Tavern on the Meta - 2017-02-03

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user202362

12:48 AM

user image

user202362

that is not ... a drumstick

user315433

1:17 AM

> #AVG #Antivirus avg tech support, @NBCNews avg tech services, avg installation support, avg customer services #Technical #Support #PenceBlackHistory

user315433

So hashtaggy

user315433

Notify users of question collection prior to moderator elections by Gilles is very reasonable but probably hard to implement because notifications are tied to elections code, and a question collection post is just that, a meta post.

user315433

A compromise: begin question collection half a week before nomination phase, and run it for a week as now. Then the notification arrives in the middle of collection, allowing users a chance to participate. The questionnaire then becomes available halfway through nomination, so the nominees will have reasonable time to complete it (after all, one can think about the questions before posting a nomination).

If/when we automate more of this, it would be possible to tie notifications to the creation of the post. That's... A ways away though.

user315433

Yes, as pretty much everything that requires dev work. "Let CMs do it manually" appears to be a cheaper option.

user315433

1:32 AM

E.g.: let Grace super-ping everyone with 150+ rep from election chatroom. Problem solved.

Yeah. And really, the only downside there is that if we created that route it might be tempting for someone else to use it for something else.

user315433

The real question about "0 down vote favorite" is why is the link text "down vote" instead of "vote down". It describes the action taken, so "vote" is a verb here.

text only exists for accessibility, so my zero-research guess here would be that someone using a screen-reader proposed that exact text years ago.

do any of you guys ever do any native osx development?

or, to the point: i don't, but this thing i built on os x 10.9 "fails to start" with a crash on os x 10.6. is that probably par for the course, or should i actually care?

1:47 AM

I don't have a Mac, but I hear tell they just work. Perhaps you're holding it wrong?

(obvious answer here is that you're linking against an API that doesn't exist on previous versions)

@Telkitty For some reason that's kinda grossing me out. Also, I challenge you to stare at it with youtube.com/watch?v=9prxnEAeMRw playing in the background for the full hour.

@Shog9 That's kind of what I figured, I'm not sure, I'm used to Microsoft's insane backwards compatibility. It links with Qt frameworks, although I distribute them with the application, but I have no idea what stuff those link to. I also had a whole thing trying to find the specific version of XCode and SDKs and crap to install for 10.9. But if it doesn't seem odd to anybody here, then I'm satisfied to just say "guys, 10.6 was so 5 years ago".

33

Q: This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa"

I think I did everything I could in the last 20 hours, but nothing seems to work. My app is running and working -- just as it should -- the only problem I have is that I cannot create a .app bundle from it. I tried both Py2App and cx_Freeze but non of them is working. Because of the multi-platfor...

osx python-3.x bundle cx-freeze pyqt5

Also Windows tends to say "xxxxx.dll not found" or "this can't be run on this version of windows" rather than a crash dialog.

Sometimes it does. There are ways to link your app such that Windows' errors are every bit as inscrutable. Most of them seem to involve SxS

Heh, yeah, and also as I say that I realize I'm forgetting about all the times I've built applications then run them on systems with missing libraries that just leave me hanging, silently failing to start.

1:56 AM

my win-dev knowledge is becoming increasingly archaic, but... Back in the day, I had nearly as much code written to do diagnostics in cases where the app wouldn't start, or would load the wrong libraries and then crash later on... As I did in the actual apps themselves.

VS6 was especially fun, because there was like a decade where MS shipped multiple versions of the runtime libraries with the exact same name. So shit would just break in hard-to-diagnose ways if the wrong one got loaded, which was also easier than it should've been.

Oh I am very familiar with that era... thanks for reviving all the painful memories.

no charge

It is funny though, I've been feeling like a dinosaur lately. I have all this Windows API knowledge that nobody cares about any more, and I also have all kinds of weird old diagnostics tools that I made.

I learned the Windows API almost entirely by writing 1337 AOL 2.0 progz. It was a good learning experience. But hilarious in retrospect.

And man I miss VB3-6.

I started out on DOS, where if you wanted a GUI you wrote it yourself. From font rendering to layout. WinAPI seemed so easy in comparison, albeit slow as mud. Then I saw my brother using PowerBuilder or some such, where you pretty much just drew stuff on screen and wrote the actual logic... I'd spend late nights doing layout and lazy-loading for lists to make them fast, and he'd spend like 15 minutes loading the data and break for lunch.

...so I switched to HTML, 'cause screw all that.

And now I hear folks complaining about how hard CSS is, and just bite my tongue.

Getting old without turning into an insufferable dick is hard.

To be fair, I used to pass my time writing and testing polymorphic viruses in assembler, and CSS is still way harder.

C++ Builder?

2:07 AM

naw, that was something else

user315433

Writing polymorphic viruses in CSS must be hard indeed, especially if HTML is not allowed.

Heh

Oh I see, I never heard of PowerBuilder. It looks like it's for data-driven stuff. That's neat.

Yeah... Think, Access VBA, but without quite as much baggage.

He was working on payroll systems or something, so it didn't need to be super fast. If you could learn to write a query, you were golden.

Right now I'm in the middle of a little bit of a nightmare trying to maintain a now-enormous application I originally wrote in C++ Builder about 12 years ago, which had survived Embarcadero's purchase of the software, but is still a complete disaster. C++ Builder used to be super solid, but at least 4-5 years ago the IDE was a tragedy. I'm not sure if it got any better since.

VCL then?

2:11 AM

I'm trying to convince the client that it's time to kill that software and start over, but projects that use it keep coming up at an insane pace and we don't have time to breath.

Yeah

Borland at least tried to do decent OO wrappers. I've no idea how they've aged.

Fun bit of trivia; it's the software that powers the LED installation on the SF Bay Bridge. Now you know, it's written with C++ Builder, it's a nightmare, and to make it more hilarious, it runs on a Mac Mini loaded with Windows 7. Tell your friends.

That's a heck of a combo

They did a decent job, and their component library was awesome. It's truly sad because it's the IDE that suffered. The debugger, the text editor, so many bugs, to the point of being unusable.

Borland stopped caring about it, then it got renamed to RAD Studio, where they tried to bring back the Delphi focus, then Embarcadero bought it.

user315433

And now Embarcadero was itself sold...

2:14 AM

Was it, I haven't even been following for a few years. I gave up.

It's Idera now?

user315433

They kept Embarcadero brand for dev tools, though.

First IDE I ever used was Borland's Turbo C++. A complete joy. I doubt I'd have ever bothered learning C++ without it.

True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.

It was a good piece of software. I think my first IDE award goes to QBasic.

Lol!

Really want to see an SO question where the poster casually mentions that the purpose of their program is to make chicken heads explode.

Well I am now faced with a choice: Back to fighting with RAD Studio, or stay up all night trying to beat all my old SpaceChem high scores. I am choosing the latter. Later all.

2:32 AM

'nite

Night, shogling.

@Shog9 or whoever. Oh wait I just remembered I had a question for you. Hairboat wanted me to send her an email and gave me the first part of her address but no domain. Is it @stackexchange.com?

@JonEricson do you know? ^

Also hi.

user315433

I think both should be the same destination for email... also, it's in her profile, meta.stackexchange.com/users/165581/hairboat

@JasonC Sure.

Oh. Right. People write useful things in their profiles.

All right. Back to SpaceChem. Later again.

2:40 AM

@stackoverflow.com works too.

user202362

2:55 AM

@JasonC Meh superb ability at posing gross pictures in name of love

user315433

3:31 AM

I can't stand it - WILCO

user315433

Wilco appear to be stand-allergic too.

4:03 AM

Based from what I know/see, the HTML title of a question might add tag if it's not mentioned in the written title. And I usually see only 1 tag added. However, this got 2 tags.

Big chance I'm wrong about 1-tag only.

4:31 AM

4

A: Why are questions adding the top two tags to the title?

This change was made last night on the Gaming site alone. It is an attempt to solve the problem without having to make broader changes to the tag system. I am very much on the fence about it, but since changing tag order is off the table for now* I am willing to give it a chance to see if it is...

Ah, so it's exclusive to Arqade. Thanks Shog!

4 hours later…

8:55 AM

Apparently the firewall at this company blocks Arqade :(

9:19 AM

@Stijn get back to work. Stop playing games. Unless you work where I work ... then it's your job.

@Bart my unit & integration tests are running

(that's the new "my code is compiling" excuse)

:D

so you playtest video games?

Well, playtest our own gamedev, sure. And during breaks we play other games ... for science

cool :)

2 hours later…

11:03 AM

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/…

> C# is used by millions of people. As one data point, this year’s Stack Overflow developer survey shows C# as one of the most popular programming languages, surpassed only by Java and of course JavaScript (not counting SQL as a programming language, but let’s not have a fight about it).

the developer survey proves useful :)

5 hours later…

3:52 PM

zzzZZZZzzzZZZzz

4:03 PM

user image

@Derpy WAG in Den if you are bored ;)

user315433

I'm afraid Randall overdosed on sugar doing research for his last comic... no Friday comic yet. xkcd.com/1793

4:42 PM

Quiet day in here today it seems :D

5:00 PM

Today's xkcd comic (Soda Sugar Comparisons):

The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.

Deja Vu

5:15 PM

@Bart it's always quiet on Friday.

How was your meeting? @Bart

Long

But useful?

Got insights?

Decisions were made?

Myeah, in the end it was okay. But long day, not many contributions. So you're exhausted without really doing anything

But those have to happen every now and then

@Bart of course. Most of my days are like that.

:/

5:17 PM

Wait, you're a group leader or something like that? @Bart

@Bart nah, I mean most of the days I just fix small bugs or add small features.

Nah, we just needed the whole team together to discuss some upcoming stuff. Minor bit of input, long meeting.

@Bart so turns out you discussed the minor things instead of the actual issues? This got a name...

user315433

5:43 PM

xkcd.com/1794

user315433

I give up

user315433

A hiccup with xkcd API

6:04 PM

Today's xkcd comic (Fire):

Billy Joel briefly detained

6:26 PM

@zaq you mean the (lack of) onebox?

7:09 PM

I believe so. It happened recently.

7:24 PM

The Great Meta-Implosion of 2017

jebus

Did that whole thing stay pretty localized to meta.SO?

Pretty much I think

7:39 PM

well, that's good

It's still somewhat ongoing with both sides apparently not really getting the other's point of view

Yeah, I waded in there and I'm regreting it.

It's a fairly interesting dynamic though. Although I don't envy having to deal with it on the SO side

@Bart wait ... are there other points of view?

Sure @rene. But they're wrong

7:54 PM

Gah.. I regret reading Kasra's updated answer...

So what is on the political agenda for this weekend?

I count four circles in the ideological venn diagram so far: agrees with the sentiment, disagrees with the sentiment, disagrees with venue, agrees with venue

@rene legalize all the things?

That can be settled quickly.

deregulate all the things?

Just do like the Dutch did with soft-drugs: don't change the law, just permit its use.

Not sure if permit is the best translation for gedogen

8:07 PM

Kinda sorta. I guess "tolerate" would be closer? Pretty much "don't enforce the law".

Yeah, tolerate is a better match, thx

That just encourages a black market and "selective" enforcement

IOW, piss of the wrong person, get hit

Except in practice it doesn't

It works remarkable well, in that area that is.

Although practice is somewhat bizar with places like coffee shops getting permission to sell, but to some extent not to buy

8:11 PM

In practice where? Can't speak to Holland, but I've known California growers who had some real headaches during the "we won't legalize growing for sale, but we won't prosecute" phase

Yeah, you can't grow and deliver the stuff

We're talking the Netherlands, yes

Piss off your neighbors, talk shit to a cop, there goes your crop.

I'm not sure what current laws are (nor enforcement) on growing your own. There used to be a 1 plant max I think?

So everything has to be grown from seed to be legal? Ouch.

8:13 PM

@Bart 5

Well, you can just purchase in a coffee shop

And who's growing for them?

There's the rub

they are growing within corn fields

so... Black market.

8:14 PM

yeah

There are slow movements for many years now to move it towards official suppliers

But I've left the country over a decade ago, so I'm not up to date

There is also more room for suppliers that grow for medical purposes

(Just for comparison, here in CO I can have up to 12 plants in my house for my own use, with licensed growers allowed much, much more as long as everything is tracked from seed / clone to sale)

I expect that to be the model the Dutch government will implement

I highly recommend it.

8:18 PM

For the medical stuff that model is already in place.

That's how we started; took care of a lot of infrastructure that way

Yeah, and you control who enters the market, handing out only 10 or 20 licenses for a year

I'm sure some of the struggling farmers we have would love that opportunity

@rene we're much less strict there. You can find licensed growers / distributors listed here: colorado.gov/pacific/enforcement/med-licensed-facilities

You can also register as a "caregiver" and essentially grow on someone else's behalf - lot more doing that.

Hi Chris

8:28 PM

123

@Shog9 Oh, that is cool. The Dutch government website is here

Are mushrooms still outlawed @rene?

I don't know actually, I recall it got stricter

Which part of Colorado, @Shog9? I promise, no RL trolling...

I know they were after some French tourists jumped out of hotel windows and off of bridges on a high

8:30 PM

yeah, that wasn't going well

and we had those bad hard-drugs that killed a couple of tourists

@rene oh cool, English

@canon central, near COSprings

@Shog9 Sweet. Just adjusting some pins and red yarn on my newsprint papered walls.

Now, please tell me you're from Fremont County...

:P

I'm in Dade County, Florida.

Oh well

Was hoping I could give you crap about misspelling the town

8:40 PM

You still can. It doesn't have to be justifiable

^

I had some family members retire out to Pagosa Springs a few years back. It's weird to hear them talk about smoking pot.

1 hour later…

9:46 PM

Everybody, come on get happy...

Do we have to?

I tried that once. It was terrible.

Can someone verify that this link http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/623444/example?opt.textResult‌s=true&opt.withExecutionPlan=true get them a checked textresults and checked include execution plan and when they run the query the Execution Plan tab is there and populated?

It looks like the result differs based on if you have run the query or not?

has a positive mental attitude

@rene the box for execution plan is checked, but no tab

OK, thx

@rene text only results box is not checked

9:55 PM

Hmm, that is strange

wait, did I have to "run the query?" I think it ran automatically?

@AaronHall yeah, you have to run it but you get a cached result on first load as I ran it a minutes ago.

but I'm interested in the checkboxes

On Edge both are enabled with that url

ok, now I get execution plan

What browser are you using?

Chrome

55.0.2883.87

~~although now it looks like it's taking the opportunity to update.~~ nope, errored out

10:00 PM

My Chrome/Win 10 does show both checkboxes checked, strange

@AaronHall yeah, that is ... you hope that things get better after an update ...

ok, I've got an answer written up. Do I post it as is, which I think is less than optimal, do I then delete it until I can work on it more at home, or do I just save the text in a file in case Chrome loses it over the weekend when my 'puter gets rebooted.

@AaronHall server side there is one copy kept

so you could risk that ... but otherwise I would just post it and delete it

Yeah... I don't want to rely on that.

I mean, it's pretty good for starting out at zero, so maybe I'm too afraid of nitpickers.

You can afford a down vote, right?

Yeah, Reddit studies show that's likely to get me a sympathy upvote anyways.

10:06 PM

We only vote on content here ...

muh effort

The gap between theory and practice is a lie. :)

I take your word for it

I'm going to focus on getting it complete and error free until I leave, and just leave it up.

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