The Computer And General Tech Thread - Software, Hardware, Questions, etc.

[Travis B.]

Why would one be building a temperature sensor project then when one can simply buy a self-contained thermometer off the shelf with far less hassle if one is not doing it to learn something?

Oh, I don't know, maybe you're building something that needs a thermometer?

I think there is an argument for avoiding libraries in the specific case of electronics. If you’re doing anything much more complicated than just plugging one electronic device into the GPIO pins specified by the documentation, you’ll end up directly working with the hardware interface between the microcontroller and the device at some point. Which means that (a) you’ll need to know how everything works anyway, in order to avoid messing up the circuit, and (b) there’s a good chance of (accidentally or deliberately) doing something the library doesn’t support.

I never disagreed with this, frankly. All I said is that the offence taken at the idea that people might want to use a library for a solved problem is ridiculous. If you want to use a component for which a library exists, refusing to use it because it's a library is absurd. If you test it and find out it has issues that make it intractable, well, that's a whole nother problem, isn't it? But you can't just assume that.

The big question is your goals - if your goals are simply to measure temperature a library makes sense, but as I said, you are probably better off just buying an off-the-shelf self-contained thermometer then unless you are building a bigger project that needs temperature sensors. If your goals are to actually learn something, using a library defeats the point of the exercise.

[KathTheDragon]

Why would one be building a temperature sensor project then when one can simply buy a self-contained thermometer off the shelf with far less hassle if one is not doing it to learn something?

Oh, I don't know, maybe you're building something that needs a thermometer?

I think there is an argument for avoiding libraries in the specific case of electronics. If you’re doing anything much more complicated than just plugging one electronic device into the GPIO pins specified by the documentation, you’ll end up directly working with the hardware interface between the microcontroller and the device at some point. Which means that (a) you’ll need to know how everything works anyway, in order to avoid messing up the circuit, and (b) there’s a good chance of (accidentally or deliberately) doing something the library doesn’t support.

I never disagreed with this, frankly. All I said is that the offence taken at the idea that people might want to use a library for a solved problem is ridiculous. If you want to use a component for which a library exists, refusing to use it because it's a library is absurd. If you test it and find out it has issues that make it intractable, well, that's a whole nother problem, isn't it? But you can't just assume that.

The big question is your goals - if your goals are simply to measure temperature a library makes sense, but as I said, you are probably better off just buying an off-the-shelf self-contained thermometer then unless you are building a bigger project that needs temperature sensors. If your goals are to actually learn something, using a library defeats the point of the exercise.

And you think these are the only two options? You can want to measure temperature as part of something else without having any goal to learn anything about the hardware.

[Travis B.]

The big question is your goals - if your goals are simply to measure temperature a library makes sense, but as I said, you are probably better off just buying an off-the-shelf self-contained thermometer then unless you are building a bigger project that needs temperature sensors. If your goals are to actually learn something, using a library defeats the point of the exercise.

And you think these are the only two options? You can want to measure temperature as part of something else without having any goal to learn anything about the hardware.

I said just that above.

[alice]

There are times when using an existing library may just be quicker, easier, and less hassle.

[Travis B.]

There are times when using an existing library may just be quicker, easier, and less hassle.

Well yes, using an existing library often is quicker, easier, and less hassle. But it all has to do with your objectives - do you intend on learning something from measuring a temperature, or do you solely care about measuring a temperature itself?

[KathTheDragon]

The big question is your goals - if your goals are simply to measure temperature a library makes sense, but as I said, you are probably better off just buying an off-the-shelf self-contained thermometer then unless you are building a bigger project that needs temperature sensors. If your goals are to actually learn something, using a library defeats the point of the exercise.

And you think these are the only two options? You can want to measure temperature as part of something else without having any goal to learn anything about the hardware.

I said just that above.

Ah, I must've misread.

There are times when using an existing library may just be quicker, easier, and less hassle.

Well yes, using an existing library often is quicker, easier, and less hassle. But it all has to do with your objectives - do you intend on learning something from measuring a temperature, or do you solely care about measuring a temperature itself?

The latter.

[Raphael]

Does anyone else have the impression that the latest Firefox update is doing weird things to the way the ZBB is presented?

[bradrn]

Does anyone else have the impression that the latest Firefox update is doing weird things to the way the ZBB is presented?

I just upgraded to check, and I can’t see anything at a glance. Which version are you running, on which OS? And can you attach a screenshot? (I just upgraded to Firefox 89.0 on Windows 10.)

[Raphael]

I upgraded to 89.0 under Linux, to be precise, Ubuntu Mate 21.04.

Here's an excerpt with weird artifacts pointed out:

artifacts.png (27.49 KiB) Viewed 15624 times

I mean the somewhat weird white wedges and the weird thickening of that white stripe for a small fraction of its length, and the weird thing that it does to my avatar in the upper right corner (elsewhere, my and other people's avatars look fine).

[bradrn]

Huh, weird, I don’t get those white lines. (Of course, I have no avatar so cannot reproduce that issue.) Perhaps someone with Linux might be more helpful than I.

[Ryusenshi]

I've just upgraded Firefox to version 89, under Linux Mint, and I don't have any problem.

(Well, except that the new theme is ugly. I'm getting seriously tired of this "flat" style that you see everywhere nowadays.)

[bradrn]

I also dislike this trend towards ‘flat’ styles, but I must say I actually quite like the new Firefox theme. My one dislike is how they removed tab borders, which is quite a problem when you have 2100 tabs^†. Thankfully I found a fix here: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-s ... on-ui.html

(^†Yes, really. I have this awful habit of opening articles and not reading them. This is particularly problematic when one frequently checks Hacker News and reads lots of linguistics papers. When I have time, I try to sort them into my reference manager — this is why my Big List of Articles currently numbers 3100+ articles and papers — but I haven’t had much time lately.)

[Ryusenshi]

This site is fantastic!

[Raphael]

I am now the proud user of a password manager. I am probably more excited about this than I should be.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Bask in whatever brings happiness!

[bradrn]

My SCA finally has feature support! So now I can sanely implement my complicated sound changes involving stress. A sample:



Now I just need to finish the paradigm builder and the batch interface — and possibly add sporadic rules and MDF support if I have time — and I should be ready for an initial release!

[alice]

My SCA finally has feature support! So now I can sanely implement my complicated sound changes involving stress.

As ever, I find it fascinating how different are the different preoccupations of the various designers of SCA software.

[bradrn]

My SCA finally has feature support! So now I can sanely implement my complicated sound changes involving stress.

As ever, I find it fascinating how different are the different preoccupations of the various designers of SCA software.

In that case, what are your particular preoccupations? (IIRC you made… GSCA, I think?)

For me, the main priorities are (a) being able to express all the common forms of sound change found in natlangs, especially when they’re currently poorly supported by SCAs, and (b) providing a good user experience. Due to (a) my SCA supports features, wildcards, category intersections and sporadicity (the latter as yet unimplemented). Due to (b) it supports multiple category blocks and multigraphs, as well as innovative UI features like syntax highlighting, output highlighting and live result previewing.

[alice]

In that case, what are your particular preoccupations? (IIRC you made… GSCA, I think?)

I'm more preoccupied with maintaining lexicons for several related languages at once, which means not focusing so much on the SCA as keepiing it unobtrusive as part of something bigger.

[Travis B.]

My SCA finally has feature support! So now I can sanely implement my complicated sound changes involving stress.

As ever, I find it fascinating how different are the different preoccupations of the various designers of SCA software.

In that case, what are your particular preoccupations? (IIRC you made… GSCA, I think?)

For me, the main priorities are (a) being able to express all the common forms of sound change found in natlangs, especially when they’re currently poorly supported by SCAs, and (b) providing a good user experience. Due to (a) my SCA supports features, wildcards, category intersections and sporadicity (the latter as yet unimplemented). Due to (b) it supports multiple category blocks and multigraphs, as well as innovative UI features like syntax highlighting, output highlighting and live result previewing.

I see from the screenshot that it looks like a Windows application - is there any possibility of a Linux/BSD port?