Posts by damiandixon 78 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Feb 2016
Adopting the approach of no raw pointers, encapsulation, use of bounds checking, parameter checking, static analysis, multiple compilers, all warnings errors, testing and the use of tools that check memory and coverage it should be very very rare to have any memory related issues in production.
In my experience the main issues are around interpretation of requirements and implementation of those requirements (design, algorithms, knowledge).
I have a similar setup : Solar PV, House Battery. Solar on an older fit tariff.
I had to have a new meter fitted as my old meter ran backwards. Only found out after it had run back past the last meter reading ...
They fitted a new SMET2 meter it works fine.
I can now take advantage of topping up house battery when my supplier gives me cheap electricity time slots...
Your generator feed will be after the supply meter on the house electrics side and there will be an isolator switch to disconnect the whole house from the supply in the case of power failure on the supply side.
So I don't know why they said it was too complicated to fit a meter as I have neighbours with exactly this setup...
I live in a rural area that suffers from a lot of power cuts. My approach is to use multiple UPS and one large portable battery as a generator, cost of fitting the feed in equipment for it and it's maintenance could not be justified as the power cuts rarely exceed a few hours.
I had a DAI personal computer. My uncle had a software house back in the late 70s and 80s. He had been buying lots of different computers to play with and decide which one to standardise on for development.
It's in the loft. Sadly it has a power supply issue.
I lived in a council house at the time and my mum was a war widow... so money was very tight.
When I could finally afford a replacement I got an atari 130xe.
I had to go to Edinburgh to fix a software issue.
I flew up from Gatwick on the first morning flight via BA in business class. Made full use of the fast lane and BA lounge facilities.
I had a seat booked on every easyJet flight back that day.
Took an hour to fix the issue so I did some sightseeing and a leisurely lunch before catching a flight home later that afternoon.
Which makes up for krap trip to Sweden where my flight was late leaving Gatwick so I missed my connection in Copenhagen and spent 12 hours waiting for the next flight.
After that one I refused any arrangements with connecting flights unless they were truly long distance... and had a decent amount of slack in the timings.
The last time I bought ink for my epsom was 2015. Then it was 3rd party. Since then ink has been obtained from the local neighbourhood free sites... I've probably got 4yrs worth of ink in a box.
Why pay for a subscription?
The only other cost has been replacing the printer potty content and resetting the print count...
"(also, incidentally, in many places where it's humid, a dehumidifier can work as well as a heater)"
I'd suggest looking at heat recovery and ventilation units. I've 3 in-wall units. Way cheaper to run then the two dehumidifiers I used to use and way more effective.
I did look at the whole house solutions but they were difficult to retrofit and would have cost significantly more to fit (pipes to a large number of rooms).
The key is to significantly reduce your heating input requirements by insulation, draft proofing and effective ventilation.
That will reduce the load on the boiler meaning it will last a lot longer, cost way less to run and when it finally dies years later there might be a better heating solution available.
I've only turned the heating on for two hours so far this autumn...
Earlier this year I was looking at using Jira, Confluence and bitbucket for a small team.
We have to have on premises or under our control due to security requirements from customers.
So I've gone with gitlab premium...
While the majority of the functionality is fine I can't quite get the Wiki"s to be as good as confluence. I'd love to see a tutorial or write up on how to achieve something similar or just a more feature rich wiki with the ability to export as a document.
Having the referrer as the register makes us reasonably unique at 0.02% of visitors.
English as a language, particularly GB gives a reasonable uniqueness. Not as good as Dutch...
Interesting that device specific reasonably static data is not being used such as IP address. Forget Mac address as mine changes more frequently than IP address.
I use nomachine when I can install it on the server (windows & Linux).
I use remmina for windows remote desktop otherwise. Windows RDP turns off graphics acceleration and the only way to turn it back on is reboot or local logon.
vnc I've not used in a long time.
ChatGPT, Bard... Google, bing... You should always check the references to make sure they make sense.
I've used ChatGPT and Bard for reasech into how to program an area that I'm unfamiliar with. I did not copy any of the code snippets as I had no idea where they came from. I did do searches on the library calls though which helped a lot in understanding call sequencing.
They are an interesting tool and came up with more relevant information than Google/bing search.
However the way the material is presented as an authoritative narrative is seductive.
I've added a policy at work to ban the copying of code from the internet without a clear copyright, licence and attribution that is acceptable to the project manager and legal.
I tend to use Libra Office from day to day.
However for a release I have to check the docs using Microsoft Office.
The online Office 365 is still not quite there IMHO for large content rich docs.
Libra Office has it's issues and so does M$ Office. I often use one or the other to fix broken docs.
Ideally I'd like to stick with Libra Office as almost all my development is on Linux now but customers require docs to be useable in M$ Office...
So far every time I've managed to connect to 5g I've been disappointed at the apparent available rate. Yes it's reported as fast by it takes forever so there is either a bottle neck or high contention.
Either way where I live 4g is not great even standing on the roof of the house. 5g no chance anytime soon, I'm more likely to get fftp.
I've had a play with a couple of topics.
It did provide some additional interesting points and links. However more than half the links were useless or very much out of date.
The risk was that the presentation of the information was very good and that if someone was naive they may not double check the results or if not sufficiently verse in the subject or similar subjects may be fooled by the results.
I do think it's a useful tool though and it is likely to get better. I'm just not too sure what I mean by better. I hope it's in the results rather than the presentation.
I'd like to see a document or written tutorial on how to migrate from using Xlib to using Wayland. Along with code examples that work.
It's dead easy to do a lot of simple things using Xlib that I've wasted way too much time trying to figure out how to do in a wayland environment.
Remote X is however the killer USP. ssh can be used for security if needed.
VNC/RDP has is it's place but I find neither satisfactory.
I tend to use nomachine but only with Windows and X servers. Not tried with a wayland session.
I use also use Nvidia graphics cards and I'm not changing. The reason is that I need the graphics debuggers. The debuggers for other gpu's just don't cut it. I've also bumped into too many issues with both AMD and Intel implementations of modern OpenGL, so I develop for Nvidia first then fix elsewhere.
I am however very impressed with Intels development of thier Mesa drivers. I wish Nvidia would move quicker to embrace a similar approach.
I recently watched a you-tube video of someone trying to fix a laptop that someone else had tried to clean. The laptop prior to cleaning was working perfectly fine.
It looked like the person who had done the cleaning had tried to lift a number of chips without understanding how heavily integrated electronic components are now.
They had also pulled ribbon cables so hard that pins were broken.
I did learn some interesting fault finding techniques watching the video.
My Uncle gave me a DAI personal computer in 81. So I've been programming for 41 years on my own machines. Professionally for 33years. I started being taught intermittently to program by my uncle over the four years prior to that on his mainframe (he had his own software company). He would sit with me and we would write small programs to turn lights on and off or create moving shapes on the single line led matrix.
Text books cost a lot because the paper version has such a small run. But I get the point.
I pay for my own O'Riley ebook subscription to get hold of the books I need. Spending less then I use too on paper books that sit on a shelf gathering dust.
Personally I'd like a textbook size colour ebook.
So I'm a zombie....
I use vi because it's the first editor I used on Unix and it's easy to do some fancy search and replace stuff with. I can easily navigate around the command line and open files... works when I'm using remote SSH. But it's not for everyone as the learning curve is high.
I use notepad++ to quickly load huge files and simple text as well as unicode conversions.
I also use VisualStudio on windows as an ide.
I also use CLion and qtcreator.
I pick what's easy to use for the job at hand.
Gdpr only applies in some jurisdictions.
It's a pain to implement even for the most trivial things such as a membership list for a youth group where you need name, age, emergency contacts and some medical information.
The amount of paperwork generated and thus time and resources consumed is out of all proportion for volunteer organisations.
Gdpr needs to be simplified and made a lot easier to understand and comply with.
Qt also has a commercial model which trys and does confuse people.
Only a few of the Qt libraries are GPL and can be completely avoided.
The sales people say if you develop using Qt under LGPL you have to pay them a large sum of money before you start using the commercial version. There is nothing in the LGPL that supports this...
Given that we only use it for the GUI it's very expensive when compared to a full msdn developer licence.
At my last place board level management required us to release on redhat enterprise.
So we had one licence left in its box. We did all development and testing on Mint, CentOS and RedHawk and told sales it would work on any Linux version given a particular minimum kernel and GCC/G++/clang version...
I never quite understood why people tie themselves to one variant of Linux distribution.
If you as a developer know what you are doing you should be able to do a single C/C++ build that works on multiple distros, given a minimum kernel, GCC and required dependencies installed (or shipped).
If you have a device driver that is built from source a kernel update can stop it working. Had this happen twice now with unbuntu. I'll keep the systems upto date until they are commissioned, but once commissioned the updates are stopped and only applied after being reviewed. It's a security balancing act. Luckily for me most of the systems once commissioned are not connected to the internet.
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