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1001

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 03:57 PM »

This one is more informative and less silly, so it's for "Interesting Stuff".

It's Tom Scott (Does he have an IQ of 150!?) on basic password security.

https://www.youtube..../watch?v=yoMOAIzBSpY

I vaguely knew about this stuff, but the incrementally more you learn, slowly you can evolve to better questions that really matter. Hopefully by this point I am not a hopeless case, but it's a tough balance between being a "limited polymath" and being a specialist that drowns the minute you get out of your fields!

1002

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 02:59 PM »

A brilliant parody of EULA's:
https://www.youtube..../watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

1003

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 02:53 PM »

Heh okay after several days break, I'm having a few cocktails! So let's play in the Silly Thread!

The first couple will be inspired by Tom Scott / Computerphile.

Series: "Things you might not have known".

Linguistic Gender
https://www.youtube....Ac&v=46ehrFk-gLk

Favorite modified childhood memory:
In ordinary rooms (and I forget which had which) you had "male" nouns next to "female" nouns. Doors and walls, and stuff.

But all that was before the post-2000's accelerated push to LGBTQ rights!! Just think of the fun!

So your entire room is busy being NSFW!

1004

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 01:19 PM »

Tom Scott / Computerphile is great. Great comedic timing for what he presents.

Here's one where he and a friend had a silly little joke on a park bench ... and it spirals out of control into being an "App"!

Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An App
https://www.youtube..../watch?v=GsyhGHUEt-k

And now for the emoji version of my Cthulu joke this week!
 

1005

Living Room / Re: Thoughts on the tech on the TV show Scorpion?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 12:29 PM »

I want to reply to this thread, but not sure how to do it. I am very similar in type to the main character in this series. I have his strengths (high IQ) and all of his weaknesses (off-beat social interaction skills). I found the way the character was portrayed was highly offensive. However, I realize it must be hard for a writer to create and write a character that is vastly more intelligent than they are. It's akin to trying to write in a language you don't know and are incapable of learning. The series is a caricature...a writer's interpretation of what 'scary smart' people must be like. There are so many directions they could have gone with this, but they'd probably need some 'scary smart' writers and there most likely aren't too many of those around.

The Mentalist is a different kind of show. It's not a show about a genius. It's a show about someone who has studied human nature intently. It can lead to some fun entertainment, but the writers have to be clever...and they usually aren't. Just pay attention to the first 10 minutes of the show & you'll guess what's going to happen 99% of the time. I think the writers have realized that because the last season or so they've given up on trying to be super-secretive with the big reveals and have included the audience in with the plotting to catch the bad guy who thinks he's smarter than everyone else but really isn't.

To tie the two shows together, I'll end with this. When Patrick Jane converses with his weekly worthy opponent, one of the lines he likes to trot out the most is, "You are the type who always thinks you are the smartest one in the room." I get the point he's trying to make. There's that one person who is looking down on everyone else with smug looks thinking that they can manipulate everyone in the room to fit their whims. However, anyone who has ever really been the smartest person in the room knows it's nothing like this. It's not a wonderful feeling at all. It's more like a numbing feeling of boredom and dread sweeping over you as you move from one person to the next trying to learn something, trying to ignite a spark of interest in something, anything, before your mind shuts down from no intellectual stimulation.

When someone is the smartest person in the room they aren't mapping out Machiavellian plots to create an army of minions. They're too busy trying to discern if they jump from that two-story window to escape into the night what the chances of twisting their ankle will be.

-Innuendo (November 02, 2014, 11:58 AM)

Heh there are some smart writers ... on the "wrong" shows! I saw a note elsewhere that several former college mathematicians are now writing for Futurama and the Simpsons! But yes, I recognized that having to churn out episodes because it's a TV show, let's say they only have one "scary" writer on the staff team - so he's burned out writing episodes 2 and 7. So maybe those come out well. So everyone else whacks at the other episodes ... with the results we're discussing.

Meanwhile for the Mentalist, notice the mood change. It was an interesting choice for it to "only" be the Cali Board of Investigation, because they had a fairly low-tech approach. Look up a couple of things from DMV, check a few surveillance cameras, then off to work the people angle.

Then when some of the actors wanted to leave and people began to tire of the exhausting Red John theme, they traveled sideways over to the FBI.

And a medium peeve is now shows are practically commercials / warnings about what all the sexy billion-dollar homeland security tech can do.

Sideways, Harlan Ellison once pointed out long ago, that networks mess with the writer's scripts all the time, so even if the writer had it right, the end show could come out demolished because some exec wanted Their Thing in there!

1006

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 11:30 AM »

New topic
Where was that awesome rant about Daylight savings time and programming, where the final answer was "just use the open source subroutine and don't mess with it"?

I ran into this in a big way today getting ready for a live podcast!

-TaoPhoenix (November 01, 2014, 11:53 PM)

It was on time zones, and I can't find the post on here, but here's the video:
...

I'm not sure what that has to do with this thread.

-Deozaan (November 02, 2014, 12:00 AM)

It's a funny video!  

Speaking of Daylight Savings time ending and causing weird issues, my husband worked tonight, over the 2AM mark when the clocks changed back. If the clocks had not changed, he would have clocked out at 2:30AM, but since the clocks had changed, his time slip says he clocked out at 1:30AM, but doesn't say which 1:30AM it was (1st or 2nd). So now his manager has to submit a list of everyone that worked tonight and clocked out after the change, so they all get an extra hour's worth of pay manually added to their paychecks.  

-app103 (November 02, 2014, 01:28 AM)

Yep! It's indeed a funny video and thanks App for finding it! That was the one I was thinking of, but in a raw Youtube search I couldn't recall it was "computerphile".

And yes, the madness is just like your husband went through. To cap it all off, letting the cat out of the bag, I watched a live telecast of grandmaster chess commentary this morning, through all that stuff I mentioned earlier. To cap it all off, they told the commenting grandmaster the wrong start time! So he had to get up two hours too early for nothing, and was barely holding on with coffee! Meanwhile, I now had to add the "adjusted wrong start time" to my previously mentioned fun!

I just gave up and watched Rubik's-Clone puzzle videos for three hours waiting for it all to shake out! But at least my clocks are changed now!

PS. Wiki says one reason they changed the fall switch was to purposely kick it past Halloween to give kids more time to trick-or-treat!

(Homer) mmmmm ... little kids candy.... (/Homer)

1007

General Software Discussion / Re: Text editor with filtering of lines

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 11:20 AM »

The plugin TextFX from Notepad++ handles this as well. And has already done this for years.
...

-Shades (November 02, 2014, 08:14 AM)

I hadn't known that some of these processors had plugins at all! Except browsers, very few programs make me think "what plugins are there" ?

There's a few for Libre and/or Open Office, but they always struck me as rather obscure and not too useful for my uses. It makes sense, but I wouldn't have thought about plugins at all for Notepad++ at all!

Thanks Shades!
---> Shades 

1008

Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 02, 2014, 11:17 AM »

I guess it can also be a sort of countdown reminder for:

  https://en.wikipedia...ki/Year_2038_problem

-ewemoa (November 01, 2014, 07:58 PM)

Haha good catch! I'd heard about that, but the odds of my getting one that happens to end on that exact scenario are ultra rare! (I mean, it was from 1999, I'd barely heard about the throes of Y2K - I was actually in a temp job assignment once doing some data checking about that!)

1009

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 01, 2014, 11:53 PM »

New topic
Where was that awesome rant about Daylight savings time and programming, where the final answer was "just use the open source subroutine and don't mess with it"?

I ran into this in a big way today getting ready for a live podcast!

1010

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 01, 2014, 11:48 AM »

Hunh.  That wasn't what we thought when we heard it (we being my "mates" and I).
To us, "pissing," coupled with some reference of time, followed by "away" meant wasting time.  Thus, "pissing the night away" meant we'd spent the time regretfully doing nothing of value.

-AzureToad (November 01, 2014, 11:37 AM)

I'm with AzureToad on this one - the "ing" form is far different than the "ed" form.

I'll also suggest there's a lot of drinking involved, because that's known to make you ______ a lot! But that also tends to be what most generic parties involve, aka having a good time mixed with potables, so it could be a triple word play that they were partying, and having a superficial good time (except maybe for the 9th beer!), but ultimately squandering deeper things of life.

1011

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 31, 2014, 11:58 PM »

You have to "Sign Up" before you can login. I would have done it, but they wanted my birthdate. That is something I'm not going to give for something like this. I'm not that interested in reviewing or discussing movies.

-Arizona Hot (October 31, 2014, 08:17 PM)

Yeah, I'm annoyed at the "useless" services that keep wanting your birthdate, not the least because it's still the backbone of tons of extremely important stuff. "For your security, what's your birthdate?" (??!) You might almost want to say "it's on my facebook page." The other one is medical. Because they don't want million dollar lawsuits when two John Smiths show up for treatment, they always ask "so your birthdate is...?"

Except for weird cases, those places don't need birthdates. The only fuzzy one is when you want to look at some NSFW stuff and they're required to ask *something* from the 2257 rules. So just give them Jan 2 19xx the year *after* you were born, aka you're plenty old enough, and in the twilight zone case if it ever matters, you/counsel says, "oh I'm sorry, I'm OLDER than I told you."

1012

Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 31, 2014, 11:42 PM »

Okay, I haven't visited gadget weekends much, but I figured I'd chime in this time.

In this age of planned obsolescence, it's nice when something gives you its money's worth!

Anyone have one of these circular perpetual calendars? (Mine is almost identical, but only has a 40 year range, not a 50 year one.)



It astounds me that I somehow managed to hold onto it ... it's "just what it is", but through all my moves, my subconscious apparently kept telling me to keep it in that "box of special things at the top of the moving pile". Mine is from 1999, with a range of 1999-2038. Being the creaky old birdie I am now, as of this year I have managed to hold onto it for 40% of its rated value ... with 60% left! That's the best $20 I ever spent! (I got it at a gift store somewhere.)

1013

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 30, 2014, 08:28 PM »

The internet is great at producing random factoids.

Apparently cook Julia Child was *tall* ... we all sorta knew that, but still ... apparently according to IMDB she was 6'2! For a woman that's towering!



For whatever probably now-obsolete reasons, she was denied service in several women's divisions in WWII, so she had to join something called the "Office of Strategic Services".

1014

Living Room / Re: Thoughts on the tech on the TV show Scorpion?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 30, 2014, 09:06 AM »

Uh ... *one* copy of this super-top file? Why didn't they make like seven copies, stash two of them in secret locations buried in the dirt, upload another copy into the darknet in the cloud, and more?

-TaoPhoenix (October 29, 2014, 07:25 PM)

That's just Hollywood having another wet dream on itself - imagining that files can only be moved, and never copied. It's in virtually every single TV show and film. Apparently the word "backup" doesn't exist in Hollywood.

Yeah... I know... It drives me nuts as well.

For the actual show, I've seen some, but it just seems rather bland so far. The entire premise seems stupid to me. But then again, "Person of Interest" started pretty lame and actually has turned out to be somewhat decent. PoI now addresses some actually interesting things, though the underlying premise is still pretty dystopian. Scorpion might pull itself out of the fire. We'll see.

-Renegade (October 30, 2014, 08:05 AM)

Well, they were in fact talking about a backup, but my gripe was there was only one backup - on a tape drive to start with. Then they only made *one more* backup onto a single flash drive. That's where I started groaning.

But even then, Agent Cabe / Robert Patrick has a decent poker face, so they could have even just had a dummy second flash drive with nothing on it at all and just faked it when he got mugged! (This is why I'd love if studios could get over copyright and do series crossovers - where's Patrick Jane when you need him? He totally would have pulled something like that!)

Patrick Jane is smart, maybe IQ 130, but more to the point he's just *sneaky*. But the scorpion team of 170+ IQ types didn't think of any of that...

Can you imagine some of the crossover possibilities? Monk really does get an extremely rare sickness and has to go see Dr. House?

1015

DonationCoder.com Newsletters / Re: Super-sized Newsletter for Oct 25, 2014 - Codename: NANY 2015 Preppers

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 30, 2014, 12:02 AM »

Excellent question bernie.  And good guess stephen -- but not quite correct.  Who can guess (moderators not allowed to try), how the spammers were caught who didn't make a post (or even try to make a post)?

-mouser (October 26, 2014, 08:21 PM)

When they use the Cranch Wire too much and start to lose control of their emotions? Spammers live in vain!
http://en.wikipedia....canners_Live_in_Vain

Oh wait ...

1016

Living Room / Thoughts on the tech on the TV show Scorpion?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 29, 2014, 07:25 PM »

So, another show has appeared about tech geniuses. For this thread, I'm skipping the controversy that Walter O'Brien is hyping himself, or casting problems, or plot cliches, etc.

I figured I'd ask y'all about the tech shown on the show.

Even to lil' ol' me, two categories stand out.

1. Ludicrous situations
In the pilot, supposedly the only way they could get some key software from point A to B was to fly a plane 8 feet above the ground and attach a cable!

2. Making things too hard for themselves
In another later episode ("Cyclone"?), there was supposedly some super incriminating file, and after a bomber blew up a backbone cable, they made it into a long term storage facility and downloaded a copy onto a flash drive and gave it to the govt handler agent ... who got mugged, and somewhere in the mess the flash drive was destroyed.

Uh ... *one* copy of this super-top file? Why didn't they make like seven copies, stash two of them in secret locations buried in the dirt, upload another copy into the darknet in the cloud, and more?

I'll let y'all come up with a third category if y'all think of one.

I do say it has to be a bit tough on writers to write for characters with a combined IQ of 700... I don't mind if they miss little details, but it's the glaring ones that annoy me just a little.

Thoughts?

1017

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 - NEW APPS FOR THE NEW YEAR 2015 - START YOUR ENGINES!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 29, 2014, 12:32 PM »

Yeah, I still need to finish this one. It has some things that need to be tweaked.

But I don't think it would be quite suitable for NANY. It really is designed purely for Coding Snacks.
 (see attachment in previous post)

-app103 (October 13, 2014, 07:57 PM)

Hehe in another of my daydream-giggle worlds, it would be *hysterical* if any marketing business geniuses here with an inside loop at somewhere like General Mills, for April Fools day, (with the whole line staff in on the joke) switched out the box art template on one of the more obscure cereal production lines, like #77 that's only used at half capacity for some health food muesli, with App's picture and a custom mold for the marshmallow nuggets to be little Cody's. After all, the C-Level management never goes to the production floor. (I worked a summer at a gatorade bottle factory. They sent out a pallette of some 1000 bottles every four minutes.) So at what must be the ferocious volume turnover on those production lines, 1000 cases could go out the door and hit shelves before someone very nervous in PR calls up and says "uh... what are Cody Snacks? And why are they selling better than the muesli?!"

 

1018

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 29, 2014, 12:21 PM »

Nany cup bowling!

1019

Living Room / Re: The Emergency Broadcast System ?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 29, 2014, 11:58 AM »

I still think the old fashioned mechanical SD-10 air raid sirens that went off at noon every Saturday post WWII till about 1980 were the most reliable. (A steady siren meant: "alert" A rising and falling tone meant: "Sit down; face the nearest concrete wall; put head between legs - kiss ass goodbye!" as the saying went.

-40hz (October 28, 2014, 02:14 PM)

I can't prove it, but I think Billy Joel borrowed the rough concept of an air raid siren in his musical structure for his song "Leningrad". (And that's unbelieveable musicianship to make something like that into a listenable song!! )

And his musical structure rose and fell...


That quote above just made me go download it, and I'm going to do a couple of my little sets of modified versions in Audacity. I haven't done one of those in a while.

I think I got my "magic formula" - "Echo 4 4" aka Delay .04 seconds and decay factor 0.4, twice. It evokes for me those cut rate cheap PA speakers one of my schools used to use for stuff. Then a couple more variants for the set, depending on the mood I am in. (After the double echo.)

A. Tempo up 15%, to give it some urgency
B. Then some pitch down adjustments, because I often like bass pitched versions of stuff. My standards:
B1 15%
B2 25%
B3 37% (This one is tricky, it can sometimes be too much. It works best when the original starts with a high tenor or soprano.)

These kinds of homemade adjustments really open new avenues for me to explore a song with.

1020

Living Room / Re: Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 29, 2014, 11:27 AM »

I love the hashtag:
#HiNSA

I still idly daydream-giggle in some dystopian future that we'll all have our personal agent assigned to us and be on eerie-friends basis with them.

**IM from Jim@NSA** "Hi. You posted a document that we don't approve of. Would you please take it down? By the way, what toppings and crust style do you want on the pizza I just ordered for you? Cheers, your NSA rep Jim."

 

1021

Developer's Corner / Re: Ludum Dare 30: August 22-25, 2014

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 28, 2014, 12:29 PM »

I'm going to play a couple more LD games. Just because their site is a bit strange, this is a raw post to the master list of LD 30 games:

http://ludumdare.com...e-30/?action=preview

1022

DC Gamer Club / Re: One Chance: A game you can only play once

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 28, 2014, 12:17 PM »

Not just that, but it seems pretty unfair. When I review Ludum Dare games, I look for an "easy-medium" level of difficulty that someone can hope to catch on to in a couple of hours. But I can't get a hold on this one at all, so if there is in fact a solution, it's incredibly tight.

1023

General Software Discussion / Re: Frustrated Mom Creates ‘Ignore No More’ App To Get Teen Kids To Return Calls

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 28, 2014, 11:45 AM »

I saw this from Mouser's newsletter.

I'm more worried that it's one more "But ... but .... mommy needs to talk to her kids!"
But then nastier types like cops get old of this, and Bad Things Happen.

1024

Living Room / Re: (Hypothetical): If DC Grouped Together...What could be achieved?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 28, 2014, 11:09 AM »

Interesting...

I never realized coding projects invariably need an 'overlord' to get them to work. Or that every project needed to start from a completely bank page if I understand you correctly. Seems almost inefficient by design.

-40hz (October 26, 2014, 10:53 AM)

I may have a wee bit of insight to offer here.

I "begged" myself into a Nany badge based on some highly alpha-level "components" that I was working on just before my job and therefore dev-paying income tanked.

I was dreaming of a "Super-Word-Processor" where once the "boring word crunching" left off, it had all kinds of fascinating ultra features to do nifty things never heard of before in a single program. The theory started out as this:

Word Processor. Makes documents. Yay.

But then you really wanted some other end result, and that requires more pieces most word processors don't do. But why not? With smart programmers like (say, you, but I outsourced this one), there's no reason a program couldn't do end-to-end production of the end goal.

The main reason typical word processors are what they are is because they "hit the minimax and no more".

But what I began designing as a concept was a type of "Turbo Word Processor with add-ons".
(I know, "turbo" is so '80's.)

So, the original goal was:
You take some web text, hit a bunch of options in the program, and using the CSS Zen Framework,
http://www.csszengarden.com/
You could have an instant webpage in any (authorized) design you wanted.

There was more, but the summary point is that I discovered I needed one guy to do the conversion module, one guy to translate the strange html output code of a program I was using, one guy to so something else, .... and then I hired a "project manager" because I got all these components but they didn't mesh, so his job was to select the raw WordProcessor open source framework, translate the intent of the modules, then connect them to the final evolving master project.

So yeah, there's a 3001 combined IQ here, and the 1 point is mine, but once you get out of Ludum Dare, various soft needs explode.

1025

Living Room / Re: Is technology killing old loved books?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on October 28, 2014, 10:36 AM »

One thing has changed for sure ... the speed that stuff ceases to be "iconic".

In the SciFi field for example, in my childhood my favorite trick was to (benignly) abuse the pricing policy of Annie's Bookstop used book pricing. "Half Cover Price". As a mid aged biz trained adult it had a long term benefit, aka raising the overall price of the store stock, but for a sweet golden period, there was lots of wonderful Gold and Silver age stuff there. So Dad's $20 allowance could let me bring home 15 books!!

And back then, stories lasted a lot longer. Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, while a nice little story itself, magically found itself as a the Golden Child of Reprint Anthologies, and stuck around for *twenty years*. Today we're lucky if anyone gestaltly remembers anything before Obama's 2nd election.