tragomaskhalos

8 ms·

31.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
However, English will usually come out at or near the top in terms of "syllable efficiency" due to its high incidence of common monosyllabic words, and the feature that inflectional suffixes will often not add a syllable (e.g. dog
32.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Yes it seems certain that classical Latin - and Greek - have come down to us in a written form that was fairly artificial; in Bodmer's wonderful phrasing, we can assume that "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" (ie the complex j
33.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
In the early 70's we'd drive down to Cornwall on holiday with my cousins - 3 adults and 3 kids squashed into a bog standard saloon car. It seems completely inconceivable now.
34.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
A good reminder that there were a lot of smartarses on usenet.
35.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Your allocation method - malloc + cast - may work for simple classes but overall it's a serious no-no; think you should either be using new/delete, or, if sticking with malloc /free, use placement new and an explicit destruct
36.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
As a maths graduate from nearly 40 years ago I've forgotten far more than I remember, but really enjoy little 10-15 minute snippets of calculus and analysis on YouTube that tickle the rusty old neurons. Current favourite is Michael &qu
37.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
BAT files writing other BAT files was often the only way to get scripting workflows done on primordial Windows versions, but chaos typically ensued if you attempted to rewrite the file you were presently running, as it appears that cmd didn
38.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
There was a period of time when Microsoft were very enamoured of the document-view model of desktop applications; you could choose to build MDI (multiple document interface) or SDI (single ...) applications, complete with menu management, s
39.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
If you read notalwaysright.com, there are a lot of stories along the following lines: - Rude and idiotic customer: <abuse abuse rant rant nonsensical demand nonsensical demand> - Retail worker: I do apologize, but ... This kind of exc
40.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Our nearest Costco (Wembley in London) has an ophthalmology section that does eye tests as well as (competitively priced of course) eye glasses. That's some confident branching out from the traditional retail domain.
41.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
French cuisine is universally lauded but is almost entirely based on cooking everything in lots of butter. Butter makes things very tasty. For everyday use, certainly cut back, but if you're eating out, spoil yourself. That said, anecd
42.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
AFAIK this chain has no footprint in the UK, so for quite a while wasn't sure if it wasn't a fictional restaurant invented by the Big Bang theory writers!
43.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
I assume the author's alternative to null is to punt nullable values into their own table, where the presence of the row tells you that the value is in fact there. Thing is, if your table has three such columns then you're going t
44.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
True, but at least those lines (you'd hope) will represent some json going over http, whereas with these legacy systems the lines could be more or less anything!
45.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines b
46.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
I worked on a C++ codebase where there was a method that had two overloads - one with 36 char* arguments, and one with 37. Obviously one hardly knows where to begin pointing out the problems. I'd like to report that it was some sort of
47.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
My favourite Ted Chiangs are those where he takes a piece of assumed knowledge or mythology from an earlier era and builds a compelling world where it is scientific reality - homunculus theory, the golem, the sky as a physical firmament, cr
48.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
I started in software dev in 1988; the only languages I knew were BASIC and Z80 assembly so, since everyone knew BASIC was kind of lame I naturally assumed I'd be a machine code programmer, albeit on slightly more exotic processors. D
49.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Ah yes apartment threading and all that. Read so much about that stuff, but will go to my grave having never understood it!
50.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Well yes that's true, however that's in the spirit of a 3rd party providing a specific service to your program, whereas the object zealots intended objects in the sense of entities with identity being these off-the-peg consuma
51.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
VB was denounced as infantile nonsense fit only for the GUI by us C++ jocks, until we'd done COM in both C++ and then in VB - then we realised what a huge favour VB was doing in insulating you from so much of the complexity. Sure the
52.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
The old adage: "the first rule of distributed objects: don't distribute your objects". DCOM and EJB also came unstuck by failing to observe this rule. It's impossible for young'uns to appreciate just how obsessed th
53.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Last time I bought a kettle my wife did her nut because I went for the 20 quid option rather than spending £80 on some prop from a lifestyle magazine, however I maintain that my reasoning was sound - all modern kit is indeed built with a de
54.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
As her name is Mithu, I suspect that she struggles to correctly pronounce the aspiration on the 't' - this is a feature of Indian languages that is notoriously tricky for anglophone (and indeed most european) speakers.
55.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
While it's easy to be wise after the event, this thing does seem to be rather too Heath Robinson to be safe considering the extraordinarily challenging nature of the environment it operates in.
56.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Worked on a codebase which was separate processes, each of which has a shedload of global variables. It was a nightmare working out what was going on, not helped by the fact that there was no naming convention for the globals, plus they wer
57.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
My wife is a school administrator and every year I run a little self-written pipeline for her to munge the local authority's XML admissions data into an Xlsx that the staff can use for planning home visits, class allocation etc. Excel
58.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
well in one case I had to go right back to "how do you declare an integer variable?", which the candidate still didn't know how to do, before eventually admitting that their C++ experience was actually testing a system writt
59.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
C++ on a CV is a gift for the interviewer because it's trivial to discover if the person is bullshitting when they say that they know it. I'm not talking about the esoteric corners here, I mean the absolute basics - it's amaz
60.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Although she died in different circumstances, this sad story immediately put me in mind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Vincent , about whom a film was made - "Dreams of a Life", referenced in the Wikip

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