@onyx said in A new StackExchange site:
Basically poke at the endpoints
Point of order: query them using sound protocols, not physical interaction. Attaching untrustworthy peripherals to your system can result in viruses or total system shutdown.
@onyx said in A new StackExchange site:
Basically poke at the endpoints
Point of order: query them using sound protocols, not physical interaction. Attaching untrustworthy peripherals to your system can result in viruses or total system shutdown.
Continuing the discussion from On starting an unoriginal project:
I've got like four separate apps worth of rants bottled up here
So here's the writeup I did but decided not to post on my costuming blog:
#Emboidery Software Review: Embird
Embroidery programs are ridiculously expensive, and from the screenshots, aren't necessarily easy to use. So before I spent the money, I decided to snag a trial and make one project, thus giving me a good idea if I could get to use this software. After all, the demo has only a time restriction, no feature restrictions, according to their website:
A screenshot from http://www.embird.net/sw/embird/down64.htm
Hang onto that. I'll come back to it.
First of all, I installed Embird, the main program. It littered my desktop with icons:
Okay, I assume it's the one with the big scary elevation shield on it, since I have no idea what the other two icons do. I installed only the main program, as instructed -- so why are there random other icons on my desktop? Sure, whatever. I clicked on the bird and allowed it to elevate.
The first paragraph of the dialogue box is as expected. Yes, yes, demo version, okay... wait, what? Click ignore if you want to load all passwords... what? What? How is that ignoring anything? What the fuck? I clicked 'ok'.
No, I don't want to register now. Let me in the damn program!
Er... what am I doing? Okay, this seems to be some kind of file browser. I browsed through some files. Very handy for figuring out what files hold what patterns, I guess, but hardly worth $168. The interface is intimidating: I count 28 icon-only buttons across the top bar. From left to right, my guess would be....
stitches or something... something involving a needle... cross-stitch? Open file, um... copy? Delete, print, maybe some sort of send to machine feature, cut, paste, um... 1:1 scale? something about a screen? 3D mode of some kind? Um... an eye and a picasso nose? I think the rulers are mm versus inches display... Rotate? Trim eyelashes? left and right eye tattoo? Teardrop tattoo? Letters, cursive letters, artistic letters. Paste again, or maybe save? Filesystem browser maybe? Make letters bigger? Big red key is probably "unlock demo".
And all that before you even get into the menus! Where's my typical File, Options, View...? "Middle panel" would be great if I had any idea what the middle panel was meant to be displaying!
Somehow, I managed to figure out how to open a file for editing. It's been about three hours since I did that and I can't tell you how to do it, but I managed to figure it out, somehow. The editor's main window is no less intimidating:
In this screenshot I've managed to load the CZU's logo into the editor. I don't know how to make it go away, but I learned how to make it appear: Image -> Import Image. Cool, I thought to myself. I'll just let it automatically convert into an embroidery pattern. There's a convert image button, right?
Here's the first snag: I have a Brother PE770, which has a 5" by 7" hoop. The default hoop size it wants me to use for some reason is 100mm by 100mm. Okay, so I just need to adjust it, right?
....Have these clowns never heard of a goddamn combo box?! Oh wait, no, clearly they have:
Okay, so if I can just enter the size, why have four fucking tabs worth of radio buttons!? Ok, fine, I get my damn hoop size picked, and I go back to the image. At this point I'd grabbed a tutorial which mentioned resizing the image so it fits in my hoop. The manual says I'm looking at 180mm by 130mm, so I make the image slightly narrower than 130mm since it's wider than it is tall. Voila. Now the auto convert button.
Ok, that's.... maybe it won't look that bad stitched? Let's find out. I try to save as a .pes so it can be read by my machine.
Only to encounter a frusturating dialogue informing me that some of the stitches were outside the 100mm x 100mm area allowed for stitching in this file format. First of all, the fucking FILE FORMAT dictates the fucking HOOP SIZE?! Secondly, I CHANGED my motherfucking hoop size! Are you seriously telling me that my machine, the second cheapest model I could find that's widely available for home consumers, does not even exist?! And I know it's not brand fucking new, because the damn manual for the USB drive feature includes instructions on how to eject a USB pendrive in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. Bull fucking shit.
Whatever. I'll make it tiny. I shrink the image to just under 100mm wide, and save. Let's get that stitched.
No, this is bullshit.
So I poke around and I look at some forums and it turns out that what I want, what I really really want, is the Studio plugin, which lets me actually create designs. As opposed to the editor, which..... I don't fucking know, really. I managed to paste three letters together to create a monogram in one file so I don't have to tweak the placement every time, but that's hardly worth $160 either, so I'm at a loss.
Whatever. Plugin download time. The studio plugin costs another $150, so off the bat, this is now costing double what it advertised. Now I understand what "plugin" means to them: "essential feature you need to pay extra for", as opposed to "useful but niche item like Iconizer" which fuck if I know what it does but it seems to be not an essential part of the editing process.
Anyway, so I get Studio 2015, which is a "Digitizing plug-in for Embird", which contains two plugins (!!!): " Digitizing Tools and Sfumato Stitch". "To turn into full version, each module needs its own password," the website informs me, which means more $$$ and I don't even fucking know if I like it yet. So I install and I open studio and I spend a few hours working on this thing.
I want an outline, since the logo is a line drawing. I eventually figure out how to trace the shape, creating a vector file which can be exported as an SVG (one file for each shape!!!!!), and then configure the stitch generator to make a "satin stitch" because that looks fancier than a straight border stitch. I then try to toy with some other options. The tutorial helpfully informs me that to close the shape, which is required for a "fill" shape, I have to make the last point somewhere off in space and then drag it on top of the first one, or else it'll select the first point. Isn't that useful.
I tried using the "column" tool as well. See those little column shapes in between the windows on the gondola? I grabbed the column tool, clicked in the upper left corner, then lower left, then lower right, then upper right. Wrong move. It says I only have one side, and I need two for a column. What? Readers, I fought with this tool for maybe 45 minutes. I managed to get it to let me accept the shape if I click "create second edge". One time that even made an edge along where I'd drawn my lines, creating a three-sided boxy shape. More commonly, though, it would shove the extra points way off into the middle of space, making some abstract curved shape. Which is nice and all but not the fucking box I wanted. Eventually I figured out the secret: It needs to go upper left, lower left, upper right, lower right. Sure. What the fuck ever.
I tried using the text tool to put in the letters. I even changed colors for the banner and letters, so I could stitch them in separate colors. I was feeling right proud of myself: all I had to do was put in the lettering and voila, I'd be golden.
...what? I start typing. Nothing happens. WTF am I doing? This tutorial page wasn't helpful: none of those items were on my screen. Frusturated, I decided to back out by pressing cancel.... and the entire bottom half of the zeppelin disappeared. Yup. It had somehow cancelled the last two fill shapes, four border shapes, and sixteen manual-stitch items I'd placed down. WTF!
So I decided, after this happened a few times, not to do the banner at all, just the top bit. Why not, I figured.
Easily four or five hours of work, ladies and gentlemen. Their stitch preview function is also really nice, as it helped me visualize what I was working with:Awesome, right! I can't wait to go plug it into my machine and try it out. Maybe I can learn to work with the frustration after all, if this turns out half as nice as it looks like it'll be.
So why is the save button greyed out?
...And so is the "export to editor" button that should bring me back to the main editor where I can fuck around with hoop sizes and save it as whatever format I want....?
Oh no.
Don't tell me.
THE FUCKING DEMO BLURB LIED TO ME. I CANNOT SAVE IN THE STUDIO IN THE DEMO.
Fuck this. I am done. There has got to be a better solution. Their UI is terrible, their options don't fucking work, fuck this, I'm out.
[14:56] <BenLubar> but it doesn't make sure each page has the full number of posts
[14:56] <BenLubar> imagine if you were reading a book and each page had a random number of lines of text on it
[14:59] <aliceif> ben ... have you ever read a book?
[14:59] <aliceif> EVER?
@Onyx said in Node JS Logos:
there weren't 104 questions!
There are 104 logos, but the game ends as soon as you get one wrong. Just like NodeJS terminates as soon as you look at it weird.
I don’t remember what the phone screen problem was about — some string manipulation algorithm problem — but it was neither interesting, nor memorable. No, I still didn’t understand the question, even after hanging up the phone.
The problem isn't the interview question here.
To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold
Learning about your craft? What a horrible idea! You should wing it instead. Make sure to only do the fun parts, that'll really show your worth.
followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm.
Being asked to write code in an interview? What are interviewers coming to these days? Next they'll be asking you to think about a problem you probably don't have the answer to memorized critically so they can evaluate your problem-solving skills, and then where will you be? Out on your ass!
I did not feel like they were prepared for an interview, as they started asking me for questions based on what I said earlier
How dare they!
If, and when, I need to know how tree-shaking is implemented, I will go look it up
Like every master craftsman, you have no need for true understanding or knowledge, merely Google.
instead of cancelling all my interview appointments (which I really wanted to do)
You got, what, two whole rejections? Poor thing! Ragequitting forever is clearly the right answer here.
I sent him my resume, we had a brief chat (didn’t sound like the friendliest recruiter), never heard from him again. If that’s any indication of their work culture, maybe I really dodged a bullet there.
A brief chat is clearly not enough to truly appreciate this man's genius. It takes at least four interviews and two lunches.
What the fuck?! You’ve got to be shitting me. How many people can actually write BFS on the spot, without preparing for it in advance?
Nobody ever. BFS doesn't even really exist. It's the hardest problem you can possibly give, as no answer exists.
What relevance does it have?
What relevance does thinking about the best way to solve a problem without wasting memory, resources, or time have to modern front-end Javascript? None whatsoever. Not even being sarcastic here. Crying a little inside, but no sarcasm.
Interviews shouldn’t be one-sided battles where a candidate must “prove” themselves in order to get hired.
They should take it on faith that he's the most awesome person in the universe.
The next round had some coding exercises, one of which was to implement a Tic-Tac-Toe game using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I was able to do it with 10 minutes to spare, although it was probably the most hacky solution I have ever coded.
Are you fucking kidding me. I wrote tic-tac-toe as my first formal programming exam ever when I was literally twelve. literally twelve. I can't even snark anymore. What the actual fuck.
rejection, rejection, rejection. It honestly feels as if I am a complete failure and an unhirable candidate. How is this possible
Literally. Twelve.
But one thing I do not understand is — why did they reach out to me in the first place, because nowhere does it say on my resume that I have any experience with video.
Does this man not understand how wide a net recruiters cast? Does he think getting a tech screen makes him special? Desirable?
Shared to my company slack with the caption "Sums up software development"
Exact Instructions Challenge - THIS is why my kids hate me. | Josh Darnit – 07:23
— Josh Darnit
I learned about this today: Laidlaw postulated that any opening line of almost any story can be improved by changing the second line to "And then the murders began." Some examples:
Marley was dead, to begin with. And then the murders began.
"I wonder what Piglet is doing," thought Pooh. And then the murders began.
Mr & Mrs Dursley, of number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you. And then the murders began.
We have some readers here; grab your favorite book or the one closest at hand and give it a shot. From my most recent book release:
Until I was twelve, I'd never been suspended; I was a straight-A student, top marks in the class. And then the murders began.
The most recent Drew Hayes novel:
Flames cascaded down from the vent, moving like poured mercury rather than fire. And then the murders began.
Eh, not as good...
@Vault_Dweller said in The nerdy jokes thread (bonus original title mode!):
Those are my initials excluding my surname, i.e. first + middle name.
My birth certificate initials are BJ.
Not even kidding. I tried to go by it as a kid for a hot minute. I even made a sign for my door: "BJ's Room". My parents about died laughing, so I took it down, but I didn't find out why for like 7 or 8 years.
My coworker has that sign, only he's modified point three to read "Git out"
@ben_lubar I had an interview once where I had occasion to ask the candidate if they were talking about Java or Javascript when they said "Java scripting". Their reply was predictable: "Yes, the Java scripting."
To expand: its hard to sell shit software to developers. But it's easier to sell it to business folks, to end users. They don't know what to look for, so you show up, tell them what they want, and tell them about how your software fills the need you just sold them on. marketing skills.
Swampy's brand of crazy is widely accessible. You show up and he starts pitching you on alien artifacts, you write him off. Jeff's brand doesn't rear its ugly head until you shelled out, migrated, and now have some degree of lock-in.
It seems so fucking simple. Want to remain non-technical? Don't apply for jobs asking for javascript. What's that, they pay less money? THEN FUCKING LEARN SOMETHING NEW. jesus fucking christ.
I have three visio documents open. Which one was which again?
Wait, what, they're identical? I click on the second one, then peek again:
Fucking Visio.
Their strategy has motivated a lot of people to answer a lot of stuff.
And, as we've seen in the thread, a lot of smart people to seek help elsewhere. Clearly what works for the smaller SEs doesn't scale well to the size of SO.
Picture a pyramid of users, where a new user enters at the bottom step. New users on, say, Cooking tend to have one goal in mind: Get their question answered. They come and post. At this point, a lot of users forget they did so and never come back. Others come back a few hours or a day later, and they get a reasonable, well-written response. The majority of users go "Awesome", click the checkmark, and wander off. Sometimes they come back when they have another question, sometimes they don't. This is all expected behavior.
Some users, though, while they're getting their question answered, start poking around at the site, and learning a bunch of useful tangental information. That's the next tier up. A large portion of the userbase reads questions but doesn't otherwise participate in the site because they're just there to learn things. Then another layer up, some users discover that they actually know the answer to something and they post an answer. The more questions they ask and answer, the more they start to get into the gamification aspects, the more they play the game, the more questions get answered. At the top you have a small number of high-rep users being elected as moderators and spending large chunks of time bettering the site. But the ideal is always a small group of highly motivated experts with high rep at the top, and increasingly less active users down to the bottom tier. That's why rep gates exist: the higher up the tier, the more moderation-like activities you can participate in.
In short, Blakey's use case of "I come, I ask, I get value" is not only perfectly legitimate, it's one of the primary use cases the system was designed for. SO only seems to be working at that level for inexperienced users -- despite the platform's primary objective being to support expert users in the first place. There used to be a "general reference" close reason system-wide for things like "what is flour" -- questions that thirty seconds on google would answer. The idea was always to attract experts because inexperienced users can't answer questions in the first place, but SO chases away experts by heaping a mound of shit on them in the form of basic questions and "give me teh codez" requests while pandering to those who are in it for pure gamification instead of the pursuit of knowledge.
$3 billion... over the next 10 years. So only $300 million a year. The US federal government spends about $4.8 billion per year on cancer alone (source). That's an insulting drop in the bathtub of disease research.
What you're really paying for is the support contract, or, "getting to tell Jeff what to do".
asm.js was discovered
Ah yes, the scientific breakthrough of the decade! When a small, intrepid research team pushed their way into a previously untrod mountain in the antarctic, they found a temple inside waiting for them. The images were of creatures that provoked an innate, deep-seeded fear response in their minds ,driving them mostly mad, but the rubbings they took turned out to be ancient Sumerian which, when translated, turned out to be the source code to asm.js.
Facebook reminded me about this old status from 2014:
So while I was buying a cpu, I got one of those Verified By Visa popups. I forgot my password, so after a few tries it told me I'd failed to verify and could not use this card. I then clicked "Continue" and was taken to... a confirmation page. A minute later, I got an email saying I successfully paid for my order. My confidence level in Verified by Visa is through the roof right now, let me tell you >.>
@masonwheeler My brother made me soup once when I was sick and we were kids. He opened the can, poured it into a pot, put it on high, and promptly wandered off to play Zelda. I remembered about it a couple hours later.
We tried to save it by adding more water. That uh... did not go over well.
Then there was the time I was going to make a fortune selling Freez-E-Cheeze: The Frozen Cheese Snack. We took some leftover cheese from my Lunchables, and put it in the freezer. It... became cold. We decided to make it into something more like a popsicle, maybe we needed to melt it first? So we put it in a pot on the stove.
That shit acts weird when you try to melt it. I became convinced it had come to life and ran off to let Mom clean it up. She was not happy.
I want a proper "In Reply To" notification instead of this workaround/hack where it inserts a mention instead. When people reply to me to add on another question, it looks like they're asking me, and I don't know shit about NodeBB.
What kind of WTF systems require the password to not have 9 or more numbers?
Fun fact: I couldn't read the notice about the site going down because it went down.
if I stop hovering over "8 agents", the whole dialog box goes away.
So how the fuck am I supposed to click "More..." to see the other three agents?
http://www.thekitchn.com/this-seder-plate-is-100-vegan-243409
So the traditional Seder plate they mention has the following items:
Only two items on that list aren't vegan.... but it replaces all of them anyway. ?
They replace the shank bone, symbolic of the sacrificed lamb, with.... a beet. No explanation of why or how that's religiously relevant, just, "try a roasted beet instead".
The egg they at least tried: it represents (in their words, I'm not a Judaism expert) "the pre-holiday offering", " the cycle of life", and "new beginnings and hope". They suggest an avocado pit: it's round, and it sprouts so it counts as new beginnings. So at least that's not half-assed.
But they literally suggest replacing parsley with kale, because kale is trendy. Ditto for endives, which are "having their moment".
Criticism is part of life. Either improve your shit or simply get over it.
For sure. I'm a perfectionist; for me, hard to take criticism means "I feel really terrible that my product wasn't good enough, and will obsessively strive to make it better" rather than "Fuck you". If my presentation ran an hour late, I'd be mortified.
My second attempt:
#6D Embroidery
Okay, so I keep hearing about this 6D software. Well, at some point it was 4D, but I guess there's been two versions since then. Anyway, I'm pretty hyped, it looks really cool:
Oh boy, awesome! I click "Purchase center", hoping to get a feel for the cost.
Yay more advertisement info! Just get to the price tag, please.
Yup, that's probably what I want! Buy now.
Er.... okay... what? Um, Current System, none. I want to buy your software.
...okay. Thanks. Guess I'm not allowed? "Buy Now" doesn't work, it's greyed out.
And that was my experience with 6D.
@asdf Why would I do that? Better if we're not seen together. There's no link that way.
Fuck. Apparently Designers are like QA people. Everything is depressing today.
"I test software day in and day out. What? Learn enough Python to script a simple test case? Oh no, that's way too complicated for my little testing brain, I can only use GUI tools to record and playback."
@groo You do, however, have to intentionally use a useless feature in an unsafe manner....
so basically it'll catch everyone ever.
I find that doing something different from my dayjob and using different tools and whatnot helps me learn more things I can use at my dayjob. So yeah, doing little shit OSS projects actually helps. The article doesn't seem to be claiming it's magic here.
And finally, something that was (shut up discotoaster) reasonable:
#Sew What Pro
Next on my list: a cheap little program called Sew What. It retails for $65, around half the price of Embird. I downloaded a 30 day free trial and popped open the installer:
Well that's always a good sign. Definitely puts me in mind of professional, slick software. Once I got it all installed, I popped it open
Man, what is it with embroidery software and a billion cryptic buttons? What I like though are the tips on the right and the comprehensive help file.
The very first paragraph of the introduction told me this wasn't the tool I needed: it didn't list converting images to embroidery files. There's a second tool in the suite that does that: Sew Art, for $75. All told, still less than just the base for Embird.
A first try at using Sew Art:
The best thing here is the Wizard. The help file, under "getting started" suggests that you run Posterize if you're using a messy image, which helps reduce noise, then run the image wizard to work the file into shape before doing the stitches. It also has simple editing tools -- eraser, pencil, paintbrush -- to allow for minor tweaks, which is handy if the wizard accidentally messes up some of the lines because they're too faint.
I decided also to convert the image to svg, since that was part of what Embird did. A second pass, this time with an svg file and using a running stitch:
Too bad the text wasn't legible. Some more tweaking of the SVG, a little fill in some of the solid areas, and erasing that darn banner provided something I could live with. Best of all, Sew What let me put some of the text back in: not the banner underneath, which I figured would be harder than I wanted to spend on this demo, but the "CZU" in the blimp balloon:
And, best of all, I could SAVE! The final test:
The text glitched out on me; it apparently tried to stitch 1500 times in the exact same spot, causing Chaos some trouble digging it out of the machine. Oops. Definitely needs some tweaking -- for one, I'd like to clean up the cabin area some more -- but this I can bring to the CZU admin meeting to discuss potential uses :)
This software is definitely not as nice. There's far fewer features, and the interface is just as crude, but the help files are well written, and the simpler features are clearly marked so I can get going fast and then make tweaks as things come up. At half the cost, I think I might just buy this one, but I'm still going to shop around a little more before I spend any money.
@blek said in A WINS Server is Required:
Off topic, but since OP mentioned Cisco Meraki and I don't know shit about networking, I googled it to see what it was. Found the website... and found this quote on it:
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT?! AAAAHHHHHHH!
So you can find the fucker who keeps stealing your bandwidth and murder him.
@e4tmyl33t said in AWS issues:
The T2 tier gives you a certain % of the CPU cores as a baseline
If we're going to stay scalable, our baseline specs should be able to handle our baseline amount of traffic. Just saying.
@sloosecannon said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
maybe if you had a field full of solar panels or something
@Lorne-Kates said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
I'm being told I just reinvented firewood
These things seem related
@wharrgarbl You can have all your posts deleted right now, past and future. Just say the word.
@ben_lubar said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
Generally, my support question answers are about 1-2× the length of the post I'm replying to.
you can't count a random screenshot as 1000 words, ben
Pet peeve: my laptop has funky functions as the primary use of the keys, with me having to hold down Fn to get the function keys.
And it put airplane mode on the F12.
It's like they know and they hate us.
Our recommendation is made purely for safety reasons. All of the original devices shipped with defective batteries that can (and have) spontaneously burst into flames, burning users, damaging property, and putting anyone nearby at risk of smoke inhalation. Despite a highly publicized multi-billion dollar recall, early indications suggest that replacement phones have the same problem. As of this writing, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have stopped selling the phone, and Samsung has temporarily halted production. That's unprecedented in the modern smartphone era, and it should give you an idea of how real and serious the problem is.