> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully.
Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
Python is an absolute disaster when it comes to packaging runnable artifacts. I love the language for server-side stuff where I control the environment (the final deliverable is a container image) but there’s no way I’d use it for anything else.
I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime.
One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways.
> I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days.
I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective contributions from outside of existing team members. Some colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.
Well, I probably was born stupid then. This was a Gnuradio setup (super impressive piece of software by the way) for a not-very-well supported SDR running an even less well supported GRC file. I'd been putting it off because I know those tell tale little clouds on the horizon well enough by now. Anyway, it's working now. But what a nightmare.
Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it.
Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it.
One of my elderly uncles was in this position, but he was a bit more responsible about it than your grandfather. His way to solve it was like this: he sold his car at a discount to someone else in the same building on the condition that when he needs transport they'll drive him. It works out well, he only uses it when he absolutely has to and the rest of the time he either walks or has stuff delivered. It was a painful decision for him but in the end it worked out well (and I'm the backup driver but I'm about 100 km away from where he lives so it would always take me at least an hour to get there).
That site is gold. I've had one that was a complete mystery, it all looked and felt perfect but still, it didn't work. I was tempted to toss it and replace it but the fact that it was a vintage Campagnolo made replacing it extremely expensive and I couldn't even find a proper replacement. So in the end I figured out what the problem was and ended up repairing it.
With Wolfram it is usually the grandstanding and taking credit for other people's work. Inventing new words for old things is part and parcel of that. He has a lot in common with Schmidhuber, both are arguably very smart people but the fact that other people can be just as smart doesn't seem to fit their worldview.
Quite, I love the esthetic of the watch stand. The exposed lacquered wire makes it look really exotic, and in general the execution is top notch. It is really tempting to throw stuff like this together and call it a day when it works (that's more my style...), so I have a lot of respect for people that can finish these things to the point where they not only work but also look good.
I loved the wedding photo. It also left me wondering if they played "Bicycle Built for Two" at their wedding. It would be appropriate, both for the bicycle angle and because Dr. Fell moved over to a computer science department.
Probably, yes. Try finding hard info about electronics. You really can't because there are a million zero effort sites by people that position themselves as teachers that really are absolute beginners themselves. And because they run Google ads they get priority in the results.
I came across this while looking at all kinds of clocks and the origins of operational amplifiers. I've used these but never realized that you could use the hysteresis to make counters.
About a completely home-grown software defined radio that is on the web as well at http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ , you can use it to listen to all kinds of interesting signals, for instance an atomic clock, DCF77 at 77.5 KHz CW.
That project is absolutely mind-blowingly complex and the fact that it works at all has me amazed.
Oh super cool. What's interesting is that to my eye it looks horrific at first glance but the longer you look the more you realize how advanced this whole thing is.
reply