Friday, July 21, 2017

Too Much Codez!!! WHY?!?!?

Why must some programmers place as much code into a single file as they can?  Seriously?  Is this some sort of challenge?  Is there some advantage unknown to me by shoving all of a program's code into a single file?

Really, I am not a huge fan of the MVC pattern.  It places, sometimes, arbitrary guidelines regarding what should be placed in the Model, the View and the Controller.  However, it is better that the SEIOF pattern!  (Shovel Everything Into One File)

In my opinion, a logical separation of interests is best and basic.  One file for the GUI, one or more files for the application or business logic and one or more containing global types, classes, utility code, etc...

Placing all that into one large bucket can be confusing.  Please...  If you are a programmer, please, please separate your code a little bit.  Help save the next programmer's sanity.

Oh...  And those long methods/functions/procedures...  While in college I was taught that a method, function, procedure, subroutine, what-have-you, should be less than a page of printed code.  While that isn't always possible, it is still a guideline that I try to observe, and firmly believe other programmers should as well.

Happy Friday!!!

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

This is one HOT little post!

Sooo...  What exactly are you expecting???

Dirty minded people...

It's HOT here...  88F with a humidity that would make any jungle animal quite comfortable.

Anyway...  My mind turned to this blog again.  You know, I really SHOULD post more here.  I mean, with my newfound projects and all.

Projects, you ask?  Yes, I have a few new ones...

  1. Learn C.  I mean, more than the typical advanced, scrolling, multicolored "Hello World" sort of level.  I mean, really learn it.  I really thought long and hard about whether I wanted to learn X86 Assembly or C.  My brain is still on the fence just a bit, but when I sat down, wrote a "Hello World" program in each, the C version compiled and ran the first time.  My Assembly version required some research to understand some of the assembler switches on NASM.  Sure, I got my assembly program to, er...  assemble but was a pain.
  2. I found my favorite college textbook, "An Introduction to Data Structures With Applications" by Tremblay and Sorenson.  There may be better text books out there that cover this subject, but this is the one I have...  And from my days at WIU, it is my favorite.  What am I going to do?  Well, when I used this book, all of our projects were written in USCD Pascal.  What I would like to do is use several languages to write all the projects in the book.  I am thinking of using C, Free Pascal, Modula III and Lua.  Maybe a few others like Assembler, C++, Python, Java or Rust.  Not certain, but it sounds interesting.
  3. Maybe...  maybe find an open source project to contribute my time.  
  4. Sailing...  boating... sailing...  OMG, I am a sailor!  Yes, my significant other gave me sailing lessons for my birthday.  Finished class about a week ago and bought a little sailboat built in the early 1970s by a company in Missouri called Advance.  She is 16 feet long, and also known as the "Sweet 16".  Great little boat, but is just for me.  Our 18 foot cruiser is currently in the shop for repairs and HOPEFULLY will be home before there is ice on the lake.
  5. Project StarStare, my little project to automatically detect meteor streaks in night sky photos is on a temporary hiatus but my be revived this winter.
  6. RuralRuins will see some new photos, I promise.
Anyway...  Probably a few things to blog about here.

And...  There is plenty to bitch, moan and complain about...  So...  Be back soon. 

Monday, May 29, 2017

WeatherUnderground Is Selling WHAT???

So there I am, innocently checking the forecast for today on wunderground, when what to my wondering eyes does appear?  BOOBS!  BREASTS!  HOOTERS!  (etc... etc..)  YES!  What has happened???  I wanted to know if our local lake would have weather agreeable to walking along the beach this afternoon and, while my primary goal was achieved, I also experienced an eyeful.

The advertisement on their page was not selling pornography, please don't think that; this advertisement was selling clothing.  Specifically, high-end blouses that are quite see-through!  I'm not a prude by any means, but is this a website that should include this sort of advertisement?

Deep in their Terms Of Service, there are references to 'Network Advertising Initiative" and "behavioral advertising" and the "Digital Advertising Alliance."  My reading of their many pages on privacy and data collection and cookies brought my fuzzy mind to one conclusion: they don't care much and leave it up to the users to either accept it, use some sort of tool to opt-out of certain advertisement programs, use an ad-blocker or use another weather website.

Honestly, there is NO reason any advertising algorithm would accurately believe I might be interested in seeing overpriced see-through blouses.

Is this a matter of corporate greed or desperation for a few more pennies of advertising income?  Is this a failure of AI and/or "behavioral advertising" code?  What worries me about this is, what if a precocious five year old used his mom's computer to check the weather and saw...  BOOBS???  At least PG-13 boobs.  When I was a kid, these might even verge on the edge of a "Rated R" evaluation.

Continue reading for screen shots.  Fair warning...  these are likely not safe for work.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Implementing a Simple Weather ScreenSaver in Linux

Starting with that first real-life tornado experience as a seven year old, I have been intrigued with the weather.  Going back to my college days I would watch the Weather Channel for hours-on-end when not doing school work.  After my freshman year (1985 or 86 or 87; don't remember completely), I passed my ham radio Technician test and was able to participate as a weather spotter.

Wanting to watch the weather on my computer while at work, many years ago I wrote a little program that would rotate the Windows background image through several current weather maps downloaded from NOAA and NWS websites.  Honestly, it worked OK, but not stellar.

Living Las Vegas gave me very little drive to be informed with the weather; it was simply depressing.  Hot... Hot...  OMG Hot... WTF Hot... oh... one nice day.  meh...  FUUU HOT!  I did NOT like the weather there.

Now, living back in the mid-west, I have been gaining interest in watching the weather again.  Since watching any cable weather outlet while working is quite distracting, a weather screen saver is the next best thing.  In this post I will detail how to setup a desktop Linux distribution (Debian "Jessie" to be exact) to download maps and radar images from the NWS and have the screen saver cycle through the images.  Personally, this runs on my spare Linux box next to my work computer.

Friday, March 17, 2017

A Linux Mint Live USB With Persistent Storage - The EASY way

Honestly, Linux Mint is my favorite Linux distribution.  Every piece of hardware I have ever thrown at it has worked out-of-the box without additional drivers.  Linux Mint with Xfce is quite lightweight and responsive on the somewhat older and under powered hardware I have a tendency to accumulate and use.

Anyway, to add to my previous post, Linux Mint Saves the Day, I wrote that post immediately after setting up the Live USB and watching a few things from YouTube and Netflix.  Unfortunately it was not after I booted to the flash drive a second time.  You see, the Linux Mint Live USB does NOT have persistent storage.  What I had initially done to setup the machine for watching Netflix was completely gone, thrown into the bit-bucket, fed to the monster of system confusion.  In short, making changes to a Linux Mint Live USB installation will NOT be saved for the next time you start a computer from that Live USB.

So, first thing I did was order a cheap little 250GB drive from NewEgg.  Cost only about $20 I think.  Anyway, while waiting for delivery, I researched the problem.  Oh, there are many interesting looking instructions on how to create a Linux Mint Live USB with persistent storage.  Unfortunately most of these solutions looked to be a bit complex and involved and even somewhat confusing.

Then, I thought of it...  Another flash drive...  Just install Linux Mint from the Live CD to the empty flash drive!  Now...  this is SLOW.  I sat there for nearly two hours while it installed.  And the resulting Linux Mint install on the USB is equally slow but does work.

So...   the solution: install from Linux Mint Live USB to an empty USB.   My recommendation: spend a little more than the cost of a USB drive, buy an inexpensive hard drive and install there.

** BASIC DISCLAIMER 
Don't know if this solution will work in all cases.
I used Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena".
My computer had USB 2, not 3 or some other faster, better interface.
Some other things I can't think of at the moment.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Linux Mint Saves the Day

So, there my wife and I were...  Just sitting in front of our television, preparing to continue our binging of Jessica Jones when, for some presently unknown reason our media computer would not boot.  After a bit of investigation I determined that the six year old Seagate hard drive had ceased working properly.  At times the BIOS would see the drive and Windows would partially boot but inevitably lock.  Other times, the BIOS saw no hard drive.

So...  No Netflix, no Winamp, no YouTube, no Hulu...  Nothing but on-the-air broadcasts.  We live in a rather rural area that is only covered by Iowa PBS, and affiliate stations for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

Last night I thought, rather than buy a new hard drive for this old computer, why not just run Linux Mint from a live flash drive?  And there it was...  Just that easy.  Well...  almost...

After getting Linux Mint running on a 16GB USB flash drive, I tried Netflix using Firefox.  Netflix complained that the browser wouldn't handle it.  OK, I download, install and try Chromium.  Nope...  Same thing.  After 30 minutes I discovered the solution...

If you want to watch Netflix on Linux without doing a lot of tweeking, use the Google Chrome browser.  Just install and use. No tweeking or adjusting.  It just works.

Many thanks to the Linux Mint and Google Chrome folks!

Friday, February 10, 2017

Anyone Else Tired???

So, this is my "on-call week" for week.  That means I need to be available constantly from 8AM Monday through 8AM on the next Monday to fix things at work.  Usually not much breaks; us programmers don't like to piss-off the other programmers when they are on-call by writing shit code.  And...  none of us want to get 'the call' from any of our bosses.  Seriously, we are all professional and most of us have worked where I am employed for the last fifteen years.  Personally, I am at nineteen years later this year.

Anyway, being on-call occasionally requires waking up at any hour of the night to fix something that is broken.  Two nights ago something little broke at about 5AM.  It was a simple repair but I couldn't go back to sleep.  Last night I had trouble falling asleep and this morning had to wake up at 4AM to assist with a software roll-out.

I'm tired.

Over the years I have created a list of activities that are verboten on days such as these.  This list includes: buying things online; bidding on items in online auctions; signing anything important; investing; handling power tools; motorcycle riding (or bicycle riding for that matter); boating; building bon-fires and working on the household electrical system.

This morning I added another item to my list of verboten activities...  updating computer operating systems.

I foolishly thought updating my Debian Linux machine would be a no-brainer...  Log on as root and apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade.  Several packages did indeed update.  Even saw a few comments about a kernel upgrade.  No biggie.  I just sat back, focusing on my coffee and the software rollout, allowing the upgrade to continue.

Coffee break.  I check the upgrade and YEA, it is complete.  I then start  my backup script; just a mount and then a call to unison.   BBBZZZTTTTTT!!!!!!!  I see an error...

mount error: cifs filesystem not supported by the system

You see...  I have a Verbatim NAS I use as a hot backup for all my PCs.  My Linux backup script simply uses mount to connect to the NAS and unison to perform the backup.  After the update/install it was just not going to work!  I scrambled...  My Windows machines could connect to the NAS.  My other Linux computers could connect as well.  I was pissed.  I searched and poked and tried different things for hours.

Then...  after several coffee's and a few ef-bombs, something occurred to me...  I hadn't rebooted the machine.  Shit!  I rebooted and SHAZAM, all is good in my Debian Linux world.  Nap time... that's allowed.