Somehow I wrote some code that ended up comparing a string type object against a pointer of an unrelated class. There are NO functions to convert that class to any kind of string representation. Let alone ones that would allow that to happen in C++.

WhyTF did the compiler not pick up on this?

Jee jee jee jee el tea ee

I have an app I have developed that uses concurrency. My dev env allows me to select different targets. One of those targets is WebAssembly. So I got it configured and decided to test my app. It immediately failed on compile due to the concurrency module missing. I later found that for my dev env concurrency for webassembly is experimental.

So concurrency is a thing for webassembly, but the support on my dev env end is not there yet.

Is threading difficult in webassembly?

Comment in repo:
"The Shadow Proclamation was challenged and found to be liable."

The change:
- UA_Client* m_client = UA_Client_new();
+ m_client = UA_Client_new();

The first thing I thought when I saw this guy was:
SKYRIM IS FOR THE NORDS!

https://eastidahonews.com/2020/09/...

Here's hoping that 2020 ends with something mild, like a super volcano or something.

Things that should not go together!
* Using the restroom
* Can be used as a floatation device.
Not going into details, but damn...

The fight is real!

So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.

It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.

Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.

This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.

The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one.

Something all devs should be practicing:

Fire Tornadoes?!

https://usatoday.com/story/news/...

What the crap, is the Fire Nation Fire Lord destroying CA?

I got to thinking it might be nice to have my own personal fingerprint reader. I could carry it with me and hook to my work computer for tasks such as sudo and login. At home I could login. I figured there ought to be some nice cross platform devices... Oh hell fuck no. Its all Windows shit. Most of them say windows 10 and usually say don't work on Linux, Mac, or Android.

So I think I am going to hack my own:
https://amazon.com/FlashTree-Optica...=
https://amazon.com/Seeeduino-Smalle...==

I have a 3d printer that I can use to enclose this and make it look nice and personalized. I can embed any kind of functionality I want to make this work.

Manufacturers: STOP MAKING SHITTY WINDOWS ONLY HARDWARE!

Microsoft has sunk to a new low.
I opened a command window to check if there was an existing python install on the path. It reported nothing back. Zero errors. A second or 2 later it opened up the Microsoft Store so I can find this missing app.

The one last sacred thing was the command line, and you violated it.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!

I like C++, but it is seriously easy to do fucked up things:

class Test{
public:
Test(){};
};

Test test;
Test* test2 = nullptr;
Test& test3 = *test2;
Test* test4 = (Test*)0x12345;
Test& test5 = *test4;
Test* test6;
Test& test7 = *test6;

No warnings at all. I wonder if there is a flag for this kind of stupidity. Here's your sign...

I wanted to create a microcontroller website. It would feature simple circuits and microcontroller code to build things. The intent was to show absolute beginner concepts to people. Since I am older than the whipper snappers out there I thought I would have concept of some old man running the website.

I found cartoon artwork featuring an old man and I also got the domain oldmanmicro.com. I then created a bunch of pages featuring some really basic circuits. I setup an affiliate program with amazon to provide kits to people and embedded those into the website. This site was going to take a lot of creativity. I struggled with what to put on the site. This was going to take time. At this point I felt pretty good with my progress. It looked nice, the links were good, etc.

Then I did web search for oldmanmicro. I found my website in top hits. I also found something else... The 3rd or fourth hit down was some fucking old dude with a micro penis website. WTF! The worst possible combination of letters in my domain name produce this terrible experience. I was already struggling with content ideas, and this just demoralized my efforts. Thus ended the tale of the oldmanmicro.com. Perhaps the micro penis guy bought it, I don't know. I am afraid to look.

This was my very ignorant adventure with not researching a domain name thoroughly.

Dynamic/Dynamically is used WAY to much in programming. What part of programming is NOT dynamic?
https://dictionary.com/browse/...
Depending upon your interpretation of the definition it can just mean: moving parts. Programming is all about moving parts.

I see things like "dynamically allocated array". Wtf does that even mean? (I get it, most likely means on heap) Say it specifically: it was allocated on the stack or the heap.

Apparently some people are just more energetic in their programming...

It becoming a really overused buzzword...

Flash Gun Kelly

Does anyone know how to create a live wallpaper app in Windows 10?
I found an API for setting the wallpaper filename, but I have to imagine that would be slow. When searching I am bombarded by apps that do this, but they are all pay apps. I want to know how to program this.

Finally finished an algo to check an image for grouping of pixels that will form a rectangular area. I got the grouping to work on one image, but found it was utterly failing on another. I went through every step of the algo and still could not find the solution. The 128x128 image was working, but the 128x16 image was not. I knew it had something to do with the dimensions. Started thinking it was overflowing a buffer somewhere. So I started putting asserts in the functions that abstracted the buffer access. None of the numbers exceeded the proper bounds. It was close to bedtime so I finally gave up. I was tired. Then I realized it wouldn't be until the next evening when I could look at this again. So I got up again and started looking at the code again. I had a loop to check the output of my algo that I did the memory access of the buffer. It too was not fully filling my temp image to show how the algo was working. WTF!

Then I finally realized the flaw:
buffer[x+y*height]

And my test loop to test the algo:
buffer[x+y*ymax]

I kept overlooking the error because I was sure it was right. Also my asserts for the functions to access the buffers? They only checked the inputs x and y. So it didn't help that the math was wrong for reading and writing the buffers. It also worked fine on 128x128 images because the width and height were the same.

It is funny that I struggled with this part. The algo was actually surprisingly easy to formulate. I just looked through every point and checked a buffer to see if that point was used. If not then I would attempt to grow in the x and y direction the shaped of that point based upon pixel color. This was saved in a structure while growing that point. Then when that rectangle could not be grown further the inner loop would continue checking used points again.

I still have work to do to use the data this algo produces. I need to now figure out how to parent the rectangular areas to each other. I will probably use my check buffer to keep track of these rects by an index. Then do adjacent checks to determine parenting. Eventually I will have to extend this algo to 3 dimensions, but that should not be difficult.

Why did Microsoft lock down TTF files?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...
None of their links work anymore.

I have a bad feeling about this...meme

Algorithm suggestions for 2d and 3d volumetric combination of voxels?

I built an image to voxel converter for exporting to the game Avorion over the weekend. I am using a naive approach and treating each pixel as a box shape. I need to learn how to write an algorithm for combining voxels with the same color into rectangular cuboids. This will reduce the imported shapes. As is the game has issues with 64x64x1 images on import. It would be good to reduce the object count by creating cuboids with the pixels that can be combined. I would like to learn to write the algorithm for both 2d and 3d.

This is a question and a rant about my frustrations with an API description. First take a look at this usage information for a library I have been playing with:

https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...

Now my first question: Is it clear as to you what the formats are for the InBuf and OutBuf parameters are?

Now, read his response to people (including me) struggling with determining the format of the buffers for this resize function:
https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...

Does the guy come across as condescending as hell? Am I reading into this? It is like the guy takes every opportunity to find fault with people not understanding the details he didn't put in his API description. I would find it difficult to have to work with someone like this.

The irony about this is the description of his code makes me think it is going to magically create this wonderfully rescaled image preserving details. The result is that a standard bilinear filtering scaling function looks practically the same. I saw no real perceptible improvements of his code over the scaler I tested against. When I adjusted parameters using presets he provided it didn't improve the results and added artifacts I could not accept. His scaler is also at least a magnitude slower than the bilinear version. So the code is pretty much a non-starter for my current project.

Ah well, I appreciate him posting the code and making it a very permissive license. That part is really cool.

I had a dream about AI.

I was contracted at a company that did some dodgy things. One of the things they "produced" was train car covers. They said the beauty of "selling" these is that they only showed that they shipped them to customers, despite never shipping them. This allowed the customers to take credit for covering their train cars to meet some environmental quota. It was a racket to satisfy someones auditing books somewhere.

Well my specialty was AI systems. I provided various types of AI for them to use to run their scams. However, there was a rule. I was not allowed to sell them or bring onsite any level 5 or above AIs. Level 5 or above AIs were AIs capable of independent thought. Not sure what levels were below, but I can imagine level 1 was probably pattern matching. Level 2 maybe can make decisions based upon rule sets.

As the dream progressed I found myself smuggling a level 5 AI onsite by combining 2 lower level AIs with complementary systems. Once "hooked up" they would act as a single level 5 AI. Not sure if I was working on some sort of industrial espionage or undercover for some sort of legal agency. I woke up too soon to find out who I really was.

Just an FYI for those that don't know. You can send poop to anyone in the world. There are vendors that do this as a service.

For example: https://poopsenders.com/

Then I realized this is SAAS, Shit As A Service.

I have a nice laptop already. Yet I see this and want it. It is about what I paid for my current lappy. The nice part is more ram, more cores, and a 2060 gfx. Right now I am running a 1650 gfx.

I just don't have a "good" reason to get this. I am glad lappy prices have finally gotten near normal again.

Anybody have experience with the newer AMD processors? Worth it?

https://amazon.com/ASUS-IPS-Type-Ge...

It is finally settled. You have heard that the cure is often worse than the disease. This may not be true anymore.

After seeing this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I have decided that the New Disease is worse than The Cure.

I am thinking of naming a game developer company with a catchy name. Due to all the shitheads that have come before me the name I want could be considered racist though it is not meant to be.

Ever since I saw this picture:
https://twitter.com/michaelkeyes/...
I want to create an image of a raccoon riding a hog from a profile image. Think lion king imagery except with a raccoon and a hog. I also want to name the company "Coon Hog Gaming". "Raccoon Hog Gaming" doesn't sound as catchy.

I am by no means desiring to be a woketard. PC culture turns my stomach. I also don't want to alienate any potential customers. I would like to signal to customers that we are not PC and will not be PC. This name does that. Yet maybe some customers would be offended so I couldn't market the game on Steam. Should I just go for it anyway? I guess down the road if things get even more stupid than now I could always change the company name.

To preincrement or to postincrement?

for(var i = 0; i<length; ++i){
}

or

for(var i = 0; i<length; i++){
}

I would imagine on a good vm or compiler this would be optimized anyway. So does it really matter?

Just got a lovely update on Windows 10. It pops up on login and informs me of this great new browser called edge. Then it fucking takes over the screen and gives me one fucking option: "Get Started". I cannot escape, I cannot close the app, I cannot right click the app icon on the toolbar and close this POS. My only option is to fucking ctrl-alt-del and kill this piece of garbage. You also cannot uninstall this shit either. I even found a thread where the MS guy was trying to help them uninstall, but the end result is that you cannot on newer Windows 10. So I have this POS thing that keeps updating flash and other shit periodically that is nothing but a security hole. Now I never want to ever run this garbage.

The irony is this. I have read a lot of good things about Edge. I was considering it as an alternative to Chrome for specific use cases. Now I absolutely no longer want to run this fucktard pos software. This one experience has now tarnished any gains MS has in the browser arena. It is just more overbearing malware being pushed by assholes. Tech these days is defined by assholes. Apple is assholes, Google is bigger assholes, and MS is still the classic assholes.

Microsoft LET ME FUCKING JUST WORK! Is this not the pro version or what?

Fuck you edge and your pos os.

Now I feel better!

Edit: That was a rendition of the evil caption Kirk from episode 27.

Been programming one language or another since the 90s. So I have been exposed to a lot of things and worked on a lot of different systems. However I have never heard of Fizz Buzz before. I heard it was something they use to test people's programming skills during an interview. I figured I better look it up in case I get asked this during an interview. Of course I found a nice explanation on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I was shocked. This is being used to test programmers for competency? This is so trivial a non programmer could write the pseudocode to solve this problem. Is the bar really this low?

I remember I didn't want to pay for the C programming class in college. So I bought a book on C++ and read it cover to cover and wrote a bit of code. I then tested out of the C course (didn't know C was much different than C++ then, I started with Pascal). I didn't do that great on the written test. However for the coding test I easily passed that. I formatted the text in nice rows and columns using the modulus operator. The instructor said: "I have never seen anybody make it look this nice." Then I was shocked because that is "just how you do it".

It just seems to me that if fizz buzz is hard, then this may not be the right field for you. Am I egotistical in that opinion? None of this programming stuff has ever been particularly difficult for me.