WTF Bites
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Why does it take over 10% CPU time (continuously) to display a folder with 6 files, in a minimized window?
Just keeping the CPU warm and ready in case it needs to suddenly spring into action.
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By the way, I was tasked with prototyping some communication. I've got a bunch of random documents and an old app that also implements it.
So I am trying to find whether some of the documents describes the protocol. Almost certainly not and I'll have to reverse-engineer the app, which is certainly a
, but not the one I want to bitch about.The
is that some of the documents are basically text documents in Excel. They are laid out in columns A through AI, narrowed to fit on a normal paper in portrait, and rows 1 through 76. The merged columns A1..P4 contain the document title, then there are some metadata right of that, some kind of sideways header in A7..C76, and then the content is sprinkled from D7 onwards to whatever layout was intended. The subsection heading in F9 (with manually assigned subsection number) set to overflow, text items in column G starting from row 11 (so they are indented under the subsection header). And next page is next sheet.Oh, and it's mostly English with some Engrish and some Japanese thrown in for style.
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mostly English with some Engrish and some Japanese
Why is that bad, Burubu-san?
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Me vs NetBeans.
NB: I can't find Java.lang!
Me: Ok, let's check the Java Platforms.
NB: /usr does not contain Java.
Me: No, that's because Java is in /usr/lib/jvm so can I change that?
NB: No, to change the path you need to remove the old platform, then add a new platform with the same name and the new path.
Me: Can I remove the old one?
NB: No.
Me: So then I create a new one with the same name.
NB: Ok!
Me And remove the old one.
NB: No, can't remove the old one.
Me: Can I change the default?
NB: No.
Me: Ok, so I remove the new one and create a new platform with a different name.
NB: Ok!
Me: Can you use the new one if I tell you to use that one instead?
NB: Still can't find Java.lang.
Me: Are you using the new platform?
NB: Yes! (No, I'm really just pretending.)
Me: So how do I change the default platform or the path?
NB: I wont tell!
Me: asks Google
: You need to open the netbeans.conf file and change the path there.
Me: Really...
NB: Oh, hey, I found Java.lang now!
Me: Why is your UI so useless and/or lying?
NB: Because fuck you that's why!I gave up on netbeans when it flat out refused to load and understand a project that every other Java IDE could understand.
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It's mainly a list of issues they fixed in early access that week. Among them...
Players can create character or pet names with non-Latin glyphs, which are then prevented from entering the world.
Okay, that's a bit embarrassing, but somewhat understandable in pre-alpha stage. I'm glad that they've noticed it and will fix it in ne...
These names should be prevented from being entered in the first place.
DIE IN A FIRE.
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@Gąska I can only assume they never intend to sell any games in, say, Japan or China.
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@HardwareGeek or Europe.
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@Gąska Well, the parts of it that use Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, anyway. Unless by "non-Latin" they are also including "Latin with funny squiggles". Which they probably are, because people who write software (at least software to be distributed publicly; stuff I write for myself doesn't (usually) need it) without full Unicode support are short-sighted and stupid.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
full Unicode support
Might be difficult for vidya specifically. For custom fonts made especially for that one game it's right out. And while one might licence some fonts that happen to complement the art style, not many of them will have this "full Unicode support", whatever that really means these days.
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@Applied-Mediocrity as the saying goes, "artstyle is the enemy of good".
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@Gąska It kind of is, yes. Readability often suffers, too. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf sans-serif look kind of weird in a high-fantasy setting, for example.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
full Unicode support
Might be difficult for vidya specifically. For custom fonts made especially for that one game it's right out. And while one might licence some fonts that happen to complement the art style,
Fair enough. I didn't think about fonts, just string manipulation; that, at least, should support Unicode.
not many of them will have this "full Unicode support", whatever that really means these days.
ASCII plus 17 billion emoji.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
full Unicode support
Might be difficult for vidya specifically. For custom fonts made especially for that one game it's right out. And while one might licence some fonts that happen to complement the art style,
Fair enough.
Not quite because finding a nice Unicode font in 2020 takes just marginally more effort than finding a nice ASCII-only font. But I can agree that there is at least some actual reason behind this decision other than broken code.
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finding a nice Unicode font in 2020 takes just marginally more effort than finding a nice ASCII-only font
I think @Applied-Mediocrity made a reasonable point. If you're just finding a "nice" font, you're right, finding a font with glyphs for at least the full set of Latin diacritics should be easy. Finding one with Greek, Cyrillic and/or at least basic CJK is probably not too hard. But if you're designing a fully custom font to match a game's art design, that's probably somewhere between 10x and 100x (depending largely on the completeness of CJK support) more characters for the font designer to design.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska It kind of is, yes. Readability often suffers, too. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf sans-serif look kind of weird in a high-fantasy setting, for example.
That's the thinking that gave us Comic Sans.
The Story Behind Comic Sans - Fonts.com | Fonts.com
The Story Behind Comic Sans - Fonts.com | Fonts.com The Story Behind Comic Sans Previous Article Next Article by Ilene Strizver There may not be a designer o...
Edit: spot the typo in the answer to the third question. Way to go, fonts.com!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska It kind of is, yes. Readability often suffers, too. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf sans-serif look kind of weird in a high-fantasy setting, for example.
That didn't stop Square-Enix when they made horrible mobile ports of their SNES RPGs
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska It kind of is, yes. Readability often suffers, too. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf sans-serif look kind of weird in a high-fantasy setting, for example.
That didn't stop Square-Enix when they made horrible mobile ports of their SNES RPGs
As far as I'm concerned, JRPGs are weird enough already without fonts coming into it
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska I can only assume they never intend to sell any games in, say, Japan or China.
There is a factor of convenience for other players. I know world of warcraft has restrictions on characters in names which are region dependent. EU realms do not allow Chinese or Cyrillic characters. Russian realms do allow Cyrillic, and they can cross-realm-zone with other EU realms. It's impossible for a player from an EU realm to refer to those players as anything more specific than "The Russian rogue" because the names are untypeable. Of course, players are often referred to by their class only anyway.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska I can only assume they never intend to sell any games in, say, Japan or China.
There is a factor of convenience for other players. I know world of warcraft has restrictions on characters in names which are region dependent. EU realms do not allow Chinese or Cyrillic characters. Russian realms do allow Cyrillic, and they can cross-realm-zone with other EU realms. It's impossible for a player from an EU realm to refer to those players as anything more specific than "The Russian rogue" because the names are untypeable. Of course, players are often referred to by their class only anyway.
That... sounds incredibly horrible. Why.. on earth.. would you do it that way??
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@sloosecannon said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Gąska I can only assume they never intend to sell any games in, say, Japan or China.
There is a factor of convenience for other players. I know world of warcraft has restrictions on characters in names which are region dependent. EU realms do not allow Chinese or Cyrillic characters. Russian realms do allow Cyrillic, and they can cross-realm-zone with other EU realms. It's impossible for a player from an EU realm to refer to those players as anything more specific than "The Russian rogue" because the names are untypeable. Of course, players are often referred to by their class only anyway.
That... sounds incredibly horrible. Why.. on earth.. would you do it that way??
Personally I think they should never have enabled cross-language zone merging in Europe. The language barrier is one of the things which killed general chat. The rest of it is older architecture, and IMO understandable.
For clarity, I don't think the client stops you from typing Cyrillic if you're on an English client on an English realm. But most people won't bother (or even don't know how to), just like how most people here don't bother spelling Gąska correctly.
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For clarity, I don't think the client stops you from typing Cyrillic if you're on an English client on an English realm.
Ah. See, that makes a little more sense.
The way I read that, I thought it displayed properly but was literally untypable. Which... would be a special flavor of stupid...
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@sloosecannon said in WTF Bites:
The way I read that, I thought it displayed properly but was literally untypable.
Most Western European keyboards (or rather keyboard drivers) are not configured for typing Cyrillic characters.
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Why the fuck do so many motherboards still come with PS/2 ports? It's been TWENTY YEARS since they were deprecated for USB.
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@anonymous234 Well...
- It's a dedicated bus so it can be used with less latency - there's always only 1 device being communicated with. I believe it was a thing in gamer keyboards until they actually wrote their own drivers to replace some parts of the USB driver stacks in most operating systems.
- Since it sends only character data (or relative position data in case of a PS/2 mouse) it cannot be compromised as easily (compare this to U3 USB sticks - those come with fun autorun stuff). That's useful for secure workstations because they can completely disable USB while still having a functioning mouse and keyboard input.
- If somehow the USB host controller fails (driver issue, device pulls too much power and somehow fries the controller) then you've still got the keyboard input.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Why the fuck do so many motherboards still come with PS/2 ports? It's been TWENTY YEARS since they were deprecated for USB.
Well, thank $deity they do. My previous desktop lost all USB capability but thankfully had a PS/2 port on the back. So it was able to limp along for a few weeks while I got a new desktop. (Mostly I RPD'd in but sometimes direct access was desired)
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In addition to what @Jbert said:
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there used to be problems with USB keyboards when too many key were pressed at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)#n-key_rollover), so gamers preferred PS/2 keyboards
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the best mechanical keyboard ever made uses PS/2:
(yeah, I'm using one right now. What do you mean, "you're biased"?)
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Why the fuck do so many motherboards still come with PS/2 ports? It's been TWENTY YEARS since they were deprecated for USB.
Gamers and their performance myths. "UsB aDdS sO mUcH lAtEnCy!1!1!"
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
- there used to be problems with USB keyboards when too many key were pressed at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)#n-key_rollover), so gamers preferred PS/2 keyboards
I remember PS/2 keyboards having MUCH worse rollover than USB. Press any three non-modifier keys and all you get is motherboard beep. It didn't even try.
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It depends on the keyboard. Cheap ones have limited rollover, even on PS/2.
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@Zerosquare I thought you’re French. Why the German keyboard?
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I am, and my keyboard is an AZERTY model. I was just
to find the correct picture.
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WTF of my day:
Corona virus From Spaaaaaaaaace!
Seriously.
Thank God it's only a preprint.
That pandemic has been analyzed in great detail by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1979), and the astute and engaged reader of all that evidence is left with only one conclusion—the Spanish Flu disease came from Space on a massive scale, and killed tens of millions before the advent of air travel.
They kind of forget that ships are a thing.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
- there used to be problems with USB keyboards when too many key were pressed at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)#n-key_rollover), so gamers preferred PS/2 keyboards
I remember PS/2 keyboards having MUCH worse rollover than USB. Press any three non-modifier keys and all you get is motherboard beep. It didn't even try.
The interesting bit is that the PS/2 keyboard protocol can actually support far more simultaneous keys than naïve USB HID implementations.
PS/2 uses a simple event-based model where a packet is sent each time a key is pressed or released. The host computer is supposed to keep track of pressed keys.
USB HID on the other hand is a rather complex beast where the device will first send a "report descriptor" (my words, not the spec) which explains what format of packets are sent between the device and the host. Since the spec was waaay too general for most devices, every keyboard on the planet simply implemented the "legacy" keyboard report descriptor which was agreed upon with BIOS vendors (they needed a fixed format because they wouldn't fit an entire USB HID implementation in the boot ROM). This packet format has only room for 6 keys + all modifiers. It's only in the last decade or so that keyboard vendors have started pushing the boundaries and started to use more of the USB HID spec.
Of course, the biggest limiting factor is the keyboard itself. I've got a 30-year old keyboard from an original IBM PC which you can press your face on and all the pressed keys will register. Meanwhile I've got several keyboards which will indeed refuse to detect several combinations of 3 or more keys, but that's mostly because it's cheaper.
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What's up with Imgur? When I paste a link to an image I don't get the picture, I get this:
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
the best mechanical keyboard ever made uses PS/2:
- no media keys or volume wheel
- no Windows key
- no RGB, or indeed any backlit keys at all
Why would you even use a keyboard without those essential features?
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- no media keys or volume wheel
I never used dedicated media keys much ; I use shortcuts instead.
I agree about the volume wheel, I considered modding the keyboard to add one (but).- no Windows key
Solved by remapping the right Ctrl key, which I never use otherwise.
- no RGB, or indeed any backlit keys at all
RGB is a cool gimmick, but only a gimmick. And a true keyboard warrior doesn't need to see the keys anyways
Why would you even use a keyboard without those essential features?
The tactile feedback is really great. Even better than the modern high-end ones.
Plus, it weighs a ton, so it's really stable and can be used to knock out annoying colleagues.
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What's up with Imgur? When I paste a link to an image I don't get the picture, I get this:
I guess they don't want you hotlnking images. MAGICAL
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Solved by remapping the right Ctrl key, which I never use otherwise.
A mouse typer, eh?
Actually, with my last KVM I had to train myself out of using that or it would foul up the displays. It would split between the two connected machines which caused all sorts of confusion to both Windows and Linux and getting stuff back to normal was a PITA.
Now I have a KVM that uses a wired remote (which I have sitting just above my mouse pad so it's convenient) instead of hot keys and I'm back to using right CTRL + arrow keys to one handedly (
) navigate text.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
A mouse typer, eh?
Not really. In which circumstances do you use the right Ctrl key? (That's an honest question.)
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
A mouse typer, eh?
Not really. In which circumstances do you use the right Ctrl key? (That's an honest question.)
It's right next to the arrow keys. I use it as described to navigate around text, where, say, CTRL+Right skips past the next word, etc.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
They kind of forget that ships are a thing.
Or trains.
Or massive troop movements.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
They kind of forget that ships are a thing.
Or trains.
Or massive troop movements.
Yeah, but those were on ships and / or trains. But yeah, that was pretty certainly a big factor in spreading the disease back then.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
It's right next to the arrow keys. I use it as described to navigate around text, where, say, CTRL+Right skips past the next word, etc.
Hmmm, true. It's a feature I don't use often, so I didn't think of it.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
It's right next to the arrow keys. I use it as described to navigate around text, where, say, CTRL+Right skips past the next word, etc.
The other Ctrl is all the way over there from the arrow keys, but that's the one I use when Ctrl+arrowing. Do I want to know where your other hand is?
(apologies if I'm assuming you have two usable hands)
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@Zecc my other hand is on the home row.
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@boomzilla I think more often that not I use the tip of my pinky to press left-Ctrl without moving the remaining fingertips from the home row.
On the other hand I don't think I could use the right pinky to press the right arrow. I just tried holding the right Ctrl with my right index finger while tapping the right arrow with my pinky and while it was more okay than expected it was somewhat awkward (probably because I forced myself to do it tbh). Tapping the left arrow was even more awkward. Trying to add the right Shift to the mix was impossible.
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
In which circumstances do you use the right Ctrl key? (That's an honest question.)
I use it a lot for Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End combinations, Ctrl-Backspace and Ctrl-Del less so. And of course any reachable key combination if I'm holding something with my left hand. It happens frequently.
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State of the Game - Week 1 | Torchlight 3
