Cool and windy in Houston? Maybe. It was at the BOL. Blowing 7mph all day long got to be a bit tedious. It was clear and in the 60sF, but the wind… oy.
I did get some more wiring done, and discovered some flaws in my plan. We’ll have to figure out what to do to work around, or maybe just do something different. And I put a bunch more stuff away, while digging through stuff looking for things I knew I had. I’ve got a few too many Automatic Transfer Switches, for example. On the other hand, shopping in my closet/shed is a thing.
Today I’m home, doing catchup on things here. Domestic bliss awaits. Like rust, dust never sleeps. And I’ve got all my normal things to do. Getting some sleep and some meds for my aches and pains will be good. My hands are torn up. I could tell I was getting too tired to work when I started getting clumsy. Time to switch to low consequence work at that point. No electrical…
If I didn’t get my whole goal list done, I did get some of it done and that is progress.
Now to get my momentum back here at home.
Stack, because if the cartels decide to bring the war to us here at home, you might want to stay in for a while.
nick
Wednesday. Good morning!
Sunny and spring-like outside. The neighbours are mowing their lawn. I will give ours a few more days to dry out after the torrential rain we had last week.
Back from the fang doctor, who replaced a crown – the one that broke in November, to SteveF’s Schadenfreude.
The lady was generous with the anaesthesia, so I am going to sleep it off for a couple of hours until I can consume breakfast without incident.
Today is local market day, and my pal the rotisserie chicken man was there. He also roasts ribs, and I was still in time to get a rack for my lunch. I got a crusty baguette too, so that will be a good test for the new tooth.
Cackle among yourselves…
Jumps and screams like an ape, throws poop like an ape… Draw your own conclusion.
Here’s a tidbit to drop into conversations: Chimps and bonobos are about 98% genetically similar to humans, specifically to subsaharan Africans. Caucasians average about 3% Neanderthal DNA and 97% subsaharan African. That means that blacks are closer to chimps than they are to Whites.
(Don’t bother me with the logical, scientific, or mathematical errors in the above. I already know. But it’s fun to drop it on people and watch them flounder and splutter.)
I haven’t noticed any problems in the month or so that I’ve had this setup. The machine has gotten some updates but I didn’t notice if any of them were for the video drivers.
Ubuntu 24.04 installed fine on the same hardware but about once a month the automatic updates broke video and I had to play with picking which version of the nvidia driver to use. And it wasn’t the same one each time, which was the really annoying part. Plus, every other kernel update (literally every other one) broke networking, so the machine had no wifi. It got annoying.
What happens, at least to me, is that at some random point XFCE only recognizes one screen. My go-to solution is to select the Nouveau drivers, reboot, then re-select the Nvidia driver. That’s been happening maybe 2-3 times per year.
The last time I did that, something went wrong with the compositing, so that terminal windows, dropdown menus, etc. would sometimes be invisible. I didn’t dig into that, just followed the ChatGPT recommendation to turn off XFCE compositing. That’s no loss – it just means I can’t have half-transparent windows, or some other useless goodies. Who knows, maybe that will accidentally fix the other problem…
That sounds unpleasant. Never had that sort of problem, but I’m on 22.04, so YMMV.
Kabuki. The Dems are biding their time until the Midterms return control of the House and the power of Impeachment.
The early voting turnout is strong here in Williamson County, James Talarico’s home base. If he wins the nomination, I expect the shadow US Senate office to open in Round Rock on Wednesday morning.
Go look at where MJ “Doors” Hegar “worked” before she first tried for a Congressional seat in 2018 and Senate in 2020.
Uh-huh. It is a big club.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio.
Glad to see I am not the only one who sometimes get his quotes from the classics wrong. Also glad I noticed it before SteveF got his pedant out. Hi Steve!
The anaesthesia is wearing off, and the tooth is tender, so I took an Ibuprofen. I hope it will calm things enough that I can have some breakfast soon, since it is almost 2 pm.
@denis, I think I’m quoting a film or tv version, maybe even Blackadder, as I have a clear picture of the scene in my head… I know I missed the significance of finding the skull when we studied the play in class.
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Apparently XFCE has a few known and long-standing issues with Nvidia drivers.
– 20 years ago when I was still working with computers, and specifically multi-monitor setups, the nvidia drivers were always broken. It was especially bad on the *nix boxen. It was as if their devs only had single monitors, and none had 3d displays. They’d break overlap, or 3d, or how the taskbar worked, or something else, and it was very frustrating to keep systems working. Glad to see that nothing has really changed.
Oops, did I say glad? I meant sad.
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Fitful sleep last night. Probably too much caffeine late in the day. Ever notice ‘caffeine’ breaks the i before e rule? Gets me every time.
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61F and 97%RH this morning, with a lot of sunrise. White sky so maybe it will clear soon.
I’m trying a cup of tea, then napping, with breakfast a bit later, to see what that does to my blood sugar levels today.
Time to poke at the kids.
n
Interesting. Someone asked on Quora where the misquote comes from, and 30 people respond that it’s wrong, and quote the original play, WITHOUT answering the question. One guy claims it’s the three stooges getting it wrong, one guy suggests 18th century “paraphrase culture”.
A perfect example of when people on the interwebs provide wrong, non-answers, just to share their smug or don’t have the critical skills to read accurately, and answer correctly.
I much prefer here for my crowdsourcing… a lot less smug, a lot more actual info.
n
Maybe a “Treehouse of Horror” episode of “The Simpsons”.
Or old school “Futurama”.
“Gilligan’s Island”?
Caffeine doesn’t strictly break the
“I before E except after C”
rule, as it is after C.
I suspect caffeine is probably an anglicised version of the German word Coffein / Koffein, whence the funky spelling. Remember that at the time the substance was isolated, German was the language of international science, and the discoverer was a German, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge.
If the AI requires the source code corresponding to what’s currently running in production, good luck with that. In my experience, source code control back in the day was at best hit or miss; worst case scenario, the source may no longer exist.
If the source has vanished, can the AI reverse engineer the executable? The results would be . . . interesting, especially if attempted on an industrial scale.
I transferred T-Bird to the new machine yesterday. Just the usual hangups. Like, “show hidden files”. And my USB stick seems to be shirt(-r) with “you need to format this” to Mint not even seeing it and the back to the Win11 box, “you need to format this”. Annoying. So I used an external hard drive, lots faster anyway.
Things are moved around a bit from T-Bird 2 but not too bad. What I haven’t found is the setting so pressing Delete deletes the mail I just read and opens the next message. Right now it deletes and I have to grab the mouse to click on the next message to open it.
News groups copied over. Sort of. The saved content is there but none of the RSS addresses. That’s not hard to fix, just tedious.
I’ll play more later. And moved FF over. But first to the Tractor Supply for a bag of dog chow and then to go vote and HEB on the way home.
I looked at the sample ballots. The Dem ballot looks to have a lot of folks with Starwars Names. But I’m voting on the other ballot.
I decided at an early age that I would be a Chemical Engineer. So when entering high school, my counselor told me I needed to study German, since all the papers I’d need to get my degree and to work were written in German.
We were both wrong. I switched to EE when I matriculated to UIUC, and to Computer Science a year later. And English became the language of science.
Disassemblers have existed for a long time, translating machine code to assembler source.
I imagine that AI could back-translate the assembler into any language you want.
How useful would it be, with no comments, no variable names, and hallucinations tossed in for free?
To further expound on the disassembler stuff, I relate it to my first professional programming job. I worked for a CPA firm that owned a computer service bureau, back in the day when our office had 2 PDP-11 computers and a bank of modems. Each client had a modem, a dumb terminal, and a printer. The printer was attached to the terminal. We had over 100 clients, mostly big mining and real estate development companies, running a complete set of financial software.
The language was BASIC-PLUS, the operating system was RSTS/E, and the source code was also the sort-of executable. There was a very minor compression phase when you ran an executable.
Memory was limited; you only had 16k for your source/executable, 16k for your data, and 32 k for the interpreter. All your variable names and function names were stored in your executable, so you were charged for that storage.
Really complicated programs needed economy, so programmers often shortened function names and variable names to the point of ridiculousness. Also, some programmers used GOTO statements (to a line number) instead of function calls to reduce the number of functions.
My job was maintenance of this horrid code. When we got an upgraded semi-compiled BASIC-PLUS interpreter, all of the variable names and function names were not kept in the executable, so I was free to rename the binary search function from BS() to BinarySearch() with no penalty in space or time. Same for A$, B$, X1!, etc.
I wrote a suite of tools to help me identify and update source files, which let me refactor code, which helped identify where a lot of our problems came from, and made testing easier.
The problem an AI would face in a disassembler situation is it wouldn’t even have the BS() name, or even A$, B$.
Ah, BillyG:
Bill Gates admits he had affairs with two Russian women but insists they were not ‘Epstein victims’ and he ‘did nothing illicit’ in apology to his employees
More “reading” weeks? This seems like damage control for more forth coming dirt. “I did nothing illicit, except screw two Russian whores. Please love me and call me William Feynman from now on”. I wonder what Melissa thinks as she swims through her vault of gold coins.