Sounds like RPN. Don't all programmers learn that at some point? :D

I use Dreamhost [^] I just run ICMP mail though they support SMTP, and a small static website and a Wordpress site. They are pretty cheap and I've had no issues with them over the years.

Kent Sharkey wrote:

0 jobs available for snarky blurb writer?

Better than "1 job available for snarky blurb writer" "Hey! That's my job they are listing!"

It might also be that the scanner software isn't allowing enough adjustment. I'd recommend VueScan (www.hamrick.com). It allows numerous adjustments for scanning, or a simple mode if preferred. It also supports older scanners that the vendor (Canon in my case) no longer support on Windows 10 with their official software. It is not free, but there is a free trial. I've used it to scan a number of slides I inherited from my father, though none of them were poorly exposed so I didn't use any of the available tweaks. It's been a while, but if I recall it also could handle scanning and cropping multiple slides in one pass.

Agree, came here to say this. This site is a great resource. Also when ordering consider Microcenter. My last build I found their in-store prices were competitive with mail order, with the advantage of being able to return the same day if anything didn't work. If you don't have one near you, they also do mail order.

Thanks for the recommendations. I read "Zen..." many years ago, but I think I was far to young (and naive) to understand what it was really about. I need to find my copy and read it again. I have a stack of philosophy books to read, but I don't think Marcus Aurelius is among them. I will check him out too, thanks!

I use a Microsoft Surface Pro for my bring everywhere with me computer. It is so light I hardly know I'm carrying it. And the display is wonderful! They have a pretty wide range of models so you should be able to find the balance between speed, storage and and cost you like. If you do get one with low storage to save money, you can expand the storage with a micro-SD card. It will of course fulfill your tablet use, simply tear off the keyboard, or fold it behind (you do have pay extra for the keyboard and pen though).

That is awesome. Yes, I've heard of him, but unfortunately not as familiar as it looks like I should be with his writing. You sound like a programmer-philosopher! I love it. I have a friend who's a professor of philosophy and talking to him makes me wish I perhaps taken a riskier path in college...

Wow. A world without art. Boy would that suck. I'm glad that rule isn't enforced!

Wow, never saw that quote before. Thanks for sharing it!

In my past I did a lot of geometric programming. Something we had to be be very careful of was degenerate intersections and numerical tolerance. That is the first thing I thought of when you mentioned an odd number of intersections. If you are at or very close to the endpoint of a line segment, it might miss, or hit, when it really shouldn't. Sometimes you have to catch them and handle them specially (*cough* hack *cough*). Like artificially extend the vector slightly to see if it intersects within the segment, or keep intersections that are questionable conditional until you can tell the count is right. For instance, imagine two line segments whose common endpoint is on or very close to the segment you are intersecting with. Really, there should be only one intersection there. But if you count each segment endpoint as colliding, then you get two intersections where you should have only one. Or vice versa, you might discard both because you think they are off the line, and have zero where you should have one. Sorry, this is off the top of my head remembering stuff we had to deal with a long time ago.

I agree it can be easily abused. It is especially true if you are maintaining someone else's code. Yes, it's great for templated iterators and such, but it can also throw more work onto someone else down the road, which I consider rude or lazy. Say I need to add some functionality. I see

auto foo = SomeFunctionReturningObjOrRef(bar);
foo.SomeMethod(blah);

Great. That's really easy for the original dev, and really easy for the compiler. Wonderful. Now I need to add some code. What the heck is a "foo"? What members does it have? What methods are available? Is it a base class, or a derived class that has the functions I need? The dev who wrote the code knew, but didn't bother to declare it. The compiler knows, and I suppose I can just try

foo.SomeMethodIHopeTheObjectHas();

And see if I get a compilation error. And hope that it really is the right type and not a base class or derived class of the one I expect... But practically speaking I have to do the work the original dev didn't do and look up

SomeFunctionReturningObjOrRef()

and see what it does, and what it returns so I can be sure I'm getting the right type or that it supports the methods I need, and I don't actually want to be using "bar" or something else or upcast or downcast etc.

I agree. At my last job where many people so embraced the "Modern" paradigm that they would rewrite stuff to use the latest language features, things went from code reviews requiring clear, readable code to the standard being "just cut and paste this templated blob and don't worry about how it works". Someone literally spent a couple of week turning a three line function call including lambda callback into a two line templated mess and were pleased with themselves it was shorter now.

Yes. I learned and programmed C++, then I read "Effective C++" and it took me to a whole new level.

I was thinking similarly: - memory. Run intensive memory tests overnight. Someone posted tips elsewhere. If they don't run for hours you aren't testing thoroughly enough. - thermal problems. there are various apps that monitor your systems thermal sensors. Check what temperatures you are running. - HD/SSD - can you check SMART status? Check the event logs for IO errors Try going to build settings to only allow a single build at a time. This will reduce system load quite a bit, though of course the builds will take longer. It would be interesting to see if it makes a difference. If it does I'd say it points to one of the problems above, or some similar physical issue with the machine. Good luck.

Yes, I still keep the AT&T C++ book on my desk. A slim volume describing a nice language which was an (IMO) elegant OO extension to 'C'. Now you can look at valid C++ syntax that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard. They seem to be trying to put every feature of every other language into C++ syntax and comprehensibility be damned.

A guy here who used Dvorak had the opposite problem. Every time he went to use someone else's computer, he'd type garbage for a minute until he mentally swapped out his keyboard mapping.

I keep a "guest mouse" just for them. It was so just so sad watching them try to figure out the trackball (which never struck me as that difficult).

I have just given up on Acronis True Image, after making the mistake of upgrading to 2017. I am now in a 30 day free trial of Macrium Reflect, so far so good. I have found Acronis, which I used for many years, to have turned in to a bloated, buggy mess. After recent updates, my backups consistently hang at about 50% into the backup. So I run a backup overnight and check it in the morning and it is stuck. To make it even worse, you cannot "Stop" it, it just spins forever. If you kill all the processes, or reboot, it attempts to retry and also gets stuck. There seems to be no good way to just kill the thing except to edit the backup and remove the schedule. Their support gave me a solution - I have to go into their install directory and delete a bunch of DLL's to do with VSS. That did fix the problem. And every time they update the software, I have to go do it again. This is on a pretty generic, fully updated Windows 10 Pro. They have also removed the feature to mount the .tib file as a folder and explore and copy files. You have to open recover from within True Image. Not a deal breaker, but I used to like that feature. Another annoyance is that if the tool gets confused and doesn't remove old backups on schedule, it gets angry with you if you do it through File Explorer. Yet there is no way within the tool to delete a backup set except to delete the actual job - along with all the backup settings. Besides this, there are many sub processes and services running now to do with Cloud backup, which I do not use, and mobile backup, likewise, etc. To sum up, I no longer recommend True Image, in fact I recommend looking hard for something else.

What I've seen is programmers now who are terrified of writing code. They don't feel like they can write a simple for loop without a unit test (written first!) to show it works. Then you take all the unit-test passing code and plug it together and find it is all still buggy because unit tests don't catch everything and the most subtle bugs occur in integration (especially with anything event driven). My favorite sayings are "you don't ship tests" and "customers don't buy tests". What ultimately matters to the business is to ship working code. Absolutely write tests for subtle algorithms or pieces of code that have proven buggy. Writing tests for code that has to be refactored (for performance for instance) is great to prove that the behavior is unchanged. But it seems the modern programming culture puts all the emphasis on unit testing as if that is a panacea for delivering working systems. And don't forget that writing test suites for code that doesn't ship due to being un-needed or because it is delivered too late is completely wasted time. Maybe these guys haven't been on a project that failed due to being delivered late, and they have to learn the hard way.