Disqus - Latest Comments for lerouxb

Re: No, YouTube, I will not subscribe to Premium - Android Authority

lerouxb — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 13:35:17 -0000

YouTube Premium is the best money I've ever spent. Will be the last subscription I cancel. Really worth it in my opinion. I will never understand people that are willing to pay for Netflix before YouTube.

And as others have pointed out it is nowhere near as bad as the popups, ads, cookie notices, subscribe to notifications, etc you see on any website nowadays. Seems pretty rich coming from here.

Re: Technoblogy - Monochrome Low-Power Display Library

lerouxb — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 05:02:37 -0000

This is very interesting! I've been looking for a display like this for some time. Do you have any estimates on the refresh / update rate? I suppose for both full screen and for updating only a small part of the display.

Re: Technoblogy - Generating Waveforms with the ATtiny85

lerouxb — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:06:37 -0000

Thanks a lot for this. I've been playing with this code as the basis for a small toy synthesizer.

I've been wondering, though: The square waves aren't particularly square. Any tips/ideas on how to try and make them more square? Is that possible? And if not, why not? I'm trying to understand the limitations and I don't know which terminology to even search for.

One idea I had would be to just special-seecase the square wave and do the PWM at the frequency of the note I want with no low pass filtering required. But that complicates the circuitry if I want to be able to switch to saw, triangle, sine, etc.

Oh and btw: One thing that confused me for a bit was the comment Divide by 400 because that line only divides by 50. It is only in combination with the 1/8 prescaler that you get to 400.

Re: Fixing Jagged Google Fonts in Chrome

lerouxb — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 06:46:33 -0000

The problem I have with these techniques is that they aren't just limited to Chrome on PC, but will affect Chrome on the Mac too, making fonts quite a bit thicker and often fuzzier.

If only there was a quick and easy way to target only Windows PCs from CSS. I can only think of JavaScript based hacks.

Re: Does CoffeeScript Have a Future?

lerouxb — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 04:47:30 -0000

I can't really see how ES6 would somehow be backwards incompatible with current JavaScript and therefore how CoffeeScript code would break. If it does, and I really doubt it because JavaScript never breaks backwards compatibility, it would be something really easily fixable with a minor point release.

There's already a better CoffeeScript compiler that's almost ready that could probably easily be made to compile to ES6, but I don't see how that's even relevant, because it is much more likely that people will be compiling ES6 code to regular old JavaScript so that it will work everywhere for many years.

Even then, I suspect it will be like jQuery that's still in use even though browsers got better simply because it is a nicer interface than standard DOM even when you only target, say, the latest versions of webkit and firefox that don't have (many) compatibility issues.

People don't just use CoffeeScript because it already has the features that are only going to be in the next JavaScript, we use it because the syntax is nicer. JavaScript's syntax can't change significantly because it has to remain backwards compatible.

You also can't change JavaScript's scoping rules so that variables are automatically declared locally by default without breaking backwards compatibility. That (tied with CoffeeScript's much nicer for loops) is my number one CoffeeScript feature. JavaScript can add new keywords like "let", but that just illustrates the point further.

And what are those "I refuse to even try to read CoffeeScript" programmers going to do when JavaScript examples start to use arrow function definitions and other ES6 features?

Re: I have to admit that I agree with the cacophony of... - Sean Oliver

lerouxb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:23:57 -0000

Isn't the product really the iStore service? Apple's network of stores that you can walk in to at any time is the immense advantage they have over the competition that they are selling.

Apple sells hardware, software, online services (itunes, streaming, the app stores, icloud) and service plans.

Re: I have to admit that I agree with the cacophony of... - Sean Oliver

lerouxb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:20:02 -0000

> They don’t show the product
> They don’t explain the product.

Same with the famous 1984 and (to a lesser extend) I'm a mac, I'm a pc ads.

> They make the target audience feel stupid.

Didn't the "I'm a mac, I'm a pc" ads also make fun of their intended audience? (By calling existing pc-users that they are hoping to switch boring.)

> They make the Geniuses look like unsupportive know-it-alls.

I didn't perceive it that way at all and the consensus around the net appears to be that most non-geeks didn't either.

Re: Introducing Prism: An awesome new syntax highlighter

lerouxb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 05:32:38 -0000

Nevermind, I see dabblet's code is also opensource. Reading through editor.js now.

Re: Introducing Prism: An awesome new syntax highlighter

lerouxb — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:19:42 -0000

Very nice highlighter, but are you going to be releasing the code-editor parts too? I'm very interested to see how you tamed contenteditable.

Re: #6 Serving Adaptive Images to Visitors – Note: NOT the same as Responsive Design

lerouxb — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:51:34 -0000

Here's my proposal: http://opensores.za.net/201...

Re: Xenowar – X-Com for Android

lerouxb — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:33:46 -0000

Pity. I'm on a Mac. On windows I can just play the original X-COM :)

Re: Xenowar – X-Com for Android

lerouxb — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:09:49 -0000

Looks like it isn't available in my region. Typical :(

Re: Were the Luddites onto something?

lerouxb — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:01:10 -0000

Sure we can't automate 100% of everything yet, but I would think that getting us 80, 50 or even just 20% of the way there would already make a huge difference.

It wouldn't be completely unprecedented: Already in most countries only a tiny percentage of the people are actively involved in doing the absolutely necessary work that feeds and (you could argue) "carries" the rest of the population. Most of the rest are in "services" (like me) or on some form of welfare.

Some degree of what we currently call socialism is probably inevitable, but most of the traditional criticism of socialism falls away when it is mostly machines that are being "stolen from" in order to house, feed, heat, transport, clothe, heal and generally care for the bulk of 7 billion people.

Re: Were the Luddites onto something?

lerouxb — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:44:24 -0000

Rather than "how can we create jobs?", we should be asking "how can we destroy jobs?". Who wants some menial job anyway? The current setup works in this bizarre way where everyone should be employed and it doesn't matter if they are doing anything meaningful or not. We should all "work" and get money and that money isn't just necessary for optional luxuries - it is necessary for basic survival too. That's just not sustainable. A system that requires near-100% employment and constant growth to function properly isn't sustainable.

Surely we can automate almost everything. Certainly the basics. We can almost completely automate mining, energy production, farming, etc. I doubt that we can get to 100% automation with current technology, but we can get very close to it. Then everyone can have the basics for free. Just enough for survival. So you would eradicate absolute poverty, but there would probably still be relative poverty which should still leave enough incentive for people to go out there and do something creative. And over the time as our technology improves we can move the base-line up so that everyone can live a comfortable life.

I think the social networks, youtube, wikipedia, blogging, all the free/independent games/movies/music, etc is proof enough that there are other "currencies" and incentives out there. But we already knew this: All the important scientific, biological and mathematical discoveries in the 18th and 19th centuries were done by "the upper classes" that were leading the types of lives where they never had to work. They kept themselves busy by advancing the human race. We won't become some dystopian society if everyone has access to all the basics for free and getting a job becomes completely optional. So communists got it all wrong and so did anti-communists. The neo-libertarians' thinking will certainly never get us there either.

As a side effect it would be good for everyone's mental health and the environment too if we all worked, produced creative things, did research or whatever because we loved doing it rather than because we were desperately trying to survive.

Re: Heads roll after Kgalema jet chaos - Newspaper - Mail & Guardian Online

lerouxb — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:15:24 -0000

Surely 1st class or business class commercial flights would be both safer AND cheaper? Especially in the "post 9/11"" world where we have so much security at airports and on airplanes that every flight might as well be carrying the president of the free world.

(Not to mention the fact that commercial flights are probably more luxurious than being flown around my the defense force too..)

Re: Mugabe hints at WikiLeaks probe - Africa - Mail & Guardian Online

lerouxb — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:53:57 -0000

Shouldn't the guy with prostate cancer be the one on the receiving end of the probe? (sorry, couldn't resist)

Re: Redis for processing payments

lerouxb — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:14:49 -0000

How does this work from the user's point of view? The user fills in the form, hits submit, things go on in the queue in the background and surely you want to tell him/her by the end of the request (preferably by the time you redirect to the next screen) that it failed or was successful?

I assume you could block for some time and check the "queue output" keys in redis, but what if it times out? What if the transaction then still goes through after the timeout and you already communicated that the transaction probably failed? What if there's an error later... that sort of thing.

Just thinking about this from a user experience point of view. Your messaging to the user (the guy making payments) should also be "atomic" in a sense.

It is also not very clear how you're being atomic in your workers: You pop the next payments_to_be_processed, but what if something goes wrong or crashes or there's a network outage or the payment processing service you use is down....? Is that transaction just lost? No retries? Does the app server still have to deal with all those hard problems?

As it stands now I don't see how this is really better than just synchronously doing the payments in your app server. Scaling would work in exactly the same way there - just add more processes/instances/threads/workers there and as an added bonus they would be multi-purpose and can deal with increases in load in other parts of your system too. Is that really more difficult?

I just don't see how this really makes the other layers in your app any simpler either - you're not isolating the rest of your app server from what can go wrong in your transactions. You're just translating the error messages the payment processor is sending back to you and buffering them a bit. Or put another way: As I understand it your queue is just a crude way of doing multi-threading, presumably so that your frontend can stay (mostly) single threaded?

Unless there's much more to it than what's written here.

Re: Criminalising sex is not the answer - In The Paper - Mail & Guardian Online

lerouxb — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:49:47 -0000

So what do you propose we do when two 12 year olds have sex? Send them to prison? For how many years?

(And how many new prisons would we need?)

Re: Mogoeng's shocking child rape rulings - In The Paper - Mail & Guardian Online

lerouxb — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:19:56 -0000

I remember reading about each and every one of these cases as they happened years ago already. And yes: people were very upset back then too.

Re: http://hugsandquiches.co.za/post/9288161448

lerouxb — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:21:19 -0000

Does this have anything to do with the fact that I ate something similar yesterday? ;)

Re: Election lists will be probed, says Zuma - News - Mail & Guardian Online

lerouxb — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:14:35 -0000

He doesn't even wait until the next sentence before contradicting himself.

Re: Finish Him completes them all! - Marcin Kulik’s tech stuff

lerouxb — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:25:26 -0000

I'm slowly writing my own text editor in my free time (using JEdit), but you're making it obsolete bit by bit before I even release it ;)

Re: Finish Him completes them all! - Marcin Kulik’s tech stuff

lerouxb — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:58:19 -0000

Looks interesting.

By the way, why is this in plugin central and not open file fast? I'm telling people to use OFF, but they still have to download it on your blog and install it manually.

Re: Sickill.net - Open File Fast updated for JEdit 4.3pre17

lerouxb — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:48:33 -0000

Works like a charm. Thanks!

Re: Sickill.net - Open File Fast 0.9.4 released for Netbeans and JEdit

lerouxb — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:27:23 -0000

Cool. Where? :)