loke

loke, 1 year ago to random

One nice thing about Singapore. When some public service is broken or unavailable, you can report it using a mobile application and they deal with it rather quickly.

I've used it to report things like broken streetlights. And in one case abtree had fallen across the mountain bike trail in the middle of the forest and they fixed it within days after reporting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/12y5b0o/first_time_using_one_service_and_i_am_rather/

loke, 1 year ago to infosec

Having attended several talks at Black Hat, I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft could fix 90% of all security exploits by removing calculator.exe.

#bhasia #blackhat #infosec

loke, 1 year ago to random

They sure love their house but we definitely need to replace it.

loke, 4 months ago to random

So gruber decided to comment on the EU compliance from apple. Say what you will about him, but he's certainly predictable. He's almost a furious as apple appears to be (which isn't surprising really)

loke, 8 months ago to random

OK, people sometimes exaggerate mathematicians' tendency to avoid using clear variable names, but usually they're right.

I'm reading a presentation the describes three variables, 𝗳, 𝙛 and 𝗙.

Would it hurt to use more descriptive names?

loke, 23 days ago to random

So I watched the two first episodes of Andor (the Star Wars TV series).

Why were people raving about this? After two episodes there should be at least one likeable character, and I would have hoped at least something would have happened?

It may be because I have a general dislike for TV series which are not episodic. But, I get the feeling that this is something that was meant to be a movie, but the writer was told to stretch it out into a TV series. The stuff that happened in the first two episodes could have been 5 minutes.

loke, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

How many "K"-sounds in "Connecticut"?

loke, 1 month ago to random

This answer came from a post on Quora, and where the posted got the answer from should be obvious.

Oh, and the date is wrong. The actual date that particular statement was posted was this year.

loke, 1 month ago to random

Is there really no generic sparse array library for Java?

I've been searching, and I really can't find anything. You have some maths-oriented libraries (like commons-math) that can do linear algebra on sparse arrays, but their implementations are always tied to the maths, and are not generic.

In my case, I have n-dimensional arrays of maybe a billion elements, and sometimes I put only 10 elements in it. Sometimes, it may be thousands or millions, and sometimes it's completely filled. I'd like something that handles these cases for me, so I don't have to try to implement this myself.

loke, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to FreeBSD

FreeBSD help requested!

Long story short: I have an important system failing to boot, and I've already broke something, and I would really appreciate someone giving some suggestions before I break it even further.

So I have a home server running FreeBSD, with a zfs-root SSD and a separate zfs volume with some spinning disks keeping all the data.

All of a sudden, the machine went down and failed to reboot. I connected a monitor to it and it was stuck with an error saying it was unable to boot an operating system, pressing a key got me to the "OK" prompt, and waiting for a reboot got me into the bios config.

It's been a while (and one upgrade to FreeBSD 14) since I installed it, and booting from the FreeBSD installer and using gpart to check the partitions shows that I have both an EFI and a freebsd-boot partition on there.

I tried to reinstall the bootcode using:

gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efi -i1 nda0<br></br>

But this did not change anything.

Then I thought that perhaps I was using BIOS and used that instead:

 gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 2 nda0<br></br>

Well,.that was a bad idea. Now nothing boots, and the drive doesn't even show up in the bios settings screen as a bootable drive anymore.

At this point I realise I'm flailing aimlessly and probably shouldn't touch the drive anymore.

I'm pretty sure the zfs root is still there, as I can see it if I do zfs import, but I haven't tried importing it after booting from the USB drive.

#freebsd

loke, 1 month ago to random

Microsoft seems to have fired all their translators and replaced them with ai. That's the only explanation I have for the absolutely horrendous Swedish translation of Microsoft teams.

It's such basic grammatical errors where single labels in a button gets the wrong grammatical form because someone just translated the word itself without being aware of the context the word occurs. It's immediately obvious so it's clear that no one who speaks the language even opened the application.

loke, 1 month ago to random

I have some broken CSS. I changed the CSS used in the language documentation, and it looks OK with one exception: There is a horizontal scrollbar, and when I move it, it doesn't look good anymore.

Here's a link. The problem should be pretty obvious:

https://kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com/tutorial.html

I kinda suck at CSS, so I can't fix this. Is there some simple change that can be done to stop the horizontal scrollbar from appearing? (perhaps the method I used to put the menu on the left is wrong?)

loke, 4 months ago to random

What a nice video showing things to do in Singapore that goes beyond the usual things people do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fyJ98uNr58

loke, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Are you familiar with these files?

loke, 4 months ago to random

Do you want to hear me drone on about my programming language project for over an hour?

Are you sure? Great, here's the perfect podcast episode for you to listen to.

I had the honour to be a guest on Array Cast with @bobtherriault and the other hosts to talk about it:

https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode72-kap

loke, 7 months ago to random

I have been paying from @write_as for a while now, and generally it's been a decent product that I want to support.

However, coming up on two years ago, I was told that they were working on getting federated replies working, so that people can comment on a post and it would show up, well, somewhere. This was the main reason that drive me to pay for the service.

Is there any updates on this? I just read a blog post by someone else (who, I presume, is using Wordpress) where the comments showed up really nicely.

I really want to stay with write.as, but I really, really want this feature.

Are there any updates on this?

loke, 2 months ago to random

Question for graphics people, especially people that knows animation.

I'm working on a video to introduce the concepts behind the Kap programming language. In doing so I want to demonstrate how to rearrange data in matrix form and I want to do this using some simple animations.

One of the simpler things I want to do is to show a grid of numbers, highlight a row, move the numbers around so that the rows become columns (for example) and highlight the original row in the new matrix.

What kinds of tools to animators use to achieve this? I could write a program to do it of course, but surely whenever I see these kinds of animations in a youtube video, the animator didn't write custom code to do it? (I'd be doing to completely from scratch, which while fun, seems like a waste of time)

loke, 5 months ago to random

I just read an blog post (on Medium, which somehow feels appropriate in this case). The content was, well, OK. It was pointing out yet another way in which modern software development management is broken.

However, it was illustrated with a series of supervillain-style illustrations that felt wrong. This in itself isn't very rare. A lot of people just shove random illustrations into their blog posts.

But in this case, the illustrations followed a single theme, and it was just... well... wrong.

Then I noticed that in one of the pictures the hero held out their hands, and being some kind of monster character, they didn't have 5 fingers. But each hand had a different number of fingers.

That's when I went back and realised why it simply didn't work. This wasn't just random pictures, but the author had tried to make it thematic. The end result was even worse than what you'd have ended up with if they had simply used some stock images.

loke, 7 months ago to random

I've been playing HERO on the 2600 lately. Honesty, this is an amazing game and possibly the best game on the platform.

It's right up there with Pitfall 2, and I enjoy the former more because Pitfall doesn't have as clear a purpose and much less suited for the quick plays I do on the Steam Deck before going to bed.

loke, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

The code coverage report in IntelliJ IDEA is terrible for an OCD-minded person like myself.

In a way it's good, I guess. My test coverage has increased, and I did find a few bugs. But that number. 🙂

loke, 7 months ago to random

Given the very long list of problems with Microsoft Teams and the uncountable ways it could be improved, I'm glad they put all their resources into making a completely new version that I can now switch to. It's completely overhauled and let me tell you about all the ways it's changed: the menu has white background now.

loke, 5 months ago to singapore

It's the 26'th already and the grocery store isn't playing that chinese new year song. Am I looking at the calendar wrong?

#singapore

loke, 7 months ago to random

Do you want to know what a Lisp-like macro system is a good thing?

This is what you end up with when you don't have it:

        override fun combine2Arg(a: APLSingleValue, b: APLSingleValue): APLValue {<br></br>            return numericRelationOperation(<br></br>                pos,<br></br>                a,<br></br>                b,<br></br>                { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() },<br></br>                { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() },<br></br>                { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() },<br></br>                { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() },<br></br>                { x, y -><br></br>                    when {<br></br>                        x is APLChar && y is APLNumber -> APLChar.fromLong(x.value - y.asLong(pos), pos)<br></br>                        else -> throwAPLException(IncompatibleTypeException("Incompatible argument types", pos))<br></br>                    }<br></br>                },<br></br>                fnBigint = { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() },<br></br>                fnRational = { x, y -> (x - y).makeAPLNumber() })<br></br>        }<br></br>

loke, 5 months ago to random

Oracle, WTF are you doing?

I mean, I dislike Oracle business practices as much as the next guy, but even with their priorities in mind, I cannot fathom why this happens.

Imagine in you will, you are a Windows user who wants to download Java (for example, in order to run Kap, which requires Java 17 to be installed). What do you do? Probably search for "windows java download".

This is where you're sent: https://www.java.com/en/download/

Ah, the download page for Java, you may think.

The headline reads:

Java Downloads for XX

Where XX is the operating system you are using.

Below that you can read:

Recommended Version 8 Update 391

Java 8!? The one that was released in 2014 went out of free support back in 2019?

What... the actual...?

I now challenge you to find any link to newer versions. In fact, find any reference to the existence of other versions at all. None.

The actual download link is: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/

Of course, while writing this I note that there is paid support until 2030. So perhaps there is a reason for this behaviour after all.

loke, 8 months ago to random

It's great to see people who weren't born during the 8-bit era pay attention to these systems, and even repairing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kkzIV5yTPQ