Humor Random Comments Thread

[Andy44]

Artlav is my favorite mad scientist. Here he is in his lab:

And this is his next project.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

As long as he pauses, if only briefly, to ask himself, "what's the worst that could happen?", we're all good.

 

[Andy44]

Well, just watched The Expanse season two opener. Did not disappoint!

 

[MaverickSawyer]

And now, for something completely different.

 

[Urwumpe]

... at one time, our control room was in the ONC building. We needed a reradiating antenna ... to talk from the pad to their ... conversations. And I told them, I said, "Man, we need a reradiating antenna." We couldn't find one. Anyhow, so one Monday I come in, and we have a test scheduled, and ... there was a reradiating antenna.


So at ten o'clock I had to go the range test conductor's briefing at the range control building. It used to be the old control building, on the Cape side. And one guy was complaining about Pad 36. He said, "I don't know what happened, but did we have a real storm or something? Friday when we went home, we had a reradiating antenna on the tower and it must have blown off over the weekend."

I said, "Oh, . I know exactly how it had blown off. Sergeant Barton." I mean, he could have just said, whatever you ... (need, I) could find for you. (Laughter) These were the things that happened.

That is how you got things done during the Space Race...

https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/WendtG/GW_1-16-98.pdf

 

[Andy44]

... at one time, our control room was in the ONC building. We needed a reradiating antenna ... to talk from the pad to their ... conversations. And I told them, I said, "Man, we need a reradiating antenna." We couldn't find one. Anyhow, so one Monday I come in, and we have a test scheduled, and ... there was a reradiating antenna.


So at ten o'clock I had to go the range test conductor's briefing at the range control building. It used to be the old control building, on the Cape side. And one guy was complaining about Pad 36. He said, "I don't know what happened, but did we have a real storm or something? Friday when we went home, we had a reradiating antenna on the tower and it must have blown off over the weekend."

I said, "Oh, . I know exactly how it had blown off. Sergeant Barton." I mean, he could have just said, whatever you ... (need, I) could find for you. (Laughter) These were the things that happened.

That is how you got things done during the Space Race...

https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/WendtG/GW_1-16-98.pdf

I read a story once written by a US Marine Vietnam War veteran, who described how his infantry unit managed to obtain an extra .50 cal M2 machine gun: they "liberated" it from a slack Army unit with what he described as "poor weapons security".

As far as he was concerned, they didn't steal it for personal use, and the Army apparently didn't care enough about it to secure it, so his Marines would put it to better use.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

:hmm:
Sounds legit.

 

[jedidia]

The real tragedy of school is that it takes so much time away from you that you could use to actually learn something!

 

[Artlav]

On a more random note...
Contemplate a binary search tree.
It's keys are pointers.
Each thing being pointed at is assigned a number.
The tree and objects are, at some point, stored on disk with pointers replaced by these numbers.
Some time later it is loaded, and the numbers are replaced back with the pointers of the restored objects.

Can you see the problem?
Took me two days of staring at the rainbow of random bugs all over the project before i narrowed it down and spent the extra 5 seconds thinking about WHAT would actually happen if you save and load a BST that way.

 

[jedidia]

Serialising pointers and then using them as key over several runtimes... yeah, I can see what might be going wrong there :lol:

Writing your own low-level memory managment to allocate them at the same address would probably be a bit overkill to fix the problem...

 

[Urwumpe]

I see the problem in the way how the numbers are turned into pointers again... I mean... you would need to construct a binary tree again from the numbers, which automatically creates pointers....

 

[Linguofreak]

Serialising pointers and then using them as key over several runtimes... yeah, I can see what might be going wrong there :lol:

Writing your own low-level memory managment to allocate them at the same address would probably be a bit overkill to fix the problem...

Wellllllll... You could* just save a memory image to a file, then mmap it back to the same base address.


*Linguofreak is not responsible for exhaustion of disk space when saving images of 64-bit address spaces to filesystems that do not implement sparse files, or for disk space overcommitment on filesystems that do. Side effects of following Linguofreak's programming advice may include CTDs, nasal demons, and rapid unplanned disassembly. May not be available in all States. Pointers void where prohibited.

 

[Artlav]

Writing your own low-level memory managment to allocate them at the same address would probably be a bit overkill to fix the problem...

Well, an easier way is to just rebuild the tree. Doesn't take that much more time.

It was initially used in a different way, with numbers as keys, so i spent a bit of time designing it for minimum memory allocation - all the nodes are stored in a lazily-expanded array, with indexes used instead of pointers for leafs. This way you can just dump the array in one block write, along with a couple of numbers like size and which index is root.

Neat, until it backfired...

 

[jedidia]

Well, an easier way is to just rebuild the tree. Doesn't take that much more time.

That was my implication, yes

 

[n122vu]

I've been tentatively offered a position programming PID controllers. A bit different direction from my current path, but I'm giving it serious consideration. One potential positive is I'd be working from home, another in that there would be no travel. Don't get me wrong, I love travelling, but having my daughter every weekend forces me into a pretty tight, usually impractical travel window.

 

[Urwumpe]

I've been tentatively offered a position programming PID controllers. A bit different direction from my current path, but I'm giving it serious consideration. One potential positive is I'd be working from home, another in that there would be no travel. Don't get me wrong, I love travelling, but having my daughter ever weekend forces me into a pretty tight, usually impractical travel window.

That is the kind of job I also would like to have. Especially since my family will grow by one this year. But so far, I am deployed in Cologne for three months. I used to hate travel, but more than hating travel, I hate bad customers.

 

[Loru]

Disclaimer: This is not advertisement - I'm not in any way related to Creative Labs

This little fella was given to me few days ago by my "girlfriend".

I'm kinda suprised how many things it can do for it's size. Plays audio via bluetooth or integrated micro SD card reader, registers itself either as card reader or audio device on PC (much better sound than bulit-in audio in my netbook), or even (take this Apple) via 3.5mm audio jack.

Pretty usefull for phone calls in hotel room assuming phone is lying close to your head.

Overall nice little piece of tech.

 

[jedidia]

...when a customer complains that a harddisk provided by your company for 24/7 video recording "is already broken after only 5 years!" :facepalm:

 

[Urwumpe]

...when a customer complains that a harddisk provided by your company for 24/7 video recording "is already broken after only 5 years!" :facepalm:

A tape drive would have lasted 50 years.... OK, the surveillance tapes have varying lifetimes, depending on what was recorded on them....

 

[jedidia]

A tape drive would have lasted 50 years.... OK, the surveillance tapes have varying lifetimes, depending on what was recorded on them....

It's a great sentiment, but try finding a managment software for security cameras that supports tape recording and playback.