/dev/chat

Gaslight is a 1940 British film directed by Thorold Dickinson which stars Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and features Frank Pettingell. The film adheres more closely to the original play upon which it is based – Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light (1938) – than the better-known 1944 MGM adaptation. The play had been shown on Broadway as Angel Street, so when the film was released in the United States it was given the same name. According to the TCM database, it has also been released in the UK as A Strange Case of Murder. == Plot == Alice Barlow (Marie Wright) is murdered by an unknown man, who then...

Gaslight (1944 film)

Gaslight is an American 1944 mystery-thriller film adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light. It was the second version to be filmed, following the British film Gaslight, directed by Thorold Dickinson and released in 1940. This 1944 version was directed by George Cukor and starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and 18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her screen debut. It had a larger scale and budget than the earlier film, and lends a different feel to the material. To avoid confusion with the first film, this version was in the UK originally given the title The Murder in Thornton...

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Oh. You are suggesting the sight is messing with me? I wish I was that important.

derobert

@FaheemMitha No. We're messing with you. The sound is indeed different. Just everyone else is saying otherwise.

To convince you that you've lost your marbles.

Faheem Mitha

3:58 PM

@derobert Oh, I see. That is truly fiendish. Congratulations.

I don't think I ever owned any marbles, though.

Though I might have forgotten.

Apparently some nutjob flew a German passenger plane into a mountain. There are some interesting people out there.

derobert

@FaheemMitha That would be an amazing nutjob. I mean, flying Hamburg into a mountain is impressive.

UGH, you edited to fix it :-( Or not. Or yes. I'M CONFUSED.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Serves you right. Depending on typos for humor? Seinfeld would not be impressed.

derobert

It's OK. His show got canceled. I've never had a show get canceled.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Good for you. And I thought it ended, not got cancelled.

They all end up in jail. That's what you get for making a show about nothing.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Not sure what the politics behind it ending were.

Faheem Mitha

4:06 PM

@derobert I think Seinfeld decided to end it.

"He refused NBC's offer of $5 million per episode, or more than $100 million total, to continue the show into a tenth season."

Courtesy of WP.

derobert

"…Seinfeld told the network that he was not married and had no children, and wished to focus on his personal life.[85][48]"

Wow, that sounds like a politician resigning in disgrace. "Need to spend more time with my family", etc.

Faheem Mitha

Strange show. But somewhat symptomatic of late 20th century US culture. I watched the parking garage episode yesterday. Very clever.

@derobert Dunno, maybe he got bored. And had enough money.

Though he could have done it for another year and given it to charity. There sure is a lot of money in advertising.

A tv show about four people who hang out for no particular reason, don't even seem to like each other, and have random trivial things happen to them . Wild ratings success. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

derobert

4:26 PM

Am I being too harsh here?

We're certainly happy to help you solve any issues you run into while writing your shell script, but most of the experts here are much less willing to write the whole thing for you (unless its particularly interesting). So, please edit your question to tell us what you've tried—narrow it down to the particular part that isn't working, etc. I'd use a combination of head, tr, and sed—or just perl... — derobert 49 secs ago

casey

4:49 PM

sounds fine to me

Braiam

@derobert sounds like explaining your son why he can't get sweets before dinner :P

derobert

LOL

mattdm

5:11 PM

0

Q: does curl -Ls 'http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=r2jYDZaw' mean it will not output anything?

Does the s in -Ls mean that nothing should be outputted? If so what will be the output then?

I was kind of shocked, given the asker's username, that the URL does not redirect to youtube....

Faheem Mitha

@Braiam I don't see what is wrong with sweets before dinner.

terdon

6:37 PM

@mattdm heh, understandable.

And welcome back, long time no see!

terdon

7:19 PM

Wow! 110 rep (so far) and a silver badge for reading a man page!

Faheem Mitha

I'm puzzled. I am able to edit deleted posts here, but not on Home Improvement, where I have 160k rep. Is this some rep related thing? If so, strange.

derobert

@mattdm I'd suggest animemusicvideos.org/members/members_vidpreview.php?v=163251 but you have to sign up for a free account there, unfortunately.

Couldn't find a copy on teh GoogleTubes

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I guess people like it when you read man pages for them.

This says you cannot edit self-deleted questions, but I was doing so just the other day.

10

A: Couple of issues with Roomba Turbocharging

The issue with retag being different from edit is moot, as retag is gone. With edit, it is now enabled on deleted questions, unless they are self deletes, as this can open a window to abuse (self delete, edit and later undelete immediately). You can now also see revisions on your own deleted qu...

derobert

@FaheemMitha you were doing it on an answer, not a question. Quite possibly that's different.

(Whether it should be or not is of course a different matter...)

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Oh, right. I was doing it on an answer. Hmm.

And in this case, I'm trying to do it on a question.

That's called missing the obvious.

derobert

7:30 PM

@FaheemMitha It's OK. Last night I was troubleshooting an issue while trying to play anime. For some reason, mpv wasn't reading the file-specific .conf file (which in my case contains volume leveling).

Well, it only worked when I ran mpv directly, not via my script that automatically plays the next episode, marks it played, etc.

After much debugging, including looking through a bunch of strace output...

I found that the script was clearly saying that it was playing a different episode than I was playing by hand. OOOPS.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert yes, it's annoying when that kind of thing happens.

Sometimes seeing the obvious can be the hardest thing. That's one reason working with other people is a good idea. Your blind spots are rarely someone elses.

derobert

There was another person in the room. Unfortunately, he was busy looking up Disgaea on his tablet...

Faheem Mitha

@derobert This is at work, I suppose.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, one can't rely on people to rescue you. Though it is nice when it happens. And is part of the reason Stack Exchange exists.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Nah, at home.

@FaheemMitha That's one of those things that's almost impossible to ask on Stack Exchange. Either it'd be a massive TLDR or I'd manage to boil it down enough that it'd be impossible to miss the file names being different (or rapidly closed as a typo)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.018;
use strict;
use warnings qw(all);
use autodie;

use Sort::Naturally qw(ncmp);
use IO::Prompter;
use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
use POSIX qw(mkfifo);

use Data::Dump qw(pp);

my @VIDEO_EXTENSIONS = qw( asf avi flv mkv mov mp4 mpeg mpg ogm rm webm wmv );
my $FILE_MANGLER = sub {
	local $_ = shift;
	s/\(.+?\)//g;
	s/\[.+?\]//g;
	s/\{.+?\}//g;
	y/_-/ /;
	s/\s+/ /g;
	s/^\s+//g;
	return $_;
};
my $FORCE_LAST = qr/\b (?: (?:NC)?ED\d? | (?:NC)?OP\d? | xxLASTxx ) \b/x;

1 == @ARGV || 2 == @ARGV or die "Usage: $0 show-directory [n]";

@FaheemMitha that's the script, as you can see fairly long for a question...

I'm not sure while FILE_MANGLER is like that. I think it used to be an array of multiple functions.

Faheem Mitha

7:51 PM

@derobert Sure. I was not suggesting one can ask about just anything on SE and get a useful answer. Though often one can boil down a complicated question into something simpler, which can then be asked. Or you might figure out the answer yourself by doing so.

@derobert That's a complicated script.

But I've seen longer things on SE.

Actions: kick-mute this user.

That sounds fairly aggressive. What does it do? And are there any volunteers to be kick-muted?

Hey, I asked basically this question here not long ago

0

Q: Exclude directories with locate search

A search with locate finds paths in the filesystem. Often, you know a priori you are interested in either files only, or directories only. A 'locate' search often returns many results. It would be useful to include only one of the types in the result, because it helps shorten the output. But the...

files find directory locate

Oh, no, he wants to do locate. My question was about find.

Apparently I can't kick-mute everyone, just @Fabby and @DavidFreitag. Must be a rep thing.

Fabby

Only people with lower rep then you... ;-)

David Freitag

@FaheemMitha I would assume so, considering how little rep I have.

Faheem Mitha

@Fabby No.

I mean, yes, I'm sure such an action (whatever it is) is restricted to people with lower rep than myself, but not all such persons, apparently.

Fabby

Maybe higher rep on another site???

Faheem Mitha

@Fabby Dunno. I'm sure if Gilles was here, he'd know the answer. Though he is technically here - he's in 10 chat rooms at the moment, including this one.

David Freitag

8:00 PM

@FaheemMitha It couldn't hurt to ping him ;]

Faheem Mitha

Does anyone know how to dynamically adjust font size in emacs?

@DavidFreitag No, I don't want to bother him. He's a busy guy, trying to be in 10 places at once.

Or possibly more.

I found

David Freitag

@FaheemMitha I feel like if there's anyone I know who could handle that, it's Gilles.

Faheem Mitha

but that just lets me reduce font size, and not in a smooth way. I asked on the emacs chat too.

@DavidFreitag handle what?

6

Q: Transiently adjust text size in mode line and minibuffer?

When working with others around a shared monitor or via screen-sharing (e.g. Google Hangout), I often use text-scale-adjust (C-x C-+) to let others more easily read my screen. I would love to be able to also transiently increase the text size of the mode line and minibuffer in the selected frame...

mode-line minibuffer

David Freitag

@FaheemMitha Being in >10 places at once.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidFreitag Oh, that. Yes.

derobert

8:07 PM

@FaheemMitha It should basically throw someone out of the room. Or at least prevent them from talking, they can still read it AFAIK (which can't be prevented, as anonymous can read it)

@FaheemMitha you're a room owner, so you can do that to any non-mod here.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Hmm. Where mod is defined as someone who is a mod somewhere on SE?

derobert

@FaheemMitha Yep. Anyone with a diamond after their name.

So it should work on me. But not on, say, terdon or casey.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Yes, that agrees with what I'm seeing.

derobert

Or Gilles. Won't work on him.

Faheem Mitha

Actually, of the 9 people currently in this room, 5 are mods.

derobert

8:11 PM

Yep. Its worse on :!chat (the vi room)

Faheem Mitha

terdon, gilles, casey, seth. michael

derobert

I suspect people more active on SE are likely to be in chat, and also more likely to be mods...

Someone who isn't active doesn't get elected or appointed mod.

And chat doesn't seem to be that popular.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert agreed.

@derobert seems to depend on the channel. Some are positively crowded.

derobert

True, though I'm not on any of those. What percent of those channels are mods?

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Dunno. I'm too lazy to check. But probably not many.

derobert

8:13 PM

4 out of 10 of the Bridge's regulars are mods

Gamedev only one

A few others it looks like 2.

Faheem Mitha

Look at python.

Python

Room rules: sopython.com/chatroom Code formatting guide: tinyu...

12

14

Super busy, for some reason.

derobert

I looked and found chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/21000/python .. which is probably wrong.

Yeah. Because SO has its own chat server.

Faheem Mitha

I count 32 people.

@derobert so?

derobert

SO → Stack Overflow

chat.stackoverflow.com/?tab=all&sort=people

Faheem Mitha

They've even got their own private language.

derobert

8:17 PM

meta.SE has its own chat server as well, I think there are only three.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert No, I meant, so what? "so" the word, not the acronym.

derobert

Ohhhh. I checked the biggest rooms on chat.SE, so I didn't stumble across the big ones on chat.SO.

C++ room is huge on chat.SO. Same with the other big langauges—PHP, JS, C#, Python. But not Java. That's smaller than even R.

At least the C# people have a sense of humor, it appears. "Th̶̰͖͖̗͇e͏͙͈ ̞̜̼̱̺͖̰͟p̵̪̮̙̘̲̪̘r̘̭̼͍͝ͅe̙͓̣̺͞ͅf͏̭̳̭͔͎e̜̺͇ṟ͕͙͈͔̘r̢e͎̫͙̫̣̗d̴͕̟̤͇ͅ ̬̞̞̱͞p̸͓͖̤̝̺̟ŗ̪̭̪̤̬̫o̱g̘̜ṛa̩͈m̸̲̥̮͍͚̫̮m̪̩̲̱̦͖͕i̳̪͕̫̲n̜̻͞g ̸͉̹̮͚͉̜̤l̗̜͙̝͎̖͍͞ḁ̖̳̙̠ͅn̯̯̫g̲̲͚͡ṷ̩̟͈̞̺a͏͙̰̭ͅg̨͙̳̩͙̙e̱ ̷͇o̮̪̗̥f̷ ̀C̜t̢̙̫͙͇̣̯̠ḩ͉̟̗̪̼u̵̬̻l̯̠h̨̲̣͇͈̲u͇̲̞̫͕̻̩.
"

chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/7/c

Faheem Mitha

Those C++ people are not very friendly. I made the mistake of asking a couple of questions there once. It's like one of the nastier IRC channels.

derobert

@FaheemMitha did they delete you?

Faheem Mitha

@derobert no. mostly they ignored me.

That's the kiss of death to an attention-seeker like me.

derobert

8:25 PM

Ah, too bad. If they deleted you, then you could invite a sock puppet with you, and laugh at their undefined behavior from using delete instead of delete[].

Faheem Mitha

@derobert I don't do C++ jokes, sorry. Mostly, I run away screaming from things C++. If I can.

I was talking to Robert on #lisp who said (this would actually be a good SE question) that using RAII is a 10% performance hit. So his reasoning is, if you are going to do that, switch to a language with automatic garbage collection. Like CL.

You know C++. What do you think?

He said professional programmers are basically clueless about performance. They use C++ because they think it is fast. They then do all sorts of things that will slow it down.

Which kind of destroys the only reason to use C++.

I've got fairly good performance out of C++ myself, I think. But I'm no expert.

@muru shouldn't IIT students be too busy to answer questions on SE?

muru

@FaheemMitha we should... but this is my way of procrastination.

Faheem Mitha

@muru I thought IIT students were supposed to have wills of iron, and not procrastinate. I am sadly disappointed.

Ah, another vi user. @derobert, you have a kindred soul.

muru

@FaheemMitha Wills of iron? I consider myself lucky if I knew two guys with wills of iron.

Faheem Mitha

What India needs is more people with iron wills.

And more emacs users, of course.

muru

8:39 PM

@FaheemMitha All the will in the word isn't gonna help if you're headed the wrong way.

@FaheemMitha Blasphemer!

Faheem Mitha

@muru the wrong way? you mean India?

@muru Hey, that's the holy Church of Emacs you are talking about.

derobert

@FaheemMitha It's been a while since I've done serious C++ work. I can believe manual memory management is a performance hit, depending on the workload (as it may lead to cache thrashing)

muru

@FaheemMitha Humanity in general, but India would do just as well.

derobert

Blanket performance statements are rather worrying, though...

Faheem Mitha

@derobert I don't really get the 10% thing though.

I mean, wouldn't it depend?

derobert

8:40 PM

Yeah. The costs are going to vary a lot with the workload.

Faheem Mitha

But I get the feeling Robert doesn't much like C++. He's not alone, of course...

derobert

If you're constantly allocating and deallocating things, that's going to cost. Of course, if you're constantly allocating, and then the GC struggles to keep up...

Faheem Mitha

Hang on, RAII is not really manual memory management. And I may have been misquoting Robert. He was talking about smart pointers.

Which certainly belong to RAII, but isn't exactly the same thing.

derobert

RAII is semi-automatic management

Faheem Mitha

@derobert right.

I actually like smart pointer, and always use them. They make C++ less nightmarish.

derobert

8:42 PM

So there is an advantage to batching together cleanup—the cleanup code, data structures, etc. get loaded into the CPU caches once, run, and then they're gone.

Faheem Mitha

But yes, they might not be a good idea performance wise.

@derobert Can one do that with smart pointers?

derobert

@FaheemMitha Sure, you could write a smart-pointer class that shoved all its work on to a queue, and then only did all the deallocates, destructor calls, etc. every N msec.

But it'd break RAII, which is mainly a convenience thing.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert and that would be efficient?

@derobert oh

derobert

@FaheemMitha Depends on the workload. If those destructors are cache-heavy, it probably would be.

Faheem Mitha

RAII is pretty useful.

@derobert ok. I thought you wrote C++ professionally, though.

derobert

8:45 PM

RAII is also used to guarantee, e.g., once you leave this block, this file, socket, etc. will be closed.

That's useful, and if you queued all those up, when the files close would be unpredictable.

GC is nice, it isn't magic though. You trade off a constant slight slowdown from manual cleanup for an unpredictable huge slowdown from GC.

Overall, GC is often faster. But often predictable performance is more important.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Efficient GC is a difficult problem.

derobert

GC's real advantage is that you don't have to remember to free the mallocs. The computer does it for you :-)

Faheem Mitha

@derobert right.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Yep. And many, many GC systems are legendary for annoying GC pauses.

Faheem Mitha

The problem with manual is that it is easy to do wrong. And then you get bugs. But I've never done manual. I've always used smart pointers.

derobert

8:49 PM

Smart pointers are a form of GC, basically they're reference counting.

Mark-and-sweep is usually faster, due to cache effects. But it has those bloody pauses...

Faheem Mitha

@derobert very manual GC.

derobert

Yes, but better than without them!

Faheem Mitha

@derobert you mean better than a totally manual approach? malloc/calloc/free/new/delete?

Long shot, but does anyone here have any idea?

0

Q: The reliability of inverter air conditioners

I'm considering buying a new split unit air conditioner for my home. Actually, this will be for a room that is planned as a short-term rental. I'm located in Bombay, India, now referred to as Mumbai. One question I am facing is whether an inverter or a regular air-conditioner is a better choice....

air-conditioning

derobert

I've never seen an inverter air conditioner.... Only the on-off type.

Faheem Mitha

9:11 PM

@derobert ok

But you are familiar with the concept?

I thought there were becoming quite common.

Faheem Mitha

9:27 PM

This looks handy.

37

Q: Is it possible to reboot a Linux OS without rebooting the hardware?

Is there a way to reboot a Linux system (Debian in particular) without rebooting the hardware? I have a RAID controller that takes a bit to get itself running before the OS starts up, and I would like it if there was a way to quickly reboot the Linux OS without having to go through the whole reb...

linux debian raid

Gilles

10:50 PM

@derobert legendary, as in, we've heard about them from our grandparents but never actually saw them

GC pauses were a problem in the 1960s. Unless you have real-time needs (in which case you can't use most malloc implementations either), they aren't a concern with modern GCs.

Fabby

11:35 PM

@FaheemMitha Telling you to buy an HVAC instead of an air-conditioner is not something you want to hear then? However, if you invest a bit more now, you can take it into the flat you'll eventually buy...

@FaheemMitha Not where my flat is... But then the climate is quite the opposite of yours... ;-)

Python

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