Its shark week and from what I'm seeing/reading the sharks seem to know it! :-)

One of my fav objects... I used to go to Mount Pinos and setup thousands of dollars of telescope and computer gear trying to catch a tiny image of this an other objects. That was an expensive and utterly frustrating hobby. Most trips either ended in mechanical/electrical or computer failure rendering the entire weekend useless or you might actually get off a shot only to have a cloud or 757 cruise through it. Once in a great while, a really long long time everything would go just grand and you'd get a good shot. Being Earth bound you are limited. We all used to sit around on cloudy nights and dream of the day when we could have our own personal Hubble space telescopes... Don't think I'll live that long... So APOD keeps me going... that and iTelescope. Nice!

I don't care if it is a billon or a trillion. Could you just send me that many (whatever it is) US dollars? I think I'd be ok then and could handle watching the light pulse in the laser all day long and not spend my days trying to outsmart SQL Server! :-)

Sounds like you need to get your own computer, password protect it really well and never let him use it. He does sound like a controlling idiot. And how is it you knew he was using multiple IP addresses and WiFis?

Hmm... younger girls in my area (I'm old... too old...) seem to like Mustangs and Camaros! Last year graduation showed 5 girls with their "muscle" cars they got for graduation all lined up. Guys around here seem to be going for either Honda Accords or pickup trucks but the girls are making headway in the pickup truck area. I was almost run off the road a few weeks back by two cow-girls in a gigantic dualie. Maybe the entry was for the best car that looked like a female?

Been seeing this... But trust me... NO ONE is that interested in my background!! :-) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. NEW_NOTIFICATION_NO_21803689 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. August 14th, 2014 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. ----------------------------------------- F7-0L ONLINE NOTIFICATION-SYSTEMS ----------------------------------------- IMPORTANT-NOTICE FOR: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We are sending you this notification right now to alert you to the fact that someone just ordered your background-scan info. You should review the details of this scan listed below right now. Scan-Details: = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =. Date: 13-Aug-2014 Time: 12:36 P.M. (EST) Visit here to see these scan-results and any other pertinent information: Thank you. ********************************************** F7-0L ONLINE NOTIFICATION-SYSTEMS ********************************************** DATE: 8/14/2014 **********************************************

Thank you sir! I think the key point in your reply is:

Shog9 wrote:

if you screw that up, you'll be gently but firmly informed of protocol.

Note the words "gently" and "firmly". Those are great words and yes I've been to such a place and agree you do need to learn to fit in. Most people in the world have no trouble doing that however one needs away to "learn" how to fit in. The gently and firmly are one way that happens. You go in, you screw up, you get gently and firmly told here is how you do it next time. The problem I see so often at SO is the gently is completely missing and usually the firmly consists of all the reasons you should not allowed near a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Not often do the "gently and firmly" posts do anything to point the misguided soul towards the right way to do things.

Shog9 wrote:

BTW, if you ever encounter issues with your account again, just let us know[^] - I or someone else will fix it.

Thanks for that. I believe I did send a note but never got a reply. It just magically got fixed.

Member 9082365 wrote:

But there are restaurants not unlike that and they have a regular clientele who go precisely for that reason. Some people thrive on rough and tumble, insult and abuse. That's just human nature.

You are absolutely right. However (pulling the age card here :-) in my almost 60 years of life not many last. Sure some do but eventually another restaurant comes long that offers better this, better that, cheaper and right across the street etc. The only thing... usually... that keeps the first place in business is a change. As far as "reputation" I guess you are right that especially in this day and age you should search, read, get feedback on the place you wish to join before you join. However we are now in a "gotta have it yesterday" environment where sometimes the answer you need is really needed quickly or bad things could happen. It would suck to have to tell my boss. Sorry... I need to do a few hours of web research to see if I should join StackOverflow because I think they have the answer I need. I agree 100% that it is futile to expect StackOverflow and similar big sites to change and trust me I'm not looking for a path of sweet smelling roses and a gift card because I graced their website with a question or comment. I don't mind being told when I'm wrong or doing something stupid. I try hard not to do so but when you are degraded for reasons beyond your control and for attempting to offer something that might help someone someday then it really says to me that StackOverflow is already on the path of those restaurants we speak of above. They will fade over time. Probably not ever just disappear but certain they have left the door open for others to jump in and take away membership. And to make it clear I was not ASKING SO to change just for me. In fact I didn't ask them to change at all. The very existence of this thread indicates I'm not alone in my feelings and beliefs about that site. So don't get on me about trying to change SO. I wasn't I was merely (just like I was on SO) attempting to add to this thread my opinion. Pulling the old card out for the last time, I'm almost 60 and I've been programming since I was 16. One of my first jobs was punching cards. Later I moved to up run technician where I ran the cards, kept the machine alive and later due to my electronics background became a repair technician. I think part of the issue today is there is almost too much information and it is too easy

I don't think anyone here is demanding membership. I think it is a case of StackOverflow having what looks to be on the outside a great source of info with people interacting and sharing. StackOverflow makes you want to take advantage of that. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, areas we are not as knowledgeable about. StackOverflow on the outside looks like a great place to ask and share your knowledge. Kind of like a restaurant with a nice fancy sign and front entrance. But once you enter you are roughly thrown down a seat and told just exactly how you suck for even coming in the restaurant in the first place. Then after you try the food you get another dose of attitude for your attempt and a kick in the butt as you exit the place. I mean in my case when I created my account something went wrong. I was not able to comment or answer AT ALL. The ONLY THING I could do was ask a question. When I asked how to fix my account I got down voted, asked to roll back, you name it. Instead of constructive information there was more bandwidth wasted on slamming me then there was pointing me in any right direction. One guy told me I wasn't looking hard enough and he sent me a link to screen shot of topic and highlighted the answer and comment links and rudely said, if you'd read you'd see these and figure it out. I calmly went to the same question and took a screen shot of my screen in 3 different browsers both on Win and Mac and sent it back to him with the caption: "Should I draw in my answer and comment links and see if the work because I don't seem to have them." About a day later, magically my rep went up a point and suddenly the answer and comment links were active. Very curious as I didn't change a thing. So I used my new found "power" to provide an additional comment(containing a different solution) a stackoverflow question that was already answered and roughly 1 year old. My rep went right back down and I was slammed for adding an answer to an "older", "Already answered" question and told I should remove my comment. Well my commenttook a very different and very useful approach from the existing accepted answer. Why the down votes and wasted bandwidth telling me how I suck when my answer adds alternatives to solving the problem!? I just don't get it.

Couldn't agree more! I had an old account with about 700 rep but decided to start a new identity since things were quite different for me. I setup the new account but some strange glitch happened. I could not comment or answer anything to gain that valuable rep. My ONLY option was to ask. So first I searched, I searched again, then finally I asked. I immediately went to -2 rep for asking about an issue with my account and why I could not comment and answer. I also got a private message telling me what an absolute idiot I was for posting such a question. Included was a screen shot link showing me where the comment and answer buttons were. I replied calmly including links to screen shots where I had no comment or answer links and the next day suddenly I could. Someone fixed something quietly and my rep went up a point. So I went back to the post I had been trying to answer and admittedly it was an older post but I had some new information on it. It matched my situation well and I'd found a way to work around the issue. So I added a comment with my new found ability. Valuable added information for anyone that might be in this same situation. I got 5 comments most of them saying, "Why are you posting to such an old post (1 year) that has already been answered!? -1 for that." I don't think SO gives you the ability to go below -2 so all their effort to write me and down vote me was just a waste of their time. I just didn't get it. I mean my info was additive to the solution. Dealt exactly with the problem but yet no one wanted to see/hear the answer I had. I stopped using it as another person here said, "out of anger". I won't ask a question even if I have it. I'd spend a day or two looking for another way to solve the problem than to use SO. Sure I'll search their results to help myself out, but I sure as hell won't add to their mess.

As I sat here working I thought about your signature again: What is this talk of release? I do not release software. My software escapes leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake. What struck me is that most of my career has been in high-resolution measurement and robotic control. And I specifically remember two projects where this signature almost became truth. First was a big Sieko SCARA robotic disk sorter. This robot measured almost 4 feet at its longest extension and it could retract and move 180 degrees and extend out 4 feet in the other direction in just about 1/10 of a second. The thing was bloody fast! We of course built a plexiglass sensor tripped cage around the thing so no idiot would get it it's way. Well one did. He removed the plexiglass portion where he needed to work, jumped the sensor and leaned in slightly to look at an issue with a printer. He spent about a week in the hospital after the bump on the head. The next was an instrument down the line from the disk sorter. It was a combiner. It had a big chuck on it to pick up about 25 disks and it would move laterally left/right to combine disks into caddies for shipment. Of course it needed to be fast so we used the biggest NEMA steppers and drivers we could find. This thing could traverse about 4 feet in 1/10 of a second. It too had a plexiglass cage. But one day I was working underneath it looking at some issues with the conveyor, I was well clear but then I heard this scream and instinctively I hit one of the gazillion estop buttons we'd wired in. A young assemply worker had her hand caught between the side of the machine and the moving carriage. Crushed quite a few bones. Why she had her hand in there was beyond me. But of course it was the software's fault for not "knowing" that a hand was in the way and gracefully stopping. Sigh... Third was an instrument that spun silicon wafers to coat them for prep. It used a big servo motor for the spinner. They had to spin pretty fast. They would come in, a mechanical centering device would center them on the vacuum chuck, retract then they would lower into a bowl and the big servo motor would spin them up to a fairly high speed. Well those of you familiar with servos know they need to be tuned. Kd, Ki, Kp, etc. Usually you have to do it under load. So stupid me put a 300mm wafer on the chuck, centered it, lowered it in to the bowl, opened the protective lid, jumped the protection sensor and hit go on the tuning algorithm. That thing

Many of us here have been "around". I've read your stories and love every one. It's hard to be 56, have all this experience and my current "director" of software development is about 30. He's a great guy, extremely knowledgable and good at what he does but he lacks the experience people like you and I have had. Doesn't make him a bad person. We all start somewhere. He just has a blank stare on his face when I talk about 300 baud modems. LOL.

Joining the Jurassic crew: Born: 1957. Wrote first FORTRAN Program: Early 1970. Managed to waste quite a few reams of greenbar paper due to a column or semicolon error. Got job while in Jr. High School punching punch cards for U. Took more FORTRAN. Included my own punch cards in stacks I'd punch on my job. Got in trouble for using computer time as unauthorized user. It worked for a while but I didn't think they would check CPU use that close. Dang. Played Star Trek on paper terminal at U in mid-70's. Got billed for excessive use of paper (AGAIN). Got access to a Vax first running VMX later converted to Unix. Got first C compiler for it sometime in early 80's. My first C program: Output "shift up/shift down" terminal commands to random VT terminals connected to Vax. I got a little foolish and had the program fork itself about 5 times. Made quite a mess of the input terminals over in the student records department. I had the service guys swapping terminals, changing cables. I feel bad now. It was not the nicest thing to do. Punishment: Had to write professors grade book keeper in C. My grade shot to A and stayed there. Went to west coast computer fair. Bought Apple I. Loved it. Bought Apple II. Sort of loved it. Hated BASIC so started to program 6502 assembly. Hated that fact the some registers could not be used for some things. Why not!? Got 300 baud modem. Screaming now! Lit up the BBSs. Posted little programs written in 6502 assembly. One of my first was a terminal program lots of people used to send receive files via Xmodem. Used the graphics page of the apple II as a buffer. Watching programs come in was sort of physadellic as it write binary data to the graphics page. Got 1200 baud modem! So happy! I have speed! Could not talk to any one else for some time. No one else had 1200 baud and 300 was broken in this modem. Got IMSAI 8080 with broken switches. Fixed switches. Wrote two programs before arthritus began to set into switch toggle fingers. Turned off IMSAI 8080. Never turned it on again. Got job coding in COBOL. Lasted about 6 weeks. Could not hack it. Got IBM PC. Wrote loan software in C. Beta tested first ever LAN for IBM PC. Davong or something like that. Man that was fast! I could move a 330k file to my co-workers computer in a minute! Outstanding! No more walking around with stupid 5 inch floppies. Oh yea... 330k at least initialially needed to be put on several floppies. Used Digital Research C compiler. Bug list was 298 pa

In addition to the 200 lines per day per programmer I think they also enforced just about every current buzz programming word and paradigm. I'd say they succeeded in folling the SOLID principles just fine. :laugh: Edit: Auto correct sux... WTF is "folling"? Urban dictionary says I've lapsed into urban slang... sigh...

The programmer has exactly 50 days left on his/her contract. Out door and wait for the frantic "It's broken call... please come fix it at 3x your previous rate!!!" Just a guess. We had a bug tracking system written some time ago that had a primary record holder delared something like DefectRecord Records[50]; Because he/she never thought anyone would have more than 50 defects to see at one time on a report. Guess they never ran into a project like the one I'm currently on.

We have some of that going on in this project too. We have a class something like:

public partial class Location
{
Location Location { get; set; }
Location location { get; set; }
}

But what really killed me is your signature line: What is this talk of release? I do not release software. My software escapes leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

Ok I wanna know just exactly how you broken into our TFS and downloaded the code from one of our files!? :)

We got a lot of them there types of function in the current project I'm tryin to untangle. I think the previous contract company lived under the motto: 200 lines of code per programmer per day keeps the customer fat, dumb, happy, and *away*

You are going to face a number of tasks: 1) How to obtain your digital guitar signal. IE you need to read the A/D output from somewhere. Perhaps you have a library or set of routines already to access the data from your sound card. If you don't this is going to be step 1. 2) As the previous answerer posted this is no simple task but it can be fun to experiment. Basically for a wah effect you are looking for a variable filter. Filters can be low-pass, band-pass, high-pass and many others. The Wah effect is usually a variable filter that takes the high end (upper frequency) and as you rock the Wah pedal lowers that high end. This was the simplest form of Wah filter. They are much more complex now days. I built an analog version many years ago and it wasn't too hard. Unfortunately in the digital world it is actually a little harder to do. But once you have the data from step 1 you can write some code or use a library to modify it and get some interesting results. 3) Sending the modified data some where. Again like step one you are going to need to figure out where/how to transmit your modified data back out either to your sound card or perhaps in early stages just write it to a WAV file and then play that file back to see what your filters did. I think there are signal processing libs in MatLab as mentioned above. There are probably some commercial libs to do this as well. I unfortunately cannot point you to any. Good luck

I believe that there is no black/white when it comes to any kind of programming. For example if I am the ONLY programmer on a very small project to write a directory scanner that looks for patterns of text within our code and I know for a fact this will be written once, uses only by a few members and never "re-used" then you bet I'm gonna make some classes that don't fit the SOLID guideline. On the other hand I'm involved in a 10 person large project at the moment. Here I'll be much more careful to follow the guideline because I know my code will get used in places I never expected it to be used. In this group I know I must follow as close as possible to the other OLID items or there will be issues. But already this product has a HUGE number of files each with sometimes a single list of enums or a very small class with the interface in yet another file. It makes it easy to understand each file but makes the project file count rather large.