English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

1:00 PM

@Robusto It means don’t prematurely optimize.

Robusto

Ah.

tchrist

And when you think you should, never do so without running a real profiler on it, with real data.

Robusto

Yes. Get things working in all their aspects first, then find the places that actually need optimization.

tchrist

@snailboat Want is the root of all woe.

Look, male altos.

Jasper Loy

Want and woe both start with w.

tchrist

1:02 PM

The doubling is for um, I think the Agnus Dei and Dona, maybe just the Dona.

skullpatrol

waste not, want not

tchrist

@JasperLoy The point was to create a version without Latin.

And also to make something funny for Jonathan Ross to say. :)

WOOT! WOOT!

Robusto

I especially like "Treat warnings as errors until proven otherwise." It makes me nuts when people simply ignore all warnings.

tchrist

@Rob Once upon a time, I met a young fellow in Lisbon who was taking some of my on-site Perl courses. We found that we both could sing the whole Bm together. It was wonderful. Only problem was that he too was a tenor. :)

Robusto

If I had my way there would be no [WARNING] or [ERROR] statements in the log.

@tchrist Problematic.

tchrist

1:05 PM

@Robusto Now, that is an interesting point of controversy.

@Robusto Likes calls to like.

What goes in the log depends on what the log will be used for.

In our case, an ERROR usually triggered a page-out to support.

And the bastards ignored the WARNING.

Robusto

Yeah. But I feel a WARNING is an ERROR waiting to happen. You just haven't encountered the right conditions for it yet.

tchrist

So they would configure things so that the ERROR config was commented out, and the WARNINGs kept going and going and going.

So as my final feat, almost my final checkin, I made the WARNINGs in my last major project “age”.

Boy, was prod support subjoyed by that one.

Robusto

So are you currently looking for new work? Or have you found something already?

tchrist

#1.

Robusto

Good luck. You'll find something soon, I'm sure.

tchrist

1:09 PM

I may have to take a C job just because the Perl jobs are all webbish which I despise, and I want to do back end stuff.

The previous one was good because it had huge amounts of Perl although the core processing was all C or C++.

When you are getting 8 billion events a day, you really don’t have time to mess around.

So things like file checkers or viewers or fetch/put upstream/downstream stuff was in Perl.

Robusto

How bad are they failing now that they let the staff go?

tchrist

I did prototype a Perl version of a SIP processor, but it was only getting through like 300 records per second and I wanted 10,000.

Depends on the group.

One project lost 4 of its 5 devs.

Plus the employee hits aren’t scheduled till June 6th and/or 20th.

Mine was especially hard hit because I was one of the 3 stateside seniors who unravelled production issues, from performance to coredumps to tracking down "bad" billing records after the fact.

There are two other stateside people, but they are no good for that.

And the rest are off shore, so cannot see the call data.

My group’s “product” was growing by leaps and bounds. We were going nuts trying to handle the volume.

Over 100% annual growth rate for the last like 3 years.

As the lead and the release manager, I certainly thought I was safe.

So did my Director.

They lied to him, or changed their minds. Very rude.

Robusto

Nobody's ever safe when the people who make the money decisions don't understand technology.

tchrist

Not that "release manager" is a de-facto thing once QA gets the release.

I was doing the job of three normal people.

In terms of responsibilities, output product, and domain expertise.

They were trying to make me an employee for 18 months to protect me from this nonsense.

Lots of anger.

I will find another job.

They will not find another me.

And they need one. Or five.

Robusto

I've been at places where they didn't think it important to have a release engineer. In one, they thought it a good plan to make everybody take a turn at running the release. I used to say, "Why not let the janitors do the surgery at the hospital then?"

tchrist

1:18 PM

I was the go-to guy for anything in the kernel, or shell scripts, or Perl programs, or C programs. And even the C++ folks would get stuff wrong.

@Robusto They kind of did that when I got there. It was a mess. Just one of the things I fixed.

Because I automated all the stuff you have to do.

They were constantly forgetting things.

Things a program could have checked.

So I made it do so.

Robusto

It hurts even to remember this.

tchrist

This is 1980s tech.

That’s why I could do it in my sleep.

I mean, they still use RCS!

With wrappers.

Like you can’t check something into the tree without the change request ticket number.

Robusto

Something charmingly Victorian/Edwardian about girls in their pinafores.

tchrist

So each release has a list of those. I simply fed that list into a program that had access to the RCS tree and made sure that anything checked in by those numbers was part of the release. Yes, they didn’t auto-include everything in a release.

RegDwigнt

This website is bad and filled with unsupportive people. I will never return because of this. Thanks for your HELP. — John Smith 7 hours ago

tchrist

1:22 PM

Because it had 1500 production config files.

RegDwigнt

Seriously. Check out the friggin question that comment's on.

-3

Q: Critical analysis of the picture of childhood, written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I have an important exam on this poem and i was hoping that people in this website can help. Thanks

questions

Robusto

@RegDwigнt Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, John.

tchrist

Wow.

RegDwigнt

That's it. That's the whole "question". He doesn't even say which poem he has in mind.

tchrist

What happened was that he thought he was in chat.

skullpatrol

1:23 PM

@RegDwigнt Another satisfied customer :-)

RegDwigнt

@skullpatrol another good riddance.

tchrist

Reg, I have something I would like you to please help me with. Will take you two seconds. Let me get the ref.

RegDwigнt

One Mississippily.

Robusto

If you work harder, could you possily alienate more of these trolls?

tchrist

I don’t know why the spam algorithm doesn’t catch our recent flurry.

I know it is not adaptive, but damn it, adapt || die!

Yes, that’s right.

Thanks so much.

RegDwigнt

1:28 PM

What spammer is it?

tchrist

The one who keeps putting phone numbers in the titles.

RegDwigнt

Is Varikrishna back again?=

Ah yes, that'd be him.-

tchrist

Peut-être.

RegDwigнt

What's with my punctuation.-

Oh FFS I really do it every single time.

Fat fingers.

tchrist

@RegDwigнt This one.

What I want to know is why I can't see that particular posting, which I spam-flagged, in my flagging history.

I wonder when they will start using something more adaptive as the commons get increasingly abused.

Ok, how did Community get on the poetaster’s case so fast?

@Reg Do you feel comfortable with the workload on the current (active) ELU moderators, or would an election of a new one or two help you guys? No of course I am not volunteering for the job: EVER. I just wondered if it is still in hand.

@Robusto My Perl programs were running just as fast as some of their C programs, but none of the Byzantine juniors writing that code have any actual experience in writing stuff that has to be tight and small and fast. Too much Java generation. And my C programs are 10–100x faster than my Perl programs, unless they’re a job Perl should have been doing from the start, in with case the factor is only about e times faster.

I got so incensed with how they kept using fgets on a fixed buffer length. Of course we would get records longer than that. So now you have two bad records, but the truncated one and the next one, since they never thought to flush to end of line. I kept making them convert to getline instead, which has no fixed limit.

I would find copies of the same function in 8, 20, even 45 programs when it should have been in a library.

Hell, there were often 8–12 copies of the same code chunk in the same damned program. Like, you guys ever hear of a subroutine?

Honest, they committed every possible sin from the code-smells handbook in nearly every program.

Apparently their “education” system does not teach against those things.

But even my mom thought they were doing crazy shit. Note: she is a retired HS biology&compsci teacher. She said she’d ding them on all of that.

That’s why my top two book recommendations are what they are, and in that order.

They can’t manager parent–child relationships tolerably either.

Never check the status of the exited kid. So don’t detect errors, including coredumps.

Anonymous

1:49 PM

@tchrist Which two books are those?

tchrist

The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, by W. Richard Stevens

And even when they thought to check, they would only check the high byte.

skullpatrol

Have you read any of Knuth's books?

tchrist

@skullpatrol Do I sound like an idiot?

skullpatrol

no

tchrist

Then you have your answer.

Of course, those are mandatory reading.

skullpatrol

1:53 PM

all of them?

tchrist

    In addition to the Perl-related publications listed above, the
    following books aren’t about Perl directly, but still come in handy for
    reference, consultation, and inspiration.

      * The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth, volumes I-III:
      “Fundamental Algorithms”, “Seminumerical Algorithms”, and “Sorting
      and Searching”; Addison–Wesley (1998).

      * Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest; MIT
      Press and McGraw–Hill (1990).

      * Algorithms in C, by Robert Sedgewick; Addison–Wesley (1990).

No, I avoided II for a long time because I didn’t want to work in that world.

And it was the first one I was thrust into.

I found I and III more useful to me.

RegDwigнt

@tchrist I have no strong feelings one way or the other, depends on the day really, but we already skipped the elections last year so I'd say we should not skip another year.

tchrist

And um, I think that’s out of date.

Ok thanks Reg.

I haven’t read the newest; should I?

The 4a piece.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

2:08 PM

@tchrist do you type brackets, braces, and parentheses in matching pairs and then fill them in?

tchrist

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Yes, I do, actually. Why do you ask?

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@tchrist just curious. I've recently extended my own practice to quotation marks.

I started doing it when programming, which I don't do much of anymore. It extended to phone numbers in my notes at work, making links in this chat, and, as of today, quotation marks.

tchrist

Certainly it easier to type Opt-[ immediately followed by Shift-Opt-[ and then a ^B to keep typing.

For the doubles. Make [ into ] for singles.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

I'll take your word for it.

I haven't touched any fruit computers since that ][e in grade school.

c c

Is there a way to make Chrome replace downloaded files instead of (1), (2), ... ? it drives me crazy sometimes

Alraxite

2:19 PM

@cc superuser.com/questions/462008/…

Mehrdad seems to have a solution.

c c

> I am not responsible for lost data. - author

hehe

indeed possibly 2 different files will have the same name, but that would be rare

@Alraxite thanks I'll try

basically if you never keep important files in Downloads, you're safe

@Alraxite what was your google request for finding it, may I ask, interesting to know?

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+chome+download+auto-numbering

Matt Эллен

2:58 PM

OMFG! There's a SWR.se going into private beta

it's for crosswords and stuff

all our SWRs can go away

@KitFox your pleas have been answered

c c

Scandinavian Weekend Radio? Safe Withdrawal Rate?

Matt Эллен

single-word-requests

c c

My orange juice has a very strong and unpleasant drug taste

Matt Эллен

have you just brushed your teeth with minty toothpaste?

c c

no, that's really those 3 juice bricks that are contamined with a deadly thing, argh

Matt Эллен

3:13 PM

oh well. better luck next time!

c c

yep, if I survive to the genetic mutations

Matt Эллен

or are reincarnated

tchrist

@cc single-white-rascal from the personals column

c c

:))

Johan Larsson

3:37 PM

When intellisense|R# breaks down I think of people who write other languages

then I restart VS

R on dotnet?

resharper, a plugin

oh ok

r# is buggy as hell

it crashed my VS a few times

Johan Larsson

3:53 PM

it is both good and bad

I'm so used to it that I miss it when I don't have it

Robusto

@MattЭллен What's a word that starts with "f" and ends in "uck"? Firetruck. What were you thinking/

Excuse me: fire lorry.

Mitch

@cc It's the antibiotics. To kill off the genetically mutated orange blight (which causes stunted growth of the fruit and excessive seed production).

Anonymous

@Robusto Firetruck isn't in /usr/share/dict/words :-(

c c

@Mitch ah, that explains it, but did they over-dosed them a bit?

thanks, it's supposed to be a 'Bio' product too

Mitch

@MattЭллен just relabel them as crossword hints but with no letters.

Anonymous

3:57 PM

It's in COCA's word list! :-)

Robusto

@snailboat That's a problem with your dictionary.

Anonymous

@Robusto Well, it's just one word list.

Mitch

@cc Well, it's poor administration management and evolutionary theory. Not enough antibiotics and the stuff that survive is more and more resistant. So you have to apply more.

Robusto

And since I used it in mine either it already existed or I created it. Either way, it exists now. ^_^

Anonymous

@Robusto Oh, believe me, I don't consider /usr/share/dict/words to be the arbiter of What Is A Word

Anonymous

3:59 PM

That would be silly.

Mitch

@snailboat You'd think they'd have more than just one word in that list. I"m sure it works great if that's the word you're looking for.

c c

@Robusto facial-hair-pluck

Mitch