Jerry_Atrick

Sometimes, I do beleive in dog albitey. And as he or she knows that I don't believe in him or her, he sor she (or it) want's to make my life a pain.. Yesterday, the sparkies were due to come in and do the final work to allow us to finish the kitchen. Of course, I am in London Tuesday and Wednesdays, and as I didn't leave work until late (about 8pm, I wasn't home until after midnight. I woke up this morning, expectng to see everything done in the kitchen electrically - lights fitted, power points fitted, light switches installed, etc. The builder was then going to work on the floor staining. I raced into the kitchen and it is exactly as it was in the photos I posted above. In the village, we get the occasioanly power black out.. aseverywhere does. And yesterday, we had one. For the first time ever in the village, an agri hedge trimmer snipped through a pwoer cable at one of the properties on the edge of the village, and there was a power outage of the row of houses righ up to ours. The rest of the village was fine. It ook the hole day to restore power. The sparkies coudln't work because they needed their power tools. You can only larf at this point.

Sometimes, you realise you're in the wrong job. I joined this company after laws made being independent in what I do here untenable (i.e. the country is broke, let's to a tax grab). I joined relatively junior and in three years have risen through the ranksfairly quickly. to where I was before I joined the firm. And, to be honest, I spend more of my day reviewing and approving invoicces than actually delivering stuff. I went in 6 months from loving my job, to waking up in the morning with a groan thinking about the day ahead. When on Monday morning, you are waiting for Friday, it is not a good sign. Today, in a video meeting, with my manager and the camera, I purposely started yawning, looking around the room and totally disengaging. And over the last few months, I have been having what I call "career limiting discussions"; making shore a spade is called a spade ans making known we are now largely shovelling ship. So today, my new manager, who although I think could do her job a lot better, I like and could work for said, "we are creating a new set of roles. As you know we can't promote, but I want you to apply for this role." Obviosuly, the role was a step up from where I am now. And, yes, iot would look great on the CV. If you asked me even 10 years ago if I would think I could hit that level, you would have had to cart be off to hospital as my sides would have burst laughing. I responded politely, "Well, thank you." She asked if I was going to apply for it. "No - I doubt very much I will apply for it." She was flabbergasted.. I explained that the work I do now was not what I signed up for. It finally sunk in that I am now well and truly a flight risk and is offloading a lot of stuff I do to others already. A great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Reminds me of my last aviation medical.. after the ECG.. Worried look on doc: "Er.. have you ever been referred to a cardiologist?" Me. "That is not a great thing to hear... No"... Him: "Well, you are now..." Me thinking to myself, "Great! Jussst great.." Two weeks later at the aviation cardilogist (Still with the RAF): "I have already told that examiner he needs a new ECG machine... but lose some flab, anyway"

Indeed - welcome back.. This place, with our antics and no reality checks, is a mess 😉

Robbie Williams was my initial thought, too.. The ghost of Christmas past?

I presume it is photoshopped, but it is funny! And, yes, I have a simple mind.

OK.. I haven't seen it, and I would suggest not many people on the forum have, either. So, I went looking for it.. on Youtibe, because you can bet your bottom dollar that if it was a controversy, then Youtube would be litterd with examples of it. I found three - two from Sky News (Australia) and I thought there was one from the Daily Wail, but can't find it anymore. Let's say it was stated that welcome to country was claimed to be around for 250,000 years.. Could it not have been a slip of the tongue.. Presenting in front of a large crowd can result in nerves getting the better of people? Have we not seen that before. And let's nto forget, the party this senator is a member of has is alleged to have been somewhat infiltrtated by Hillsong cchurch people.. And I am guessing if this is the most pressing thing a senator comes upo with in terms of issues facing the country, he is not far from that cult. You know, those that believe in Adam and Even, and I am guessing that is purported to be quite a bit earlier than the 100,000 years of homo sapients, replendent with a talking snake, and belief in Noah's ark, which cannot be true unles it was hundreds of millions of years ago to let evolution re-evolve all of the land creatures creatures it was missing.. And then that would not quite add up to two of the more modern animals, but would be two brontasouruses, etc. Yeah.. Believe it or not, Aboriginals have their own religions and beliefs, unfounded, just like everyone else. For example, they believe they were in Australia (or their country in Australa) from the Draming time... https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples. Now, is somehow non-Aboriginals totally unfounded and religious beliefs more real and justifiable than Aboriginals? So, maybe they thing dreaming started a little over 250K years ago.. and welcome to country did start around 250,000 years ago.. It is a wrong belief, but science has rebuked most of the crap in other religions, but other religions get a free pass? Personally I would rather be in the crowd at the SCG sitting through a ceremony even if I didn't like it, as I could don my headphones or just talk to the others around me, ignorning it than say have to endure wfts of cigarette smoke in publoc - and infringement of my rights not to smoke that I cannot escape. FFS, Some perspective, please.

Was in London the last couple of days, and my fingers aren't designed for phones... To expand the above post... Yes.. I have had experience at parallel programming, and this is the book that started me off on it: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0134437063?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid07-21 As mentioned above, there are three main types of parallel programming (ignoring quantum computing theory, which is heading towards commericisation): Fork/Join: This is effectively milti-processing. A controller type program will fork a process off, and that process will have its own memory space. All master/slave process communication is peformed using inter-process communication, which is available between otherwise un-related processes. An example of this is, ay Microsoft word. You have a document open. You open a new document from within Microsoft word, and it forks a new word process. The new word proccess has total control of the document and the original one doesn't see it at all. This example is a little contrived as it is not actually what is commonely referred to multi-processing.. but is just illustrative. Network processors, operating systems, etc, use fork.join a lot. They care considered heavyweght because with each new process spawned, the execution and address spalce, as well as memory, queues, etc has to be set up for the new process. A real example will be an electronic trading process. The master process will forkl off a pricing process, and signal watching process, and an order placement/execution process. They will use inter process communication to send messages between them to facilitate trading. The master process may be watching over them making sure things are operating smoothly and kill processes, if for example, the market watcher sees the prices going crazy or something. Mutli-treading: This is allowing a single process to branch of finto multiple execution thread. This is considered lightweight as each thread shares the memory and address space of the main process, and only needs to load local to that thread memory. So, they are much faster to initiate, and use less system resources. They do however suffer from rce conditions, where different threads alter the main process memory contents unexpectedly to other threads and causes bugs, which are notoriously difficult to track down. This is because of the way multi-processing works. This form of parallel or concurrent processing is used for sub-tasks of a program. For example, your browswer uses them because it is downloading at the same time as loading a page on Tab 2 while you are reading this post. Although, due to the lightweight nature of threads, they are used more where one would normally use multi-processing where performance is required. Going back to electronic trading, I can have a thread for each of the items listed above, which will run faster and as the memory is shared, will allow much faster communication than inter-program communication. So, if I am building a low-latency (microsecond actions) high frequency trading platform, I would go to the bother of using threads and writing extra code to protect form race conditions. GPU programming: This is basically combining multi-processing and multi-threading in one. The overheads of setting up a GPU process are minimal, becuase the GPUs have thousands of cores and their own address spalce, execution space etc. You effectively set up the memory areas and attach a thread to a core. Sort of. I am going through it slowly. However, it is not simple programming in higher level languages live Java or c~ or Python, because you need to understand the chipset language or follow a standard language such as CUDA and embed that in your programming.. The cores in a GPU have a very limited instruction set and are designed to only manipulate bit streams (streams of 1s and 0s) into a signal for the monitor, but for simple arithemtic operations, they are perfect as you can run massively parallel simple computations extremely quickly and chain them toapply more advanved algorthms still a lot faster than the CPU set up. It's great fun, and a challenge - that's for sure.

I had an interesting discussion with a young Russian woman (c. 30 years ols I would guess) at work yesterday... She was very much for Trump winning the election. Reason: He would go easy on Russia. She wa very unhappy about the Whitehouse thinking of allowing Ukraine to be able to use long rangle missiles to attack inside of Russia. I could only say, "Oh, the irony... "

There's a reason I am moving back to Oz

Hmm I call a fake

There are essentially three models of concurrent processing (ex. quantum computing): multithreading, fork/exec, and now gpu programming. I am learning of the latter but, yes have previously been involved in the two former. The best way to learn it is to join an open source project as a contributor - but be prepared, they are full of egos. Years ago I joined the linux kernel team and mainly focused on bringing the ISO network stack - for me network address translation to the kernel. But I did dabble in kernel process dispatchers..all written in C then If you want to learn rust, there is a project starting to natively support rust in the Linux kernel

A coder? tsk tsk tsk... I was a software engineer, or developer, or systems programmer - but coder???!! 😉 A few on here are, or were. Surpised you don't have COBOL from university in that era... I still dabble - mainly Java and C/C++ these days... Though will have to learn Rust (not of the kind that corrodes metal!!) as, although it is already over 8 years old, it is slowly going to be overtake C and C++ because it is both a low level language and is memory safe - alledgedly anyway.

Er.. unless you have moved lately, I think you mean miles :-)

OK.. Fess up, Specy... how many accidents and speeding tickets?

Yes, but I think @newsaroundme is a little south of where I am.

What programming languages did you learn back in 1988 and up to now? And what languages are you learning now? If you learned C (or its forerunner, Algol) back in 1988, not much has actually changed, except graphics and object oriented, functional, and aspect oriented programming. The latter are programming paradigms rather than technology themselves.

That is true; though it is possible that there could be a touch of makeup, photoshop or both. But, to be fairto Scott Baio, if youy look after yourself, there's little reason you won't age well. My My, doesn't Henry Winkler look a little like a smurf in the older shot... 😉

We all make arses of ourselves every so often.. It's pretty rare people hold grudges (unless it's really bad). I would suggest from the president's reactionn, you have probably read more into it than was there. Enioy your return to the shed. And what better way to do the community a service than to bring along the Vietnam vet?

18 degrees in SW England, after a chilly start (4 degrees). But sunny and no wind.

Back to the Robodebt royal commission. It has already been a year since it concluded. And what has been done?

😉

Better watch out next time your around those chickens. Their ancestory explains why they eat anything and have hen-pecked snakes to death: https://www.zarebasystems.com/articles/t-rex-closest-relative-the-chicken

I really like Kamala Harris - she seems to have a good blend of leadership, empathy, and a kind of ability to relate to the average person, whatever that really is. Noboy's perfect, because perfection is subjective anyway, but I have a feeling she would give many leaders a good run for their money. Of course, I may be proven totally wrong, but she can't be worse that bat-ship crazy Trump...

I haven't switched on the TV for donkeys and when I do, it is youtube or watchafl.com.au The kids and partner watch netflix and I think Disney; and my partner watches free to air catch up TV.. Can't think of the last time I watched a traditional TV channel.