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I used Sikuli back in 2011-12 for some random automaton tasks, and often wish I would remember to use it more. - Advisor wanted a one button way to run a convo
by krilnon 12y ago
I used Sikuli back in 2011-12 for some random automaton tasks, and often wish I would remember to use it more.
- Advisor wanted a one button way to run a convoluted research prototype I had made, and I didn't want to have to dig into Cocoa to figure out how to programmatically click/select options in a few desktop apps.
- Worked at a company and there was silly employee training slideshow+quiz, so I had Sikuli wait for the next arrow to show up once the audio was finished and click it.
- Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago> - Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie Please elaborate.
- krilnon 12y agoSure thing. I was an intern at Adobe working on a new programming language. The office has a cafeteria, and I would often buy lunch there and get a brownie to save for later. I like brownies better when they're warm, so I came up with a few ways to warm the pre-packaged treats while still sitting in my office. I first tried sitting the brownie atop my laptop charger: http://images.reclipse.net/warmed_brownie.jpg http://images.reclipse.net/warmed_brownie.jpg This worked fairly well, but the charger was less hot when my laptop was at 100% charge, so I sought alternate methods for heating up the brownie. For some reason, I had stumbled across some recent WebGL demos at the time, and noticed that the fan on my laptop would spin up on that particular demo. (http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/ http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/) This provided a more consistent heat than the charger, since usually my laptops would be completely charged by the end of lunchtime. I had my own laptop and a company-provided laptop, so it wasn't hard to set one of them aside as a brownie warmer.
- habosa 12y agoWow. I thought the "to warm a brownie" thing was a joke about WebGL performance. That's a hilarious story.
- krilnon 12y agoNah, it's real. Adobe had a WebGL competitor, Stage3D, at the time, but I didn't work on that at all. As an intern, I would run a few useful benchmarks per day, but it was more reliable to run things I knew would heat up a laptop instantly, so I used WebGL demos. Brownie-wise, I would wait a while because lunch would fill me up. But at 3 or 4 pm, I'd be hungry again and something the size of a brownie would really hit the spot.
- _pmf_ 12y agoLow hanging fruits.
- yzzxy 12y ago> - Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water. I'm not sure why this is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Maybe it's the programmer equivalent of dog-earing book pages.
- krilnon 12y agoIt was just for fun. Part of my job at the time was evaluating benchmarks, so things like the water simulation were on my mind. I don't remember if there were microwaves on each floor that I might have used instead. I don't dog-ear book pages, if that makes you feel any better.
- yzzxy 12y agoReminds me of the Wired bitcoin miner[0]. They bought an early ASIC miner and used it to heat coffee on a livestream. [0] http://www.wired.com/2013/05/butterfly_live/ http://www.wired.com/2013/05/butterfly_live/ (also I dog ear pages so we're even)
- Ygg2 12y agoI'm gonna post this XKCD, because it's eerily appropriate (once WebGL manages to fix any performance bugs): http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/