Posts Tagged Karl

Posted on Uncategorised

Counter example!

So there’s this website that let’s you convert regular image files into icons. You’ve probably seen it before, maybe used it once or twice. It has a donate button, which allows donations by way of Paypal. That button is there for one reason, and one reason only: to prove Karl wrong.

You see, he once posited that no one ever donates. And now, finally, after all six of these months and 100,978 icon conversions, someone has. An entire American(USD) cent, and all the way from Italy. I mean sure, it may have been a mistake. I might even concede that it probably was a mistake. Either way, it’s a counter example!

Theory disproven.

 

Posted on Programming

brackets or whatever you call them

At first I was all how am I going to deal with the order of operations? and I thought about maybe creating a parse tree.

That seemed excessive, especially when I thought about how simple calculators usually work, from a usage standpoint. Which was okay, even good, but how to account for brackets. Or better, nested brackets?

There’s probably a real name for this method, but I don’t know it. Karl will definitely know? And if he doesn’t he’s lying.
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Posted on Business

When Google is not available, I ask Karl

I don’t know if you’ve ever used a web browser before, but a common UI convention is to display a box at the top of the window, into which you type an address (or, URL). It lets the browser know what you want to retrieve, and soon you are browsing away like a professional.

With certain websites, Chrome asks if I’d like to preform a website-specific search using a query typed directly into his very own address bar — something I find very cool and also reasonably useful.

Firefox, too, but who cares about him?
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Posted on Uncategorised

Sometimes I forget to duck

I opened my eyes to Chris Evans. In time to witness the final fight scene, it wasn’t at all a sudden awakening. I wish I had slept right through.

I saw Push for the second time on Monday night. I was pretty tired, and I didn’t even like the movie the first time I saw it.

Don’t let that discourage you if you’re looking forward to seeing it. My taste probably differs from your own, though you should defer to mine.

But man, that out of place half an hour – it cured my tiredness for some time to come.
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Posted on Programming

Some stuff is fun

Karl will remember this one.

I don’t know how it started, though I suspect it was with Luke. Maybe he asked a question, or requested assistance from Karl or from me. However it began, it ended with the the three of us solving our way through the OSIX challenges. It actually worked out very well because at least one of us was well-suited for each level.

Level 12, the second last, was my favourite. It was called the Evil Professor, and if I recall it with any accuracy, we were provided with the specs for an instruction set and a binary file that, when executed on the fictional machine built for that instruction set, would print for you the key to complete the challenge.
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Posted on Programming

Oh hey, want to be friends?

I want to one day go up to someone and say that, just to see how they react. Also because I have no friends. Seriously, I only ever play Left 4 Dead in person these days. My xbox live friends are so busy hugging zombies and watching videos that they no longer want to cooperatively kill them with me. Oh, well – at least they included the split screen mode.

Guys, a few days ago Sheldon basically called me a liar. Why? Because he’s insensitive. To satisfy him, here’s a picture:
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Posted on Uncategorised

Adobe and Flash

Hello, World.  I’m Karl.  Brad gave me an account on his blog, so I decided to use it, to “rant” about Adobe.

Half a decade or so ago, Adobe decided that they would look much more hip if Macromedia happened to be hanging from their belt.   Suddenly, Macromedia disappeared, and Flash became Adobe Flash.  This was surprising and unexpected for people like me that do not pay attention to current events.

Soon I realised that Adobe was the best thing ever to happen to Flash.  Adobe looked at what people wanted for Flash, and they did almost every single thing people had been asking for years for.  They open-sourced nearly everything.  They added hardware acceleration, linux & 64-bit support, runtime generation of resources, local file access, and recently even 3D transforms.

Brad said something to me recently, however, that has gotten me thinking about Adobe.  He said he “read some funny / scary things about actionscript 3.”  At first the words meant little to me.  But as time passed, I began to think about Adobe, and my recent frustrations with them.

Over the past two days, I’ve spent significant time working on one of my large projects.  In that short time I encountered four or five bugs with Flash and Flex, two of which were entirely new to the bugbase.  Each bug crippled my ability to continue for hours, while I tried to isolate the problem and then somehow work around it.

I really have no desire to run into bugs in my tools this frequently.   It reminds me of something I’d forgotten about Adobe: Adobe created ColdFusion.  I had to use ColdFusion extensively while working for .NU Domain, and it gave me the same kinds of issues.  I tend to use features of a language to their fullest when I code, and when coding in proprietary languages made with regard for features over stability, this results in me running into issues relatively often.  It really gives an icky sense of the product being totally hacked together — and if I am making my product using this hacked-together product, how can I even trust my own creation?

ColdFusion has come a long way since I used it last.  By now, I imagine Adobe has put bandaids on all the bugs I found long ago.  Along the way, I imagine they introduced about twice as many features and about as many new bugs, all of which are probably much harder to run across than the older ones, and take much longer to isolate when you do.

Adobe provides two methods for reporting bugs with its products.  The “wish form” has been around for some time.  It gives a simple interface for submitting a bug report or a feature request confidentially.  Items submitted via the form are categorised by Adobe into an internal bug database.  One recieves no feedback after submitting a bug via the form.  However, I have submitted two bugs using this form, and both of them were quietly fixed by the next release.

The more grandiose interface is the triply named “Adobe Public Bug Database and Issue Reporting System”, “Adobe Bug Reporting System”, or “Adobe Bug and Issue Management System”, which I call simply the bugbase.  This public bug database contains a subset of the bugs in the internal database — most of the public bugs have been submitted by members of the community who have registered at the site.  A number have also been imported from some older (Macromedia?) bug and feature tracking systems.  The advantage of a public bugbase is being able to search for workarounds to existing bugs, to watch bugs and receive updates when they change, and to show your support for bugs you care about.

The public bugbase has a feature shared by many others — that of ‘voting‘ for issues.   A given bug is not shown to Adobe developers, and is left with a status of “Open” or “Community”, until it has passed some unknown vote threshold.  This feature makes it much easier for Adobe to totally ignore the problems that not many people encounter.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of those.

At the time of this writing, there are over three and a half thousand bugs in the bugbase marked “Open”, “New”, or “Community”.  Only 15 of these have ten or more votes, and 2833 of them have no votes at all.

I would encourage anyone who uses Adobe products and has encountered strange things occurring to visit the bugbase and give your issues a vote.  Especially if the issue gives you the impression that something important should really, really be refactored.