Book vs Show Discussion - S02E11 - "Here There Be Dragons"

CaptainMuon · 2017-04-06T14:21:52+00:00

I'd appreciate if they introduced some of the characters from NG early, so they could set them up as a nemesis (no pun intended). In to books, the big plot point of NG came out of the blue sky (again, no pun intended :-D). It would be natural if you'd see the bad guys engange in some inner OPA fights, some smuggling, some small attacks first

There is so much material in the books, and actually the opportunity to flesh out some of the stories. I don't understand why they are rushing it. Same with Game of Thrones. Although they went really slow in the beginning, now they are burning everything they have. Although you could argue that only now the prelude is over and all pieces are in place for the main story. I'd love to see Sam as a full Maester, or Arya use her super assasin powers, but I disgress...

CaptainMuon · 2017-03-29T18:42:11+00:00

On Earth, you rotate around the poles. On Polish spin station, Poles rotate around you.

CaptainMuon · 2017-03-14T09:01:12+00:00

In the beginning, I had quite a misunderstanding about how the 'juice' works. I had read some articles about the show, and watched the first few episodes, so I knew the juice lets you survive high-G burns. I also saw that the belter guy in the first episode broke his neck when he didn't take the juice.

So I imagined the juice to be much thicker than it is. Not like medicine, but rather like liquid plastic. The injector fills your blood vessels and cavities with it, stiffening you up completely so you don't get compressed at high G. Like when a dead body is plastinated. Quite creepy shit :-). (Un-)fortunately the real juice in the show and books doesn't work like that, and I am relieved and disappointed at the same time.

CaptainMuon · 2017-03-10T09:29:13+00:00

On the one hand, this is great, on the other, this is a pirated version of a paid font... Whatever your stance is towards that, you should at least be aware of it.

FWIW, there is a better way of supporting Powerline fonts than patching the font. On Linux, you can add some code to fonts.conf so that the powerline characters are mapped into a font of your choice (it's in the powerline documentation). On Windows, you can do the same - and I've never seen this documented - by adding the following to the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLink

Create a multi part string, name it after the font (e.g. Consolas), and set it to:

PowerlineSymbols.ttf,PowerlineSymbols,125,110
fontawesome-regular.ttf,FontAwesome,50,85
pomicons-regular.ttf,Pomodoro,50,85
octicons-regular.ttf,octicons,50,85
seguisym.ttf,Segoe UI Symbol

The numbers are for scaling the characters to match the original font. I forgot what they actually mean (sorry), but the numbers I picked work pretty well for Consolas at least.

CaptainMuon · 2017-02-10T07:45:55+00:00

Bookmark sync. If there was a chrome (or hell, even edge!) plugin to sync with firefox bookmarks, I would switch.

CaptainMuon · 2017-01-27T09:34:48+00:00

People are worried and angry about the current developments all around the world. I am thinking about organizing a march for science in Göttingen, Germany. If you are from there and would like to help, get in touch!

Göttingen used to be a center of world science. A lot of important mathematicians and scientists worked here, including Gauss, Riemann, Klein, Minkowski, Werner Heisenberg, Emmy Noether, Max Born, James Frank, and many more.

That came to a sudden end when the Nazis took over and purged the university. Jews, and everybody they considered "jewish", "communist" or unloyal had to go. "Ungerman" science was banned. And we know this was just a prelude to something much more terrible...

I don't make the Nazi analogy lightly (and it doesn't have to end like this), but hearing the news and knowing our history scares me quite a bit. And I think we international scientists have the responsibility to speak out in this situation.

CaptainMuon · 2017-01-13T11:38:19+00:00

Kotlin also sounds bad to me. "Kot" means feces in German.

CaptainMuon · 2017-01-10T08:37:09+00:00

What annoys me less is when I can't understand what they're saying - after all, I think if I don't understand it, I'm not supposed to. As others have commented, it's like Chewbacca.

I find it more grating when I actually understand what they are saying. I grew up bilingually with German and English, and while I like that they put German bits in, they should have consulted jemand who actually speaks the language(s). (I've actually made a belter-esqe mistake in that sentence and left it in for fun ;-))

The worst example is in LW, where one character tells another to "Schrauben Sie!" which I assume would be "Screw you!". But it is a completely wrong, dictionary-like translation. "Schrauben" does mean "to screw" but has no vulgar connotation, and "Sie" is the polite form of "you", so it actually comes across as "Would you fasten that screw?".

Even later on, I feel often the words taken from German are not the ones that would naturally be loaned in a multilingual environment, but just random words. They are not all particularly catchy. I think some work well though, like "Bist" (you are / are you).

Also I like the belter language much more on the show, it shows that they actually have someone working on it. I love words like "belterlowda" and everything"-walla".

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-07T13:42:18+00:00

It can also be annoying if you recieve one of those letters because you forgot the legally mandated contact information (imprint) on your website, or you were caught torrenting copyrighted material - the latter costs you about 900€. But very efficient indeed, since the courts are not involved.

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-07T13:19:27+00:00

Have you tried getting a lawyer?

I'm not sure about the US, but at least here in Germany a lawyer can often "force" a company to respond, by claiming wrongdoing and setting a deadline. If you are sure you did nothing wrong this is often the only way to escalate the issue to someone who can fix it.

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-06T12:16:05+00:00

No, it is still break. Only when you have selected text it means copy. (At the command prompt, you can select with the mouse. In console applications that use the mouse, I think you additionally press shift, but I can't test it right now). So it's no big conflict.

Additionally, you can end a running process with Ctrl+Break.

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-06T12:13:13+00:00

To be fair, the role of Ctrl+C (to interrupt a process) has been classically played by Ctrl+Break on DOS/Windows. And Ctrl+C only copies in cmd when you have selected text, so it's not too bad. But IMHO they should have used Ctrl+Ins (to copy) and Shift+Ins (to insert) instead, which is also a standard on Windows.

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-06T09:55:27+00:00

Haha, that sounds pretty far fetched, given that ST is so lean and vim has decades of growth. But OTOH, I've heard that ST's vim emulation is pretty good.

What I used to think is that ST was based on Chromium. This was way before Atom and Electron. I didn't think it was using the "HTML widget", like those apps, but rather just the UI toolkit and the tabs. Indeed, it seems to use Skia, which is a part of chromium.

Btw., Jon Skinner, the author of ST, has a blog where he used to write about the motivation behind the design of ST. It was really interesting, but unfortunately it is not online currently.

CaptainMuon · 2016-12-06T09:46:18+00:00

Just start serving ads locally and get over with it.

CaptainMuon · 2016-11-27T19:27:09+00:00

Actually, I know a couple of cases where people did so successfully. A former school mate used to "make websites". Back then (early 2000s) they were't called social networks, but communites. His first big site was one for song lyrics, and he built a strong community around it, with people contributing a lot of lyrics, and spending a lot of time on the forums. Eventually, he sold the site (while still in school) for a lot of money.

He then had a couple of projects that were closer to what we would call a social network today. IIRC, he had one site which was a very popular local social network for our area/county. It was especially popular with teens and young people (~12-20). He also used a similar code base to make a dating site. This was before Facebook (at least before it was available in Germany) and before StudiVZ etc..

In the meantime, that guy made a bunch of other communites, including a site which hosts mods for a popular game. Over that, he came into the game business and recently had a successful Kickstarter for his first (big) game. So while he didn't exactly build Facebook, he was successful with social networks for quite some time.

The other case was a couple of guys who built a social network for our university (StudIP). This was ~2002. It had everything (early) Facebook had, you had profile pages, a wall, you could post polls and a kind of "blog". It was also gamified, and I remember spending a ton of time trying to get into the top ten :-). And almost accidentially, it managed courses, had forums, wikis, and managed material. It is still used at this university, altough I think they toned down the "fun" aspect. They successfully sold (or it was adopted?) it to many other universities in Germany.

Back then, a friend tried to convince me to build a similar site, for the general public. I said he was crazy and that would never catch on. The same guy said it would be great if cell phones had cameras. I should have listened to him :-).

CaptainMuon · 2016-10-13T10:13:27+00:00

I'm note sure, but I think you can access certain UWP APIs from Win32 apps (like async network APIs, sensor readings etc.). After all, they are basically just COM underneath.

CaptainMuon · 2016-09-13T08:33:09+00:00

Sure, in that case it would not work. I'm not saying something like this should be enabled by default - even in the best case you'd have a flash-of-unstyled-content like effect.

Rather, I'd like something like: You press a panic key and it displays the current state of the page, on a best-effort basis. Preferably on an independent "buffer", so if the page finishes loading in the meantime it will not notice that it has been partially shown before, and work correctly.

You could also make it display what is already loaded if you hit the "stop" button, instead of discarding everything and showing a blank page. Put up a banner "this page is only partially loaded".

You could put all of this behind a about:config in Firefox. Normal users don't care, but many people who do could activate it.

CaptainMuon · 2016-09-13T08:26:24+00:00

Doesn't seem to work nowadays. Firefox sometimes even deletes the address from the URL bar if I hit stop, so I have to enter it again.

CaptainMuon · 2016-09-12T16:02:19+00:00

I find it so annoying when a browser clearly has already loaded the HTML page, and maybe even most CSS, but it is waiting for a resource and doesn't display anything. This happens on mobile, but also with bad connections on desktop.

I would love a feature that lets you force the browser to display the page now, even if some external javascript or whatever is not loaded yet. Or maybe even a switch that says, display the page after 1 second, max. If it breaks the page, so what, as long as I can see the content. We still have flags to disable images or JS, so this feature can't cause more breakage than those...

CaptainMuon · 2016-09-12T08:58:05+00:00

Oh my G.Aad!

CaptainMuon · 2016-08-24T09:02:23+00:00

Argh, just got a mail from Amazon that it got bumpt even further. New release date is January 7 (although I'm in Germany, maybe US folks get it earlier).

CaptainMuon · 2016-08-18T18:36:36+00:00

The app seems to be EveryTap, which looks very cool, but I can't figure out exactly how it works (as a business). They get places to sign up, and give free items to visitors, as a way to lure the visitors there. How do they make money, they have to charge the places something... or are they just burning VC money? What are the beacons for? There are plenty of deals apps that don't use them. Is it accepted that beacons are required? There are still plenty of phones without NFC.

I'm wondering, because this exact app doesn't seem to exist outside of Poland, and that makes it a nice target to clone ;-). (Not that I actually had the time and knowledge to do that, I'm just fantasizing.)

CaptainMuon · 2016-08-03T14:14:58+00:00

Is there even a Win32 function that returns the version as a string?

Last I checked, there were only functions like GetVersionEx that return numbers, and don't report a version number higher than in the manifest. You had to resort to tricks, like opening system DLLs and reading the version resources to get the version otherwise.

CaptainMuon · 2016-08-02T23:07:49+00:00

That title is really misleading. Microsoft will never in the foreseeable future "remove" Win32. What they might do though is to keep certain new features exclusive to store apps.

E.g. unless your app is signed and sold via the MS store, you'd get no new Direct3D 15 features like holodeck support or whatever. That is a real possibility, and I believe the thing that Sweeney is worried about.

Now, currently, there is no technical barrier to using most UWP features from Win32 (it's just that nobody does it). The WinRT runtime (or whatever they are calling it now) is just plain old COM under the hood, spiced up with a bit of metadata and made to look like .NET/XAML. You can instantiate many objects from C#, C++/CX or even plain C++ in a regular Win32 program (at least it worked last I checked). So currently the barrier is one-way - UWP apps are strictly less powerful than Win32 apps.

But there is nothing stopping MS from closing the barrier, and adding a new API that is UWP exclusive (heck, they might have already. Last time I've looked into this in detail, Windows 8.1 was recent and Windows 10 was in beta).

CaptainMuon

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