Feeling lonely.. and sad .. where are you all?

[fansongecho]

Since Space Otters post about the Gold ..  no one is around, I can hear the virtual tumbleweed swirling down Pegasus Avenue/Street/Lane ...  did you all get visa's and tickets to Australia for the new Gold Rush??

Dammit!! I am always the last ..  Missed the Tech Boom...  Missed the building bubble.. missed the crypto-currency..  and now missed the new Gold Rush... 

Good luck with yaw stakes, I think Z and JL will be able to offer top advice mind 

[ArMaP]

No, I'm still here, but I just read that post about the gold.

If I had the money to go to Australia I wouldn't need to go to Australia to search for gold.

[fansongecho]

LOL ArMaP..  but it is a HOOOGE amount of Gold mate! ..  I am not sure that I would have advertised it like they did ?

[petrus4]

I'm still here.  I just don't really have anything interesting to say.  My life consists of watching Star Trek, playing either Borderlands 2 or the pre-sequel, browsing Reddit or YouTube, and sleeping.  I reinstalled Cygwin the other day, which essentially gives me a UNIX-like textual user interface for Windows; although very few of you are likely to even understand what that is, let alone be interested in it.

I'm feeling more optimistic than usual right now, although that is primarily because I've discovered Athena, the character class I'm playing with in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.  Although I enjoy those games for the actual gameplay, they are difficult for me to play at times, because the primary antagonist is one of the most vicious, horrifying psychopaths I've ever seen in any media anywhere.  He's called Handsome Jack, and he's a much nastier version of Willem Defoe's portrayal of Norman Osborn from the first Spider Man movie; I essentially view him as Capitalism personified.  I mostly just focus on the rest of the game and mute his dialogue, although there are parts of them where he isn't present at all which is good, as well.

Space Otter would probably express concern over the fact that I am mentally being exposed to such an individual's influence on such a constant basis; but that is also being counterbalanced by Jean-Luc Picard, the captain from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who is compassionate, enlightened, and extremely ethically positive.  That show's episodes focus on the idea of mutual co-operation between different forms of life of various kinds, and how it's actually better to avoid war and conflict, because mutual suicide can result.

Even when I've had other activities available to me, I've noticed that I only really feel alive when I am either studying the UNIX operating system, worshipping Kali, watching various incarnations of Star Trek, or vicariously playing the role of either a hunter, gladiator, or explorer in various computer games.

[fansongecho]

Hey Petrus, always great to hear from you, and as ever your post is both interesting and insightful, I don't understand the UNIX technology at all though buddy, but I have always loved the many variants of Star Trek / cast - I am not sure if it is true but I did hear a rumour that Star Trek was required reading/watching at one or more of the military academies in the UK - I kind off believe it to be honest with you.


Stay safe bud, please keep us in the loop with your status when you can.

Cheers'


Fansongecho 

[A51Watcher]

Since Space Otters post about the Gold ..  no one is around, I can hear the virtual tumbleweed swirling tumbleweed

Somebody say tumbleweed??

[ArMaP]

petrus4, have you tried to learn some programming language? That would open lots of possibilities.

[space otter]

geeeeeeeze guys.... i'd come hold your hands but monday is my tv night.. hours of ninjas and then elementary.. wow two shows for the week and that's it..

hey i have a bunch of articles on tv antenna's where you can cut out cable..as soon as i read them all - i'll share and maybe some of you tech wizards can chime in

https://www.americanninjawarriornation.com/2018/9/10/17828950/american-ninja-warrior-season-10-obstacle-design-challenge-winner-kevin-carbone-deja-vu

heading for  a beverage and a comfy chair

[Shasta56]

I've been posting in the "Molecular Black Hole," thread.  Other than that, I'm still recovering from a broken hip, and now I'm wondering if I still have a job.  I got a really unsettling phone call about my job, that contradicted what my medical leave paperwork says.  I may heckling for unemployment and looking for a new job.

[petrus4]

petrus4, have you tried to learn some programming language? That would open lots of possibilities.

I know several, Armap; although most of them are what I might call intermediate or scripting languages.  HTML, Bash, PHP, m4, a little Perl, a tiny bit of Lua, the DOS batch language, if you can call it that.  I should probably learn Java, but I am deeply averse to object oriented languages, to be honest.

Code Select Expand


: STAR 42 EMIT ;
: STARS 0 DO STAR LOOP ;
: DOUBLE DUP + ;
: QUAD DOUBLE DOUBLE ;
: QL 0 DO QUAD LOOP ;

16 8 QL STARS


The above code is in the GNU dialect of FORTH.  It will print the asterisk character (42 in ASCII code) 1,048,576 times, and will do so in less than a minute.  I mainly like it because it demonstrates how fast FORTH loops are.  It is the only fully native FORTH program I know how to write, although the GNU dialect provides the system word, which allows interaction with an underlying UNIX-compatible operating system, and I have written a basic program which will choose from a number of mp3 files and play one before.

FORTH is probably my favourite language, although it is generally difficult to make it interact with anything outside itself.  Most people don't understand what FORTH is, either.  FORTH is a Turing machine at pretty much the most basic level, which is ideally used as a means of controlling something else.  Usually registers for hardware, but you can write software registers in another programming language, and then write your control loops for those in FORTH.  Words for directly accessing TCP/IP sockets would be particularly nice, because from there I could fairly easily write a basic IRC or HTTP server.

[The Seeker]

No, I'm still here, but I just read that post about the gold.

If I had the money to go to Australia I wouldn't need to go to Australia to search for gold.

Ditto 

And I hate to tell you this, but unless you have what the ozzies consider a needed and necessary skill set they aren't going to let you in for more than a brief visit, Fans, and I seriously doubt they are going to let many peeps within a mile of that mine 

The site of the original gold rush here in the US is 5 minutes from where I live; but I cannot even get access to the tailings piles that have been lying out there for 200 years 

[petrus4]

And I hate to tell you this, but unless you have what the ozzies consider a needed and necessary skill set they aren't going to let you in for more than a brief visit, Fans, and I seriously doubt they are going to let many peeps within a mile of that mine 

There are reasons why I like living in Australia, but it is a very expensive place to live.  Food prices here are higher than Europe, according to the backpackers I knew while in Nimbin, and there is no rent in Victoria (the state I am in) for much less than $300 AUD ($213 USD currently) per week.  Gentrification is a chronic problem here.  If I wasn't living with my mother, I would have to move interstate now.

[ArMaP]

I know several, Armap; although most of them are what I might call intermediate or scripting languages.  HTML, Bash, PHP, m4, a little Perl, a tiny bit of Lua, the DOS batch language, if you can call it that.  I should probably learn Java, but I am deeply averse to object oriented languages, to be honest.

I don't consider HTML a programming language, as it's just a descriptive language, not an active language. I looked at PHP a few years ago and never used any of the others (besides the DOS batch language). My all-time favourite is assembly, as it works directly with the processor registers and operations. Because of that it's extremely fast (the compiler translates the commands in direct CPU operation codes) but hard to work with, as it's limited to the specific CPU commands. Today that's not as big a problem as it was 30 years ago, when the CPUs had a small instruction set when compared with today's CPUs with dedicated floating point units. In the old days there was no direct command for doing a multiplication, so you had to add numbers and/or shift some bits to achieve the same result. Divisions were even harder, obviously.

I asked because one thing I love about programming is the freedom it gives me to do whatever I want. If I had the time I could try to do any thing, like a game, for example. Today it's easy to create complex games by using something like Unity, that can be programmed with C# and is a very powerful and free engine available for several platforms.

The possibilities are endless.

[ArMaP]

The site of the original gold rush here in the US is 5 minutes from where I live; but I cannot even get access to the tailings piles that have been lying out there for 200 years 

Only now that you said that did I remember that there was a gold mine near the area where I live, some people even say that the name "Almada" (the town where I live) comes from the Arabic name for "the mine". One confirmed fact is that from the 12th century up to the 14th, during the winter, the fishermen used to catch gold on the river bank to compensate for the meagre fishing during that time.

[petrus4]

My all-time favourite is assembly, as it works directly with the processor registers and operations. Because of that it's extremely fast (the compiler translates the commands in direct CPU operation codes) but hard to work with, as it's limited to the specific CPU commands.

I love the idea of assembly for loops and branching; conditional jumps are wonderful things, and are generally not implemented in any higher languages these days, because of the universal conspiracy against GOTO, or open ended/non-returning jumps.  I suspect that said taboo is the main reason why most people find it so hard to understand FORTH; because none of its' loops are terminated by the same command that starts them.

Writing asm to interact with operating systems or pre-existing software is likely to be difficult, however, unless said pre-existing software offers very simple output, and most don't, these days.

In the old days there was no direct command for doing a multiplication, so you had to add numbers and/or shift some bits to achieve the same result. Divisions were even harder, obviously.

I've got into the habit of using the Egyptian system for non-programming mathematics to a degree, although I am a bit rusty at the moment.