The Whiteboard

user20683

12:04 AM

@Ampt Todays' trippy Python thing: doing this for x in range(1,6): print(x) will print:
1
2
3
4
5

but doing for x in range(6,11): print(y, end=" ") will print 6 7 8 9 10

user20683

now I can put whatever the hell I fell like in that end string

user20683

6 Mwahahahah 7 Mwahahahah 8 Mwahahahah 9 Mwahahahah 10 Mwahahahah

user20683

for instance

user20683

or I can be hugely evil and have it be empty string

Ampt

you can call out y? wouln't it be print(x, end="blah")

user20683

12:05 AM

just getting "678910"

user20683

@Ampt sorry x, it's y in my code

user20683

so it should be for y in range(6...

Ampt

ok, continue

user20683

that's it

Ampt

oh

user20683

12:07 AM

you can also specify other things like separators

Ampt

what other keyword arguments does print have?

user20683

@Ampt file

Ampt

you could do print x, as well, and that would make it spaces instead of new lines

so it would be

user20683

you can print directly to a file rather than to the std out

Ampt

     for x in range(6, 11): print x,

user20683

12:08 AM

@Ampt not in Python 3

Ampt

I'm on python 2.5 :)

at least at work I am

user20683

I'm in Python 3.3 unless I'm using SimpleCV

Ampt

I wish I had some of my work code available to me right now haha

i did some... interesting things with it

user20683

@Ampt What in the name of Ruby did you do?

Ampt

lots of meta programming and what have you

parsing files for methods to call without knowing anything about them

well. not nothing

but theres a lot of having to interact with outside code when writing a tester framework

and without interfaces....

plus you can't just crash and spit out a stacktrace when something goes wrong

Matt D

1:00 AM

so you rolled your own reflection? ;)

Ampt

1:53 AM

@MattD kinda yeah. python provides a lot of it for free but there was some stuff I had to do myself

Reut Sharabani

12:03 PM

"Cannot convert collection to abstractcollection", seriously?

emuigai

1:33 PM

Hi

enderland

@emuigai Hello!

emuigai

Hi @enderland

nice surprise thought I was alone

Thomas Owens

It's just really early in the morning for most users. More activity begins in the next few hours.

emuigai

here its evening

But i can see a lot of people are on your timezone

user41796

2:16 PM

@ReutSharabani Sounds like C#, yes

user41796

2:38 PM

@ThomasOwens - don't know if you saw this already or not. theinstitute.ieee.org/ieee-roundup/opinions/ieee-roundup/…

Thomas Owens

2:56 PM

@GlenH7 I have problems with that article. First, I can't find 30 states that require licensure for software engineers. I can find references to Texas and Florida. I don't know what the other 28 are.

Second, the whole section about the exam being irrelevant is bogus. I graduated from an engineering program and couldn't pass an FE exam (I only took 20 weeks of physics and 10 weeks of chemistry and haven't touched either, and 10 weeks of statistics and 10 weeks of economics - only scratched the surface of what's on the FE exam).

I don't buy the statement that "material properties, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics would be relevant to a software engineer working on water treatment, power generation and distribution, or road and railway systems". That's why we have multidisciplinary teams. Understanding the problem domain is important, but no need for an in-depth understanding of any of these to build software. I don't understand a lot of image science, yet I work on code that turns raw data into imagery.

blackbee

i am using this code to increase the contrast of an image ... http://pastebin.com/EhJPLDRv but there happens to be a little problem...
http://i.stack.imgur.com/jdTeV.jpg ... how can i prevennt this?

user41796

3:09 PM

@ThomasOwens I haven't worked my way through the whole article, but the "30 states" was an eyebrow raising one for me. I think the author is being a little creative in the basis behind that statement.

user41796

And I certainly agree with your other comments. I put a lot of study time in before my FE. Probably to the tune of 150 - 200 hours brushing up on all of the areas you mentioned. My background as a BME was pretty diverse, so that helped. But there were some sections like trusses where I just gave up.

user41796

Not saying I couldn't get those at some point, just that I didn't have enough exercises & explanations to justify throwing more effort at it.

Thomas Owens

I would honestly love to get it, but unless I can get a waiver from the FE, there's no chance I could pass it. I could probably easily pass the PE, though. I did some of the sample questions and outside of two of the areas, I got nearly all the practice questions right.

user41796

@ThomasOwens Which FE exam did you look at? Avoid the general one, and pick the one specific to your background. I used a general exam study book, which was a mistake.

user41796

I bashed the PPI book for the EE/CompSci & Hardware PE exam, but their FE material seemed pretty good. Then again, I put a lot of time into studying which isn't realistic to expect of everyone.

user41796

3:15 PM

@blackbee - I think the term for that is aliasing? I'm not a PHP or an image manipulation guy. Offhand, I would guess you're banging into boundary conditions.

user41796

> To question the relevancy of these concepts to the profession of engineering or software engineering is the purview of professional organizations, such as IEEE, universities, industry councils, and government entities.

user41796

WAT? How does that address the underlying concerns about the FE? That's just waving your hands and responding with a holier-than-thou attititude

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 I looked at the Electrical and Computer. I have no experience in differential equations, linear algebra, vector analysis, any of Parts 5-14 or Part 16, and barely Part 17.

There's literally no FE exam that I have a hope of passing unless they made a software FE exam. But I have 5 years of professional experience, 3 post graduation. I should be able to waive the FE and just take the PE eventually.

user41796

No differential equations? Wow. Consider yourself lucky!

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 My math requirements was a year of calculus, two quarters of discrete mathematics, one quarter of calculus-based statistics.

user41796

3:22 PM

FFTs and Laplace transforms are heavy on the advanced maths. And yes, I recall them being a significant piece of the FE too

user41796

I had 3 semesters of calc and 1 of diff-eqs.

user41796

I actually wish I had been required to take statistics. Would have been of more use to me.

Thomas Owens

But looking at the Software PE exam, the only thing not required was the safety, security, and privacy section. And some aspects were covered in other courses. SEcure coding and security testing were covered in Verification & Validation, HCI design was a whole course, and safety issues were discussed in all of the design electives.

user41796

I posted a comment to the article asking for a reference on the 30 states

Thomas Owens

I think the commenting is blocked at work.

I can't see or make one.

user41796

3:26 PM

Thinking about it, I would have to agree that the FE is heavily biased towards the traditional engineering disciplines. I can see where that's coming from, but I have a hard time saying there is a lot of carryover into the SWE realm.

user41796

If I see a reply comment, I'll post it here.

Thomas Owens

Wow. He's the LaPlante that wrote my book on the design and analysis of real-time systems,

user41796

The traditional bias is making me ponder a number of things regarding the exams and how SWE fits into the entire engineering realm.

Thomas Owens

Part of the problem is that software engineering is a small subset of all software development activities.

user41796

I'm a bit disappointed at the end of his rebuttal there. His counter-arguments start crumbling a bit. Good to know he's got some deep expertise in aspects of the field.

Thomas Owens

3:29 PM

He as a BS in Systems Engineering from Stevens, an M.Eng from Stevens, an MBA from University of Colorado, and a Ph.D. from Stevens.

Undo the Snowman

Soo... Is pinning the new starring?

user41796

@UndotheSnowman Yes, but only the cool kids can do it

user41796

@ThomasOwens A well qualified academic then. :-)

user41796

I worry when academics "think" they understand industry better than they actually do. OTOH, many that I have spoken with over the years have been forthcoming when they call out the limits of their knowledge.

user41796

I think the problem(s) I'm still chewing on is/are: How does the FE or PE help me as a software engineer manage the complexity and risk of a particular software project. Same can be asked of a PE. The point of licensing is so we can quantify and manage risk.

Thomas Owens

3:42 PM

I think the point of licensing using a common exam is to demonstrate that the taker has knowledge that is deemed to be required to function in their field.

user41796

That's a good point - the exams are meant to demonstrate minimal competency that can be reasonably expected of a practitioner in a field.

Thomas Owens

It also provides a mechanism to stop people who shouldn't be practicing from practicing, should they cause harm in the field.

user41796

Or at least provide the big stick of Liability to whack those sorts of folk with.

user41796

People have asked if I'll ever stamp / seal anything, and my general answer is "no, not unless I'm wiling to accept the liability associated with it."

Thomas Owens

Yeah. And if you're working on safety-critical projects or projects funded with the public's money, I would have no problem requiring at least some licensed individuals overseeing the work.

user41796

3:48 PM

I think part of the challenge is that in many states a PE is a PE without any designation regarding field. I could have tested as a ChemE but many states will allow me to seal structural documents.

Thomas Owens

That's just wrong. Engineers are not interchangable.

user41796

And that's a thorny field to wade. You don't necessarily want to force people to re-test as they shift into other fields. But on the other hand, you end up with tests that sample across all of the disciplines

user41796

My home state is an example of that. And they're just now adding language to force a measure of differentiation.

user41796

But it worked because of a) ethical expectations and b) associated liability

Thomas Owens

I could probably function as a Systems Engineer. And some Computer Engineers I know could probably do well as Electrical Engineers. But I know that I could never seal Electrical or Mechanical documents.

user41796

3:52 PM

Right. On one hand, the nature of the license kind of encourages cross-discipline growth. And that's good for careers as well as the field overall. But that also muddies the waters when you have a highly specialized discipline like SWE.

blackbee

@GlenH7 i have checked the boundary conditions for the rgb colors while i was modifying them... like if the val of red after the manipulation is greater than 255 then set it to 255. am actually only 5 days old in image processing... if u could break down that aliasing thing...

Thomas Owens

@blackbee Are you referring to the blueish pixels in the image?

user41796

And I'm still trying to grok a balance when it comes to a medical device. Part of that is mechanical. Part of it is electrical. Part of it is computer. Part of it is biomedical. How do you stamp something like that?

blackbee

yes @ThomasOwens

i mean i applied the adjust parameter as 4 one to a low contrast image and another to an (hopefully edited) good pixel quality image

user41796

(Med device continued) More importantly, how do you structure your team so each team can cross-check the others? Your embedded folk need to have an inkling about physiological responses, actuators, and even perhaps fluid dynamics.

Thomas Owens

3:55 PM

@blackbee I've seen similar things before. Are you considering the RGB values as a sum? I'm not sure (if value > 255, set to 255) is correct. You could end up with 255, 255, 48 (as an example).

OK. I have a meeting. I'll be back during/after lunch.

blackbee

@ThomasOwens yup u are right ... i apparently have hit a dead end... and all that google gives me is about histogram equalization.. but thats an automated thing... but i want it to be controlled... i looked into the scripts of caman.js .. and tried to reproduce that myself.... then i ported it to php....

and i need some better solutions....

user41796

@blackbee welcome to iterative development....

blackbee

whats that...

user55340

Make a change, see if it works, repeat.

user55340

gamedev.net/topic/313181-adjust-contrast-rgb-image

user55340

4:01 PM

1

Q: adjust bitmap image brightness/contrast using c++

adjust image brightness/contrast using c++ without using any other 3rd party library or dependancy

jozefg

I just sped up my code by 3x :D Hurray for not having 5 layers of indirection

user41796

@MichaelT Reinforcing your master google-fu title

user41796

@jozefg You switched back to the dark side and embraced Imperative?!?

user55340

perlmonks.org/?node_id=428712 might also be of particular use for php.

jozefg

@GlenH7 Oh of course not :D I'm just using some more cache friendly datastructures

Nowadays if I program imperatively I just burst into flames

blackbee

4:03 PM

to be honest i don't even understand why they first divide by 255 and subtract '5' from it... then multiply the adjust value... and again add 5 and multiply by 255... its like they are taking something off the rgb value and then modifying the underlying something and putting the previous something back... but why.... @MichaelT looking into the link

Ampt

@MichaelT businessinsider.com/homeless-coders-trees-for-cars-app-2013-12

user41796

@jozefg I kind of figured as much, but couldn't resist teasing.

user55340

Are you starting off with a grayscale image? or a color image?

user55340

2

Q: Increasing Image Contrast in MATLAB

I have a greyscale image which has pixel values ranging from 1.000 to 1.003. I would like to increase the contrast between the different pixels. I have tried imcontrast under imtool, but I'm not seeing any improvement visually. Perhaps an idea would be to increase values of pixels >1.000. For e...

matlab image-processing

user55340

Note that that is matlab, however, the concept is still the same.

user55340

4:07 PM

The other aspect to consider is what contrast means at the image processing level - consider working with it similar to levels in photoshop:

user55340

jozefg

@GlenH7 Figured haha, though for what sorta stuff I write FP is a very nice fit

blackbee

the image is actually in grayscale ... however if i colorize the image to (143,73,144) or anything colorful... then i need to increase the contrast value inorder to get those pixels... the pixels turn green specially the total hair and the other darker parts.......

Jimmy Hoffa

I need to less insomnia be having..

blackbee

@MichaelT bobpowell.net/image_contrast.aspx this link was quite useful.. it addressed exactly the same problem.. thanks... may i ask another question...

Jimmy Hoffa

4:15 PM

in Home Improvement, Nov 7 at 15:19, by BMitch

We need a sign: It's been 0 days since a visitor to this site has electrocuted themselves.

jozefg

Now I'm trying this, I'm going to write some Java code for the first time in 2 years.. let's see how this goes

Jimmy Hoffa

DIY.SE is interesting

@jozefg writing Java code?? You'll shoot your eye out kid!

2

user55340

> There is one small problem with this theory and that is the ColorMatrix has a nasty habit of causing arithmetic overflows in the images colour values such that simply scaling will cause an undesirable colourization of the image.

jozefg

Oh man, it's been so long that I've removed my stuff from Java from my .emacs file O_o

user41796

@blackbee We generally don't enforce any quotas about asking questions in chat. So go ahead. :-)

user55340

4:17 PM

@blackbee Btw, if you think you can write a good question and self answer for that (preferably with a... more 'tame' image), please do so.

user41796

@MichaelT I think he was referring here in chat, not on main. And I agree with your recommendation regarding the image.

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa It's for science! If I really wanted to be evil I could do Java 4 and cast all the things

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Nonsense, but we're running a deal right now, buy 2 questions get one free. Maybe he can make this next one a two parter to get his moneys worth..

user55340

@GlenH7 Yep. The useful link was hidden in a two link only answer on SO.

jozefg

All transactions to the lounge are payable in bitcoins

user41796

4:18 PM

@jozefg That sounds more torturous than coq.

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Science? You're going to measure how many lines it takes to write a stack language in Java? Even science isn't worth that litigious hell

user55340

@jozefg did you see that rail (no, not ruby) to C complier in haskell I linked yesterday?

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, I'm actually going to benchmark it, Optimized Haskell Forth vs Optimized Java Forth

user55340

github.com/mtolly/rail

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT That genuinely is neat. I still have the wiki on it open in another tab I keep paging back to it and reading a little more every so often

It's like the lynx-users visual-logical-workflow language

jozefg

4:21 PM

@MichaelT Oh cool.. I actually have doodles like that in my documentation for my compiler (it compiles to C and TCO means goto's)

Jimmy Hoffa

What I really want to see though is a high quality IDE for rail. Just a big blank canvas you can click and drag to draw ascii-rails around in.

jozefg

Urk.. why are they unsafePeformIO-ing in a configuration file ಠ_ಠ

user55340

Here's the rail doc - esolangs.org/wiki/Rail

user55340

$ 'is-number' (a -- c):
 \                                            /-(flag)-#
  \-t-(!flag!)(!restser!)--(restser)-z-0-{>}-<
                         /                    \-(restser)-1c-------\
                        /                                          |
                        |  /-(firstsrif)-(!firstsrif!)-(!restser!)-/
                        |  |
                        |  \-{is-digit}-(flag)-{&&}-(!flag!)-\
                        |                                    |
                        \------------------------------------/

jozefg

> In addition to a rich set of builtins, a standard library is planned which should make it possible to write a useful program

Jimmy Hoffa

4:26 PM

$ 'print-star-reverse'
 \
  \
#oo-[star]-@

> Will print 'ratsstar'. Execution starts at the '$', heading southeast. The train turns east at the '-', then pushes 'star' onto the stack. It reaches '@', the reflector, and reverses direction heading west. It pushes 'rats' onto the stack. Then it prints out 'rats' then 'star'.

Ampt

Why did XHTML die?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Have you tried writing any?

user55340

@Ampt because it never really lived.

Ampt

We just kinda glossed over it in my web apps class

"We had html 4 and then xhtml, and then xhtml just died and now we have html 5!"

Jimmy Hoffa

I tried a couple times. Then I realized it was unbelievably onerous on any javascript or css plus I had to get all kinds of extra tags just so, but most importantly: The browsers did not treat mistakes in it well at all. Mistakes in HTML it has ways of making it easy for you to catch, mistakes in XHTML browsers I found would just silently swallow or you'd get no page at all or weird errors

user41796

4:29 PM

@JimmyHoffa "Never mind me, I'm just quietly sweeping exceptions under the rug over here." "Oh, were you wanting something?"

user55340

xhtml was kind of an attempt to unify html and xml back when xml was the best thing ever.

user41796

@MichaelT That would imply XML isn't the best thing ever anymore?!?!

Jimmy Hoffa

I recall thinking at various points the server was having an error in even trying to serve the page before realizing my client just refused to display any of it, then later having the opposite and it was just a pain when HTML works just fine for me so why shall I bother..

user55340

@GlenH7 Nope. JSON is (untill they realize they want structured data again with actual types rather than 'well, it looks like a number...)

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT "they" ? I think the norm for "they" is growing less and less static by the day...

I've a feeling those of us living in the OO space are going to need to make a choice in the next 10 years, stay static and go FP or go dynamic to stay imperative

user41796

4:32 PM

@MichaelT Crockford's reactions to greater than a few MB requests is quite amusing. He never foresaw JSON being abused in the way it is now.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Its all cycles... the great wheel of change. At some point Ada will be the best language ever again.

user41796

@MichaelT I hope I can retire before then.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Ada is the best language ever!

user55340

I was showing some soap things to coworkers (xml) who were very json based. "Yep, once you annotate your classes properly, you can then just use this tool to generate the xsd, the wsdl... and then on the other side, run the tool against the wsdl, and you've got your classes back."

user55340

"but what if I want 1 or more of an item" - then you annotate your field such and presto the generated code requires that you have 1 or more of an item too. "Oh neat..."

Ampt

4:36 PM

how neat is that

blackbee

@MichaelT
suppose that i have a set of rgb values... like
	        `$r=[48,57,65,72,79,86,91,96,104,109,115,122,132,143,154];
		$g=[10,20,34,52,73,94,117,139,157,172,192,204,214,223,229];
		$b=[41,34,87,115,139,163,185,204,219,230,238,244,247,250,252];`
how do i apply it on an image... i mean what actually happens when a curve adjustment i done... all i know is the x axis is input and y is output but how are the pixels manipulated?

user55340

$r=[48,57,65,72,79,86,91,96,104,109,115,122,132,143,154];
$g=[10,20,34,52,73,94,117,139,157,172,192,204,214,223,229];
$b=[41,34,87,115,139,163,185,204,219,230,238,244,247,250,252];

user55340

Just fixed space it so that I can see it more eaislly.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Wow, are you telling me what was brand new 10 years ago is now not even taught anymore ?

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Fairly much.

user41796

4:39 PM

@JimmyHoffa All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

Jimmy Hoffa

The idea that people would know JSON services but totally clueless of SOAP...

Ampt

This is the 6th time I've made the matrix

user41796

@Ampt bzzzt wrong scifi reference. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Sure but, SOAP isn't even old! I'd expect people to say "Just use JSON" but I wouldn't expect them to not even know about SOAP

blackbee

how to fix space?

user55340

4:40 PM

@blackbee Same as in a post. Though easier to paste and then hit 'fixed font'

user41796

@JimmyHoffa You've got kids. You know that kids hate soap. Of course today's kids would "forget" about things like that.

Ampt

@GlenH7 I'll make my own references then! With hookers and black jack!

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT at that rate you could put together a presentation on the SOAP envelope and detail all the authentication facilities available and transport-agnosticism and sell them on it as new-fangled

shit, perhaps it's time for SOAP to come back already if people are that clueless about it...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa They were actually quite amazed at the generated code, that its deeply structured, and that the code can also generate all the connection plumbing too.

Ampt

did someone say soap?

Jimmy Hoffa

4:42 PM

@blackbee When you put something on a new line, there's a "Fixed font" button that shows up on the right of your chat box

shift+enter to new line

blackbee

got it

user55340

So... anyways... you've got a value, and a function. The standard curve is 'y=x' which is no adjustment.

user41796

@Ampt but that soap burns

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT While you're at it why not introduce them to XSDs, then you'll have a bunch of new green faces all thinking XSLT and XPath are The Win and it'll be like 2004 all over again

user55340

Aside from the chat difficulties, what is the problem you're trying to understand with curves?

Ampt

4:44 PM

I am @GlenH7's Complete Lack of Surprise.

Jimmy Hoffa

@blackbee

Bit blit

Bit blit (also written BITBLT, BIT BLT, BitBLT, Bit BLT, Bit Blt etc., which stands for bit-boundary block transfer) is a computer graphics operation in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a raster operator. The operation involves at least two bitmaps, a source and destination, possibly a third that is often called the "mask" and sometimes a fourth used to create a stencil. The pixels of each are combined bitwise according to the specified raster operation (ROP) and the result is then written to the destination. The ROP is essentially a boolean formula. The most obvious ROP o...

blackbee

ok fine i'll try that later....

Jimmy Hoffa

Render output unit

The render output unit, often abbreviated as "ROP", and sometimes called (perhaps more properly) raster operations pipeline, is one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern 3D accelerator boards. The pixel pipelines take pixel and texel information and process it, via specific matrix and vector operations, into a final pixel or depth value. The ROPs perform the transactions between the relevant buffers in the local memory – this includes writing or reading values, as well as blending them together. Historically the number of ROPs, TMUs, and pixel shaders have been equal. Howe...

gnat

free spam flags...

-1

A: Why don't companies ship multiple modules within a mobile app? Are there concerns about tight coupling?

Mobile apps are hot today. But hiring a programmer is too expensive. I used snappii.com to make apps. It's really easy, the web service allows to make mobile apps in minutes, and without programming skills at all. If you are short of time, they can make an app for you very quickly.

user41796

@Ampt I can't find a good link to reference the quote from Battlestar Galactica. <sigh>

Ampt

4:45 PM

Really? It's not like they had a million seasons to choose from

blackbee

about the curves... i'll explain what i did and what i am trying to do ...

Ampt

Boy, when you take a souvenir, you don't screw around.

user41796

@Ampt yeah, the quote is being attributed incorrectly but I also didn't dig that hard for a link.

Ampt

pretty much anything Adama said is quotable. Pretty sure that was just a part of his character haha.

user41796

@Ampt I remember that quote coming from the hive mind. But there were a ton of great quotes in that series.

Ampt

4:49 PM

I need to watch that again. Maybe not the last season or two

it kinda got weird there

user55340

'kinda'?

blackbee

i actually like a filter from a website.. it was a kind of cross process.. so i made a grayscale image having a discreet gradients.. like rgb(255,255,255) rgb(255-16,255-16,255-16) .. rgb (255-32,255-32,255-32) upto rgb(0,0,0) approx..

then i uploaded the image... put the filter.. downloaded it... took the rgb color values from each distinct part of the gradient and substracted it from the original grayscale image... i now hope that adding the values to the same grayscale image will produce the same effect....

Ampt

ok, it was way out of left field

but you know you watched it because damn did they have a great first 6 seasons

user41796

@Ampt You mean 4?

user41796

List of Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series) episodes

Battlestar Galactica is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore as a re-imagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series created by Glen A. Larson. The series first aired as a three-hour miniseries (comprising four broadcast hours) in December 2003 on the Sci-Fi Channel. The television series debuted in the United Kingdom on Sky1 on October 18, 2004, and premiered in the United States on the Sci-Fi Channel on January 14, 2005. The story arc of Battlestar Galactica is set ...

user55340

4:52 PM

@blackbee I've gotta think about this a bit... currently thinking about some work code.

blackbee

but... that is for distinct color values... like for (0,0,0) i have (48,10,41) and so on... but what about the colors like (0,5,5)... how do i get the corresponding values... so i thought curves may be a way to solve it... first plot the existing points and make the curve and then get the values from their... but i dnt know how to make a curve with that many points.... the brenstein basis function allows only the start point, end point and two control point....

@MichaelT okk... whenever u are free... i would like to discuss

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT @GlenH7 Engineers! Is RAM turing complete without a CPU?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa VTC as unclear on what you're asking.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Yeah, I'm not sure conceptually it even makes sense either. But then people have shown turing completeness with so many things...

I wonder if you could give instructions to RAM that perhaps kickstarted a machine inside of it where it continued turing complete operations without the CPU. I suppose being a passive piece of hardware that doesn't make sense

user41796

RAM is a structure. Turing complete is a tool designation.

Jimmy Hoffa

4:59 PM

Has anyone made turing completeness out of passive things?

user41796

I'm eliding the fact that RAM chips have routines that refresh the stored signal on a periodic basis, but that's generally not something that can be tapped outside of the chip.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 See you're eliding the single part that I thought might make it possible

user41796

But you can't tap the circuitry at that device. To my knowledge, there's not an API to control refresh rates. All that can be done is to request a read or write of sections of memory.

user41796

There's some handshaking / signaling that goes on at the device driver layer but nothing that would come close to constructing a programming language.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I'm talking closer to the hardware level

user41796

5:14 PM

Nah, not even at device driver / kernel level which is as close as you can get.

Jimmy Hoffa

not looking for an API or even a driver, imagine you're writing code in the motherboards BIOS, where it actually manually constructs and sends the signals and sets baud rates and does all of that

user41796

to my knowledge, the answer is still "nope"

Jimmy Hoffa

Real engineers are jerks

user41796

the mainboard is ignorant of the RAM refreshes and what not. Mainboard just knows it has a bus pointing to memory. Chips on the mainboard can ask for sections of the memory to be read or written to

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I've been accurately called much worse. Not my fault that RAM is well encapsulated.

Jimmy Hoffa

5:16 PM

"We can't... we can't!" Phooey! Do we fake engineers say that when we're asked to write a CMS from scratch in a week by somebody with all the excitement of a bottle of diet pills? NO! We spend a week writing some garbage in PHP, call it a CMS, and then enjoy waiting for it to get really big so we can cash in those stock options the twitchy guy promised us!

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I think we've reversed our roles in the conversation we had yesterday.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 That's not totally true, the mainboard has to ask the RAM for it's timings/bus rates/latency/what have you, and often times the mainboard can set these disregarding what the memory wants so it has control over the bus, but that doesn't mean it has control over the RAM... The part that makes me think there's some communication with the RAM that could be used is the fact that if I put a stick of RAM in my box, the motherboard comes up with BIOS knowing all the details about the RAM

There was some kind of request sent to the RAM which caused it to do some kind of processing and send back responses... Alternatively it's dumber than that, there's just standard test paths and tolerances the motherboard uses to prod it's buses for capable settings..

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Or the size is burned into a controller during manufacturing.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Yeah, that was my other thought but I was trying to put it out of my mind

user41796

So it could just be part of the handshake between RAM chip and mainboard. "how much space do you have?" "how fast are you?"

Jimmy Hoffa

5:22 PM

stupid real engineers with their "real world", I prefer being a fake engineer in my fake world where CMS's spring up in a week and all us softwarites get rich off stock options the following week

user41796

this is a case where lazy == simple == goodness.

user41796

stupid real engineers have to design for a manufacturing line and how to most cost-efficiently address design specifications.

user41796

Why put a programmable chip in as a controller when a hard-coded chip is significantly cheaper?

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 stupid real engineers use big words "manufacturing" "address" you're just trying to make my head spin in a whirligig of hundred dollar words!

user41796

Think about trying to update the "bios" of a RAM chip. Blech. Fixed technology has advantages.

user41796

5:24 PM

@JimmyHoffa I think you need more sleep. :-P

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I suspect there's just some RAM configuration spec standard format and they like byte 1-64: size, byte 65: timing, byte 66: latency and they just burned that data into the first 128-byte space on the stick since it's full of storage, they just had to make one tiny section of that storage NV and motherboard manufacturers have agreed to only use the first X section of ram for that and never give access up to systems or something

enderland

stupid bus number problem.

user55340

@GlenH7 But I want to talk directly to the cpu and ignore the bios of the computer to send video images to the screen.

user55340

(ug, it hurt even to type that... much less think that)

enderland

@GlenH7 I did a virtual reality study over the weekend about virtual assembly, and apparently having worked in industry gave me a totally different perspective about how to put this thing together as I thought of all sorts of... real things to worry about :)

user41796

5:29 PM

@MichaelT I assume assembler will be too high level for you? And you'll want that in ML?

user41796

@enderland I think we ought to receive a measure of disability given how working in the industry warps our thought processes.

enderland

@GlenH7 lets just say I doubt the thought process I took was remotely similar to what it was when I was still in school. HA.

so this afternoon I'm going to be broaching the "I might apply for another internal job" convo with my manager in spite of the busfactor=enderland problem

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I suppose so... but I pull it off way better ;D

user41796

@enderland Is that bus Turing complete?

enderland

Jimmy Hoffa

5:35 PM

@enderland From the appearances of the picture there's clearly no guarantees on halting, that thing might just fly away or crash disturbingly to the ground, I'll call it turing complete

user41796

@ThomasOwens - got a follow up reply on that IEEE / PE article. The reply was a bit hand wavy-ish. I think what he meant was "30 states offer the SW PE exam" via NCEES.

user41796

I have asked for additional clarification from him.

Thomas Owens

Yeah. That seems more reasonable. For example, New Hampshire does, but Massachusetts doesn't. Right now, it wouldn't be useful for me professionally since I work in Massachusetts. Unless they have some kind of recognition of each other's licenses (which some states do).

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens I can't imagine anybody seeing "Certified Professional Engineer in the state of New Hampshire" on a resume and thinking "pfah! This isn't New Hampshire, irrelevant!"

Perhaps it won't get you a current bump with your employer but if nothing else it makes clear to them you're serious and you're the kind of person people will try stealing from them, if they care about a thing like that.

enderland

@JimmyHoffa reading this as "you're the kind of person people that will try stealing from them" FTW?

user55340

5:44 PM

@Ampt I remember why I was so confused about the battery now... the "negative" terminal on the lead acid battery... goes to the car frame.

user41796

@ThomasOwens And I think NCEES offers in ~37 or 38 states. So that would align a little well with not all states allowing the SW PE exam as well.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I have mentioned it before I think, but I'll prattle on anyway. Both at current and previous employer, when we review an engineer's resume we checked to see if they list passing the FE and / or PE as part of our screening. And it does form a preference for candidates as you described.

enderland

@GlenH7 la la la la la la la, I can't see this, la la la la la

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Unless the license is in New Hampshire! Clearly only MA issued licenses are the ones you guys look for.

user41796

@enderland - you can use the bus factor to your advantage. Everyone needs a bit of change at some point. Does your boss & the rest of the hierarchy want to keep that knowledge in-house, or do they want it going somewhere else?

user41796

5:51 PM

@JimmyHoffa When I state that I have a PE, I have to indicate what state granted it. But that's a regional thing. Not every state requires that type of disclosure.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland Glen is dead right, I've been given lots of preference in the past just because they wanted to keep me around even if I wasn't doing the stuff for them they didn't have anybody else to do. At least I was still available in case it was really necessary.

enderland

@GlenH7 so it gets awkward because my day to day boss doesn't currently pay my paycheck... (corporate does)

user41796

Since I'm in a border city, we have engineers that are PEs in one state but not the other. And there was some .... opacity a while back that created some issues. So the state boards now require a PE to list what states they are registered in.

enderland

there is a position in a different division, essentially, which is fairly close to what I think I want to do (and matches my background dang well)

user41796

@enderland sounds like your current boss has a little less leverage then.

Undo the Snowman

5:55 PM

Do we have a site for SQL query advice?

enderland

the only leverage he has is the "enderland doesn't want to kill his project and would feel bad" leverage, honestly. the problem too is in my company engineering has a much flatter career path than IT, where the position I'm looking at is, too, so it's even worse

user41796

Your not on his payroll. And you're pitching something that benefits the firm along with him. Doesn't leave him too much room to pitch a fit.

Undo the Snowman

Like, "I want to do this,how?"

enderland

@UndotheSnowman probably StackOverflow works, maybe dba.stackexchange.com

the guys on dba.SE pay attention to the sql on StackOverflow

user55340

SO is probably the better choice for "how to write" DBA would be more the "how to design" question.

Undo the Snowman

5:56 PM

Ah, ok.

user41796

@enderland so maybe the conversation should be "how can we change a smidge of corporate structure to make this work."

enderland

@GlenH7 well except I'd be leaving his project mid-project and a lot of it would die

user55340

That said, we've got some sql minor wizards here too if you don't want the SO question rep.

enderland

@GlenH7 that's my hope, honestly, but i'm not sure I can singlehandedly push that myself

user55340

especially if its Data.SE that you're trying to poke at.

user41796

5:57 PM

@enderland That's just an extended roll-off plan. No biggie.

user41796

He fights the political battle to hold the slot for you. You finish things up, maybe train a replacement. Then you go to smaller pastures.

user55340

0

Q: Combine Data from Two Tables-Help Needed

I have developed a web site with a mysql backend, but am not satisfied with how I am getting one set of data and do not know how to get another dataset. The page in question is at: http://whistclub.org/test/ajax.php?vichill/results/1 The results are shown through October so there is some data ...

mysql

user55340

(and its not particularly off topic here either)

user41796

Not quite sure why you want that last part, but to each his own.

enderland

yeah. I think I'm going to broach the topic like, "so in my current position it's awkward for me, because I know that if I leave this project I'm going to pretty significnatly affect it, but, I am having a hard time balancing this vs my longer term career interests - and the program I'm in means I have to constantly think of this"

user55340

5:59 PM

(I knew I posted an sqlfiddle answer somewhere didn't remember if it was here or SO... turns out it was here... and yea... that was an answer you'd not likely get on SO).

enderland

@MichaelT yeah you deserve more than 25 rep for that answer and effort ha

user55340

@enderland Even had an ascii ER diagram in there!

user55340

Ascii flow rocks - asciiflow.com/#Draw

user41796

@enderland business continuity conversations are always difficult. Doesn't matter what company or what role you're in. If your absence presents a threat to their continuity, it'll always be awkward.

enderland

@GlenH7 you know, I think this is the part which is hard for me - I've never really had to have one of "these" sorts of discussions before

user41796

6:04 PM

@enderland I had that conversation with the VP of a 3k+ employee firm about a business critical application. It's great for job security. But it can be miserable for career prospects.

user55340

Sometimes, its a necessary step (the shakeup) for the company you are leaving to grow.

user55340

Its also a better thing for them to realize they need to do in N weeks time rather than you actually getting hit with a bus.

user55340

(back in Sillicon Valley, I recall seeing many startups completely belly up when a key person got hit by a bus because all of the load bearing "functionality" sat on that one person)

user41796

@MichaelT "well, let's all pack up and go home now. We're done..."

user55340

If you are a load bearing person such that if you left the company today, they'd be going to the accountant tomorrow to ask about how to spin down the company... there's a problem there that needs to be addressed because they can't hire anyone into your position.

user55340

6:09 PM

@GlenH7 fairly much. Its one thing to be shared load bearing, but if its all sitting on you that they can't replace (because they're underpaying, because they've put too much work on you, because you have too much internal knowledge)... there's something bigger wrong with the process / company that needs to be addressed in short order.

user41796

Certainly agree with all of that. Very much a concern whenever you're in that situation.

user55340

(frankly, I know one guy in point of sales at my previous employer who was a solo load bearing person... we expect that if they don't find someone to fill in for him, when he retires (late 50s now), when he leaves there will be a point where a store server goes down and the store won't be able to sell anything for a week or longer)

user41796

Personality issues can be a forcing function too. Sometimes the load bearing point has just had enough of others.

user41796

@MichaelT I'm sure the store could survive a week without any sales... :-)

user55340

The week estimate is how long it would take to build a new store server from scratch, send it out to the store, and inventory the entire store back into it.

user55340

6:14 PM

While me and the other guys who left in a matter of weeks of each other (about 2/3 of the java side programming in the department), were a blow to the process - we wren't load bearing (granted the remaining 1/3 became load bearing). It did however shake up the entire company.

user41796

@MichaelT sometimes those messages have to be delivered, no doubt.

Undo the Snowman

Ok, if anyone here has any idea (this should be fairly basic): I have two tables: a flags table and a users table. The users table has a id field and a username field. The flags table has a handledBy field, which is either NULL or a user id. I'd like to kind of merge the tables together, showing the username field from the users table in the flags table. Any way to do that?

user55340

Still not all the way to being a good place (they need to clean out management and redo it)... but you've got things like flex time and a more relaxed dress code that were implemented within a month of me leaving.

user55340

So, now when my former co-workers go out to lunch, they don't have to worry about getting back within N minutes or getting fired... it has helped things.

user41796

@MichaelT Impressive. Things actually got worse at my previous employer, not better. That told me I was right to not hang around.

user55340

6:17 PM

@GlenH7 Not everything is better... they've still got absurd business plans and deadlines... but at least you don't have to worry about how far away the parking spot from the door is when you punch in to not be late.

user41796

That would be ... crazy. For a salaried, non-retail, not customer facing environment, that's just .... crazy.

user55340

@GlenH7 Its not salaried.

user55340

Or where I was working wasn't salaried... it was hourly.

user55340

(side bit... funny thing, if they'd increase the hourly pay to $27.63, they wouldn't need to pay overtime to programmers...)

user55340

oser.state.wi.us/docview.asp?docid=4271

user41796

6:20 PM

I'll grant a measure more perfunctoriness for an hourly environment. But at the same time my answer would be "you weren't here, you don't get paid."

user55340

> The federal salary test is the more stringent test: it requires executive, administrative, and professional employees to earn a weekly salary of at least $455 per week. Computer employees must earn a weekly salary of at least $455 per week or be paid $27.63 or higher per hour. Some computer employees may be exempt under the administrative test

user55340

Because they'd we'd fall into the exempt status for overtime.

user41796

I'm trying to wrap my head around that hourly rate....

user55340

Exempt employees don't get paid overtime. Things like farm workers, healthcare and such. Computer programmers also fall into that category if we are paid above a certain amount which means that our work is more mental than menial.

user41796

As in: they weren't paying at least some of you that much? Yikes.

user55340

6:22 PM

(ie: data entry paid $15/h is a computer worker, but paid overtime. Programmer paid $30/h is a computer worker but not getting overtime)

user55340

@GlenH7 They had a funny bonus structure. Even JM (owner of company) was paid on the same payscale as us... he just got big year end bonsues.

user41796

ah, ok. That makes a lot more sense.

user55340

And then many times you're doing 45, 50, 55 h/week just to get what you need done... well, there's a lot of money in that.

user41796

@MichaelT Still leaves a fair amount of room for the bonus to make up.

user55340

Some people even knew how to 'play' payroll. If you worked from 7-3, and then 6-9 pm... that 6-9 pm was logged as second shift, which was a +$2.50. Weekends also counted another +$2.50/h.

user41796

6:25 PM

If those are the rules they want to have in place .... okay...

user55340

But thats because we were all working in the same payroll system that they wouldn't change.

user55340

(and they wonder why they're having trouble finding people)

user41796

My previous employer was pretty rigid in how they thought they wanted to handle accounting and payroll.

user55340

Here, one day last week we got email at 2pm from people who left early for whatever reason saying the roads were bad, and it would be best if we left before the sun went down... shrug we went home early.

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT When I was a TA, I tended to do my grading and stuff on the weekend night shifts. I made like an extra $1/hour.

Now, I'm paid the same no matter when I work.

user55340

6:30 PM

I remember the week when we did an IP change in a store... was a sunday night (stores close at 8pm, End Of Day done by 9pm giving us the most time before the store opens the next day if anything goes wrong...) That lasted until 4am. 7h (no breaks), second shift, weekend, and then another 45h that week... that was a nice paycheck.

user55340

(the stores had the IP scheme of: 10.XX.YY.ZZ -- so the store 3011 was 10.30.11.ZZ -- but this only gave 254 ip addresses in a store. We needed to add some subnets within it for credit card processing systems that the rest of the store didn't see... once doing that, suddenly we didn't have enough ip addresses because each subnet takes another 2 addresses and it was tight before)

user41796

@MichaelT as opposed to mapping store numbers to class B or C ranges? yikes.

user55340

@GlenH7 Well, each store now has 4x blocks of 256. However, the code was fun. There was lots of code that expected the take a store number split it, and use that as the ip address...

user41796

@MichaelT Sooooo glad I never worked there.

user55340

10.30.11.1 was the ip address of the store server. 10.30.11.2 was the ip address of the failover machine for the server. 10.30.11.1XN was the Nth salesdesk machine of the department number. Ie: Plumbing (200) PC 1 was 10.30.11.121 ...

user55340

6:37 PM

And when we started doing this, we had to find all the code that was doing these calculations and change it to use the dns name instead. Not a bad thing... but it was a big change.

enderland

I guess in some sense, this conversation is making me realize that a single project isn't that big of a deal. It might matter a ton for my boss but it's not a mission critical application (well, yet, lol)

user41796

@enderland See, you need to move on before you make a mistake like the one just described.

user55340

(note that some departments only had 2 machines... so we'd use the 3, 4, 5 of those departments for kiosks and other department spill over... Millwork for example had 15 different machine configurations, and the machine name was the configuration key... so there was special case code there to handle identifying if a machine was millwork or hardware (they didn't have any kiosks, so thats where that department spilled into)

enderland

@GlenH7 the bright side is I matter of factly AM going to be moving on in 4-6 months because I'm on a rotational type thing anyways, so that's helpful

user55340

The 1X0 machine is the address of the timeclock, and 1x9 machine was the computer that ran the display for the department.

user55340

6:41 PM

This caused problems with departments that weren't really departments... like cashiers and the front end... so they used 200 and 209.

enderland

@GlenH7 you're right on this though. On the phone I talked with the IT manager and basically told her as much, that in engineering world anyone doing any sort of develoment basically is immediately pigeon holed (not to mention having no teammates who can mentor/coach you in development). YOU guys are basically that for me at the moment ;-)

user55340

(I want you to start thinking about how do you code all of these rules in place... and then find them...)

user41796

@enderland Glad to be here for you. :-)

user41796

@MichaelT I just wouldn't approach it that way. <sigh>

user41796

Even when I built out my 30 server + 100 workstation environment.... Never did I imagine hard coding the IP addresses like that.

enderland

6:44 PM

but it's so much easier to just hard code the IP! don't worry about expand-ability or maintenance, those are someone else's problems

user55340

@enderland Bingo. Want your store server? Sure, take your ip address, drop the last byte, replace it with 1. You're done.

user41796

@enderland roll-off before roll-out.

user41796

@MichaelT that's true. Lookup tables are soooo ugly looking.

enderland

every time I have situatinos like that I always ask myself, "will I cry a little in the future if I just hard code this?" and if the answer is yes well... it's generally worth making easier :-)

user55340

@GlenH7 Well, now its a java library (that I had written) that has a bunch of methods and enums and such. You call it and get back the ip address for the machine you want... or find out info about the machine from the ip address (that then goes and looks up info in dns)

user55340

6:50 PM

The real fun was in the "this is my name, what is my ip address" thing on windows. Because sometimes the name would get clobbered in strange ways.

user55340

I had a ~300 line long function that tried to figure out what the machine really is named and what store it was at and such.

user55340

That jar also contained a main method so that when something broke (often did), the person could go in and "run" the library to get debugging information about where it thought it was.

user41796

@MichaelT Not surprised. Probably would have helped if you had something more modern than Win95 to program against. Win95 still didn't get the idea of networks... :-)

user55340

@GlenH7 Actually, we still had one machine running '95. Most of it was running... XP I think.

user55340

I know that it was last year that they finally got around to the IE8 update.

user41796

6:55 PM

@MichaelT That's .... awesome. So amazingly awesome. 'Cause Win98 and it's whole "second edition" was just too much.

user55340

Why update a machine that works? It had a funky .dll for working with a magnetic card reader that was a pain to install anywhere else. They had the image for building it. All it did was launch IE in kiosk mode.

user41796

@MichaelT My mind is rolling through the number of network exploits that could have been used to compromise that machine

user55340

@GlenH7 ssh. Don't even think of that. What do you think the magnetic card reader was reading? Network shmetwork...

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