window box aren't getting any sunshine!
Can't fault the buggers on productivity, that's for sure.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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xkcd: Networking Problems[^] What's the latency at exactly noon? I think we need to know.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I once debugged a problem where users reported that they'd print a batch of invoices, say 100, but only half of them were printed.
So I check the logging and sure enough, all print jobs were created, but only half of them finished.
No errors or exceptions, printer worked, the client couldn't think of anything that happened prior to the printing.
They printed two batches a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, but this only happened in the afternoon.
The next day everything went fine, then it didn't, when I tested it everything worked, I built all kinds of checks and logging, but NOTHING would solve the problem.
I even went there to check out why it went wrong, but I couldn't find anything and of course everything printed as it should that day.
This went on for months, not every day, but quite often and I would be looking for the problem regularly.
One fine day, my manager was over at the client and he wanted to go home just when the department was about to print invoices.
In a moment of clarity he thought he'd walk in to see if the invoices were printed.
He found the problem.
They selected 100 invoiced, pressed the print button, THEN TURNED OFF THEIR FRIGGIN COMPUTER!
That explained why it always worked in the morning, no one turned off their computer in the morning.
It doesn't explain why these people can't make a connection between turning off their computer and a printer stopping
I don't think I've ever spent that much time on a "bug"
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I spent a week sitting in a library, waiting for an intermittent fault to happen.
We'd delivered a new design of VDT (a terminal that talked to a mainframe) and this one site 300 miles away had a problem with it glitching out and restarting sometimes. The hardware had been replace with a brand new one, it only seemed to happen with my software. So a service engineer and I went up there are sat until it failed. Monday was dull. Tuesday more so. Friday was "climb the walls" time ... And then it happened.
Because they laminated a new library user's card for the first time that week.
And the laminator "spiked" the mains supply and the VDT PSU glitched out, crashing the software ...
One line conditioner later and we headed for home.
That was an expensive problem, not just in our time, but definitely in the bar bill which was "quite staggering" in the words of the Managing Director!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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While we are at crazy causes of problems: The case of the 500-mile email[^]
(This is a classic story, probably known to the oldtimers, but lots of younger people are not familiar with it.)
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Nothing amazes me anymore, even when I provide detailed step by step instructions how to install and use the software we write they somehow manage to do things wrong most of the time.
Guess it's too hard to read the instructions
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RickZeeland wrote: Guess it's too hard to read the instructions
FTFY
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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A telephone switch was installed in Alaska to carry calls between Asia and North America. It connected to the North American network by satellite. It was so far north that it could barely see the satellite in its orbit, low over the horizon.
A satellite dish is usually mounted on a tower, but posts conduct heat into the ground, melting permafrost and creating a Leaning Tower of Pisa look. So the dish stayed on the ground.
After some uneventful months, the switch suddenly went insane. Thousands of links simultaneously failed and reconnected shortly afterwards, and the cycle would then repeat. Each failed link resulted in a message for the maintenance software, which began to diagnose the problem. This used up a lot of CPU time. And each link reestablishment resulted in a call origination message for the call handling software.
The switch couldn't handle the intense message flood. Call originations timed out and were retransmitted, exacerbating the problem. Then the links would crash again, causing another message flurry for the maintenance software. The switch got so far behind that it couldn't even handle calls on the links that had actually remained in service.
Eventually the links came up and stayed up, but it still took the switch quite a while to recover from the message flood.
The next day, the same thing. This continued until some field engineers took a snowmobile to go and inspect the satellite dish. It was in perfect working order. But one day while they were out there, they experienced what felt like a mild earthquake. A great herd of caribou (reindeer) were crossing the horizon on their yearly migration. The satellite dish was mounted so low that the dust cloud kicked up by the caribou broke the microwave beam between the satellite and dish, causing all the links to crash. The gaps between herds would then allow the links to reconnect before the next herd took them down again.
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A slightly related story:
In the early days of email, a colleague of mine reported that he had received a rush of emails from his wife, working with another company, some of the messages weeks and months old - messages that had "disappeared" for unknown reasons now reappearing.
They found the reason: At my employer, we still did offline backup, taking down the machines at midnight to make backup copies. At the company of my colleague's wife, their email system tried to send the mail when submitted, but if unsuccessful (which wasn't uncommon in those days), the mail was put into a backlog for a retry after midnight ... when our machines were offline for backup. So the midnight retransmission failed, night after night. Then our mailserver had a major crash at nighttime. It was restarted right before midnight, without being taken down for backup. Then the whole rush of backlogged emails where accepted.
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In the UK, a telephone subscriber is signalled by sending 90 volts across one side of the two-wire circuit and ground. When the phone is answered, it switches to the two-wire circuit for conversation. This method allows two parties on the same line to be signalled without disturbing each other.
An elderly man called British Telecom to say that his telephone nearly always failed to ring when his friends called. On the few occasions when it did ring, his dog always barked first. A technician dispatched to the premises climbed a nearby pole, connected his test set, and dialled the house. The phone didn't ring.
On investigation, it was found that the dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar, and was receiving 90 volts of signalling current. After several jolts, the dog urinated on the ground and barked. The wet ground then conducted and the phone rang.
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