Pi Project

It's pinging Google and measuring the response time every three seconds, then graphs the result on the LED SenseHat. It's graphing wifi stability.

Got a graphing calculator in high school for math class. Needed to memorize a bunch of formulas, saw you could program them in the calculator with BASIC. Sold the program to other students, profit.

So a follow up to my last Mathematica rant:

I have a JSON file made up of arrays of arrays of arrays with the outermost layer containing ~10,000 arrays.

So, my graphing works perfectly the first time for one of my graphs. I fix another unrelated graph, graph the whole file, and suddenly the first one stops working. The file read-in only reads in the array {2,13}. I double checked the contents of the file, they were as large as always.

Then, I proceed to look for bugs, find none, and decide to restart Mathematica. This doesn't help.

So I go back, find no bugs, and eventually am so fed up that I just restart Mathematica again, no changes.

Suddenly, the array reads in fine. Waiting for the graphs to come out but I think they'll be fine.

WTF Mathematica? Why must I restart TWICE to make bugs caused by your application go away?

Since we're limiting this to things on my desk I can't do any more deep cuts out of my calculator collection, but this one is still somewhat interesting.

The HP 32S was my friend throughout university, it replaced the 15c I used before which does not live on my desk. The notable thing about the 32s is the fact it's an RPN calculator. RPN calculators are the best way to have friends never ask to borrow your calculator. The exchange will start by them asking to use it, you saying sure, and them handing it back a few minutes later without saying a word.

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who go "wtf" in an interview when asked to create a calculator program using a stack, and people who were oddballs and for whatever reason used reverse polish notation devices.

For those not familiar, rather than entering values into the calculator in "10+10" fashion, you instead provide it a compositional set of values until an operation is provided (10,10,+) at which point it executes. The why is, this type of operation allows the calculator to more naturally process operations, and eliminates the need for parenthesis which makes the operations less error prone in practice and easier to track.

The 32s had a 4 year run before being replaced by the 32SII. In the same way using a Curta will give you a significant understanding of how radix computations and floating points work. Using an HP 32s (or any of its predecessors) will do the same for algebraic functions, because you had to program them yourself using a basic label address system that also had subroutine support.

Kids who grew up with graphing calculators don't know how good you had it 😋

My Precalculus teacher has such overstrict rules on showing work.

1. On tests, degree signs must be shown in all work. This wouldn't be outrageous except that if the answer is right but a single degree sign is missing in the mandated shown work, the entire question is wrong even with a correct final answer because the "answer doesn't match up with the work".

2. We must show work in the exact form mandated from on class. If even a single step of work is missing or wrong on even one say homework problem, no credit even if the entire rest of the sheet is correct and complete.

3. Never applied to me, but if a homework problem cannot be solved by a student, they must write a sentence describing how far they got and what wasn't doable, or no credit on the entire homework. Did I mention it is checked daily and is 2 unweighted points with 50-100 point tests?

4. On graphing calculator problems, one had to draw a rectangle representing the calculator screen, even for solving systems of equations without explicit drawing graphs as part of the problem, because otherwise, she had "no proof that a calculator was used". It isn't that hard to fake, and it was quite stupid.

5. Reference triangles were required even when completely unnecessary or the answers were assumed copied, even if a better method was shown in work.

And much, much more!

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

Thoughts on forced emergency support?

I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.

I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.

I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.

Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..

Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.

What the actual fuck?

Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..

#confused and #annoyed

Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?

Thanks.

It’s midnight and I clearly remember having a graphing calculator with every button saying “SISTER” instead of whatever it needs to say

i'm so frustrated with how much effort it takes to create a simple vector logo i'm just going to graph it in desmos graphing calculator and use the fill tool

Senior year of highschool (5 years ago), my friend and I were bored in Calculus class. The calculators we used were the TI-NSpire CX cas (the most advanced Texas Instruments graphing calculator at that time). After figuring out we could get a Game Boy Advance emulatir on the calculator, we decided we should try making out own game for it. That was when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life and havent looked back yet

An open source technical graphing and analysis software using Matplotlib numpy and Scipy backends.

Me: I hate our current graphing frontend, its super hard to do anything more complex in here and it looks like it was made in the last century, we need a more modern solution!

Also me: Uuuugh, this modern graphing frontend lags my browser soooo much!

Why is dealing with graphs so hard? D:

I keep having this recurring idea that I can fill in the gaps in my education by writing video games that allow me to explore those topics. This would force me to learn the subject well enough to share it with other people. So it would not be just surface level.

I keep thinking of a program that explores and visualizes math topics and programming topics. I would really like to have a program that allows me to visualize memory cells for algorithm exploration. Or a really nice graphing calculator in the computer that allows me to view multiple graphs to compare and contrast equations.

What holds me back is both math and CS are huge topics. I feel like any kind of playground would only cover a small subset. Ideally whatever I make should be extendable over time to add content and topics. It would need to be somewhat fun as well.

I can imagine an AI training program where you help your character navigate a room of hazards or die. This could be one such fun challenge.