Some time ago my spouse came home from work (New England Medical Center, hematology lab) talking about seeing a bunch of micromegs in several patient's blood samples. Wait, wait, I said, you saw WHAT!? She was referring to abnormally small megakaryocytes[1]. I of course got tripped up by the meg not being an SI unit at all but rather an adjective denoting small. This got me thinking: Hey, this is a pretty creative combination of prefixes used in a specific way to describe something fairly accurately. I'll use descriptions such as nanolight-second to measure a distance just to prove my geekiness. But I think that pales in comparison to micromegs. Does anyone have other examples? [1] Megakaryocytes are large blood cells normally confined bone marrow. They are too big to escape to the peripheral blood. If they do then you have some real trouble health-wise. I'm not standing on Mt. Stupid saying what that trouble might be because I don't know. And to be honest I'm not qualified to even read the wikipedia article on megakaryocytes.

Disguise the limit

trønderen wrote:

Place a microphone in front of the PC speakers, and digitize that

Hmmm, I remember doing that when ripping vinyl onto reel-to-reel tape. The sound may have been a little crappy but that crappiness was nothing compared to tape wow, flutter, hiss, oxide shedding, and the poor playback system(s). But there were some secrets revealed that in that recording method that might otherwise go unnoticed. Take, for instance, Steve Miller Band's album Number 5, side one. The last song is Tokin's and the final verses of the song repeat "And in a little while I know it's gonna change." Nothing to that, right? But when you listen to the tape the song ends and then you can hear the record changer look for the next record in the stack.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

Have you ever used "conductive grease"? I have and here's some of what I've observed. Years ago I got some MG Chemicals carbon conductive grease for automotive and shop use. * It worked great on '70s car electrical connections like batteries. Other connections like alternators and fuel pumps were not sealed and corroded quicky in New England winters. A little conductive grease would keep things working well. * Also in the '70s, back in the days of C-cells, even the best alkaline batteries would leak when discharged fully. After cleaning the corroded battery contacts as well as I could with sandpaper or wire brushes some conductive grease would help get the appliance going again reliably. * Normally crummy wiring and connections for phones and stereos were all improved with the grease. * Be careful with carbon grease if you are wearing good clothes. The smallest smears of this stuff will ruin nice shirts and pants in no time. Then I moved up to "fixing" a burner on my '60s electric range. One of the rear burners on my stove over time had been subjected to repeated boil-overs, among other indignities, and eventually stopped working. I decided to apply conductive grease to the corroded pads on the burner coil where it connected to the range receptacle. After energizing the greased connection everything happened "in a flash", so to speak. A few seconds after powering the burner on the receptacle contacts heated up and the grease started to smoke. This led to a conductive grease vapor that produced a short circuit in the receptacle. ZZZZZTTT-POW!! The 220v arc lit the room like a flashbulb. I doubt that the event emitted any X-rays but the light, sound, and smell were pretty impressive. Afterwards one of the burner coil resistive wire leads was gone. Vaporized. Melted blobs of metal were spattered all around near the receptacle connector. Surprisingly, the 50 amp main circuit breaker never tripped. It was a really quick over-current event. From a few rooms away my SO asks, "What the heck was THAT?" I replied, "No worries!" as I was still digesting what had happened and shaking a little bit. After that I didn't use conductive grease for anything for 20+ years.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

I used ffmpeg years ago to rip my Hero3 underwater movies into a stream of still photos. I can get just the best shots. Back then I marveled at ffmpeg's command line options. Fast forward a decade or so and I want to go change the ripper script. I am again presented with ffmpeg's massive number of command line options. ffmpeg -h full lists over ten thousand lines of complex, precise, and densely packed switches. One may specify audio and video codecs, formats, sampling strategies, quantization schemes, transformations, distortion, compression, and on and on. How many career-lifetimes are embodied in this piece of software? Is there another piece of software that has this many command line options? -Chug In one respect ffmpeg reminds me of git: I'm not qualified to judge if the way it behaves is a bug or not.

Over the top we go.

Oh the memories! VB6 is the only language I've ever used where functions htonb and ntohb seemed like a bright idea. Had to write my own, of course, and used them to great effect.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

As my finger hovers over the Enter key I think this could be a bad idea. Hmmmmm. Worst command ever? Worse than laying on the up-arrow key for a bit and blindly pressing Enter? I might never do that again!

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

^Z in fedora emacs minimizes the window. Then the following keystrokes go into whatever window gets focus. Hahaha.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

My programming career has been blessed by an affair or two with TECO the text editor. Browsing around I can find very few examples of TECO code. So I decided to provide some for you. Wait, if you dig hard enough you can always find TECO code by guys like Stanley Rabinowtiz but what about every day, run of the mill TECO macros? For starters see DATE. Enjoy! If you spot a bug then please submit a PR. :)

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

Yeah, 2. Multiply, add, divide. I've seen enough Vedic math ways to do things that I know my brain-dead solution could be improved. I never compare myself with any student from any time other than to say, "I'm still learning." Imagine running into a completely unschooled guy who comes up with this for an approximation of pi? Srinivasa Ramanujan - Wikipedia[^] Say WHAT!?

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

My biggest laugh of the week so far is in the article Dereference operator - Wikipedia[^] The See also section at the bottom has one item: Segmentation fault.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

There is some consolation in more modern laptops going without Scroll Lock. The key will die eventually. I still find XON-XOFF useful. Say I've got a massive Visual Studio compile going in a dos box and there's some interesting error messages early on. I can't just move the scroll bar to go back and see because the compile is spewing more and keeps taking me back to the bottom of the stream. Typing ^S (XOFF) stops the incoming text and I can browse around to see what happened. Satisfied, ^Q (XON) resumes the flood. Works on Linux, too.

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

Astronomy Picture of the Day - yesterday's news! Try ^

Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

but it didn't stick, other than in the District of Columbia.

It stuck pretty well in South America and Canada. :)

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

There's a good reason to teach bubble sort: don't turn out graduates who don't know what bubble sort is! Old timers and interviewers would think, "Good Lord, newbies these days don't even know bubble sort. We're doomed!"

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

Using a keypunch machine to punch the format card that you put into the keypunch machine to get good tab stops for columns 6 and 72 for FORTRAN programs, or for whatever. My problem here is that I can remember how to do it so it's can't count as a 'forgotten skill'. -C

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

If only you had their budget...

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

' Grasshopper, take a deep breath ...
err2go = " sErrDescr = ""Error "" & Err.Number & "" '"" & Err.Description & ""'"" & vbCrLf &_
"" occurred in " & fileName & " " & gErlRoutine & """ & _" & vbCrLf & _
" IIf(Erl <> 0, "" at line "" & cstr(Erl) & ""."", ""."")"
Print #fOut, err2go
' ... now exhale

This was a project that needed error handlers everywhere[1]. Using structured comments the source was preprocessed to automatically insert error handlers. Run time errors produced full stack traces with none of the bother of having to code an actual error handler manually. Sweet! [1] Really. Trust me.

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

A former colleague asks me: So have you been "working long and hard to make quality software for the rest of the world to use" or have you been "grunting out steaming mounds"? I, of course, used

sessionp = new ::qpid::messaging::Session(*(const_cast(session).NativeSession));

in my reply. That, my friends, is a grunt.

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

Great news! This must prove that I'm not a troll.

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito

Simulate the problem following Ken Perlin's lead. Keep adding projectors until the surface is covered.

They will never have seen anything like us them there. - M. Spirito