SoylentNews

hello world -> .... . .-.. .-.. ---   .-- --- .-. .-.. -..  ->

#  #  #  #  ##    #  ## #  #  ##
#     ## ## ##    ## ## ## ## #
#     #  #  ##    ## ## #  #  #
#     #  #                 #     

(That's prettier in unicode, but might not display.

▎  ▎  ▎  ▎  ▎▎    ▎  ▎▎ ▎  ▎  ▎▎
▎     ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎    ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎
▎     ▎  ▎  ▎▎    ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎  ▎  ▎
▎     ▎  ▎                 ▎     

)

And, in my handwriting, punctuation and numbers are written normally, because it's too hard to remember how to write them, and even harder to tell them apart.

So far, this has been fun, but sorta slow and difficult to use.

Thus, maybe it's time to attack the problem from the other direction ? Practice reading first ?

There are certainly several different ways of approaching the problem of either shrinking the above ascii art by 4x (so it's the same size as a normal character) or blowing up nontranslated characters (punctuation and numbers) 4x, so that they're the same visual size and can be mixed just like they can be in handwriting.

But, having gotten this far, I suddenly have cold feet. I can't answer the voice of doubt that asks "why spend effort deliberately making your own computer, harder to use ? Shouldn't you slowly back away from the screen and get a girlfriend already ?"

Sometimes I envy women for one thing: the freedom to be kind, to enjoy sweet, cute things, to be amusingly deranged, and to like whatever they want. I'll clear things up, I'm not gay, nor trans, or anything like that.

My complaint is that many of my peers think there's something wrong with giving a fuck about others, about being vegetarian, or about liking cute little videos made by some random youtuber nobody else ever heard of.

Let's see. I am:

* Kind, and try extremely hard at it.
* Vegetarian with a side of vegan. I avoid dairy and eggs but will eat it if provided to me. I will never eat meat.
* Goofy as hell, to the point of people questioning my sanity.
* A lover of adorable things. My favorite animal is the rat. The best possible pet. I also love cats, ironically.
* Mildly autistic, which I mostly outgrew.
* A lover of music from Enya to Creed to Glitch Mob to Bassnectar, with a deep love of post-dubstep.
* A socialist, a political choice motivated by compassion for others.
* Slow to anger, but tend to explode when my threshold is reached.
* Easygoing, with a sedate, laid back lifestyle and world view.
* Usually not wearing a shirt with any insignia whatsoever. I go plain.
* A brutal god-tier player in Warzone 2100, a game which I deeply love.
* A deist, but with a deep, deep respect for Jesus, willing to defend his name. The old testament is manure to me.
* The kind of philosophical mind who can find the meaning of life on a shampoo bottle.
* A Linux using programmer who built and uses his own XFCE distro from source code, and no, not LFS or Gentoo.
* A bit overweight, but not obese. I have a gut. I don't tend to mind fat jokes unless they are intended to insult.
* Not prone to judge a person by anything other than their ethics, which is one thing I will judge the shit out of them for.
* Slightly lazy.

I am not:

* A pussy. I've frequently made threats of grinding my enemies into cat food and feeding them to their grandmother.
* A faggot. I like the ladies, unfortunately they don't like me.
* A left-wing nutcase. I don't even like abortion.
* An atheist. I believe in a greater concept of God.
* A hardcore gamer. There are few games I play, and my most recent console is a PSP fat. I mostly do Warzone 2100 and Nintendo 64 emulation.
* A tech god. There's much I want to learn and I'll feel inadequate until I do.
* A hipster. Don't fucking say it. I have a beard, but you won't see me wearing slogan T-shirts, and I suck at identifying music. I don't have strong opinions on arts.

I just wanted to vent. I am what I am. I am Subsentient.

The time has come to learn some Python. I have a rough idea what it is having read about it in the past and probably spent about half an hour playing with it many years ago.

I'm so busy these days (working long hours, family life) I find it hard to keep up with all the developments so I'd like to ask a couple of questions, since I believe the Python language changes significantly between each major release.

At my current place of work, we have development systems running ancient versions of Red Hat with Python 2.6.x. At home I have Slackware which has Python 2.7.5 by default. There are much newer versions of Python out in the wild these days, and I'm not scared to compile from source.

So, which version of Python should I start with? In a nutshell, what are the main differences? Which parts of the language are backwards-compatible?

Looking at the comments in the current SoylentNews Poll on the 2015 Hugo Awards, and I stumbled across a post from wisnoskij:

Seriously, I cannot imagine trying to keep up with modern literature. I read somewhere that like thousands of books get published a day. There are billions and billions of old great books, you could likely spend a lifetime just reading the boos published in one year. It just makes more sense to focus your effort on books which have proven to have staying power instead of the newest flash in the pan.

This got me thinking and lead me to post a somewhat rambling response:

If no one reads the new books, or takes the time to digest them like the classics, then in 50 years from now the books with 'staying power' will be the same one as they are now.

I generally take the opposite approach, if lots of people have engaged with a certain bit of media, be it books, movies or music, i'm more likely to go find something else. The ones with 'staying power' are not going anywhere, there are already millions of people who will endorse it and keep the art alive for the next generation(s).

Surely it's better to discover something new and spread the word about something that until now had little of recognition it deserves. I totally get your logic, and it can be frustrating to find something new and good, but it's worth the effort and immensely rewarding when you do get there.

There is however a very valid point you make about a signal:noise problem with all media now, there are books coming out every day and it is impossible to keep up. However, ignoring it and sticking to the classics does not benefit the art, it only places more value on the marketing machines to keep certain books or intellectual properties in the public consciousness.

On a related tangent: I'm not a fan of The Beatles music, however I can appreciate the value of their music from listening to people who are fans of their work and were inspired by them. That is not to say I don't enjoy their music either, I do, but i'd rather continue with the evolution and hear people who were inspired by them, than look back on it as a golden age of music in which nothing that came after can compare.

The classics in literature and other media laid a foundation and other people have built on, the last thing we should be doing it dismissing it. It's no longer served up for us in a way that tells us we will like it before we've even read it, thats a good thing. Art is subjective and shouldn't be shackled by tradition and group-think.

Thought I would share this here as it's a topic i've been pondering for a while, the over-saturation of media making it very hard to choose what to consume and the signal:noise problem. I'd like some feedback if anyone has thoughts on the comments above, mine or from wisnoskij. As above, I am talking in more general terms of media (including news), not specifically about books.

This is a test story which contains a variety of 1-, 2-, and 3-octet UTF-8 chars. The purpose is to see how well the e-mailing of stories handles these characters. These chars were entered directly (actually, cut-and-paste) as opposed to being entered as decimal/hex/named character entities.

The following is taken from: "3. UTF-8 definition" in: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629 [ietf.org]

    Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
       (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
    --------------------+---------------------------------------------
    0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
    0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

peugen 0x40 0x7f 0x0140 0x017f 0x0700 0x073f 0x0800 0x083f | peu2utf8 > bleh.txt
cat bleh.txt

@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyz{|}~�

ŀŁłŃńŅņŇňʼnŊŋŌōŎŏ
ŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŜŝŞş
ŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮů
ŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžſ

܀܁܂܃܄܅܆܇܈܉܊܋܌܍܎܏
ܐܑܒܓܔܕܖܗܘܙܚܛܜܝܞܟ
ܠܡܢܣܤܥܦܧܨܩܪܫܬܭܮܯ

ࠀࠁࠂࠃࠄࠅࠆࠇࠈࠉࠊࠋࠌࠍࠎࠏ
ࠐࠑࠒࠓࠔࠕࠚ
ࠤࠥࠦࠧࠨ࠮࠯
࠰࠱࠲࠳࠴࠵࠶࠷࠸࠹࠺࠻࠼࠽࠾࠿

---
That was one block of 1-octet UTF-8 chars; two blocks of 2-octet UTF-8 chars, and one block of 3-octet chars, submitted as 'plain old text'

Here it is the first of June in 2015, and our dev team has been working long and hard to get the foundation code to this site upgraded to handle newer versions of perl and apache. I lent a hand with QA duties and can attest that this was no small feat. Many *many* thanks to NCommander and Paulej72!

And, this acts as a test that the journal code is still working. Please let me know if you cannot see it! ;)

fwswgwergwe

Spotted today on YouTube a video advertising the fact that women's national teams will be implemented in FIFA 16. Video's been up less than a day. The comments on the vid include so much casual sexism dressed up as humour it's unreal. There are some interesting points about ranking male and female players by in-game attributes, development priorities and EA's support of realistic portrayals of females in video games, but they are somewhat outweighed by the immature 3-year-old mental age boys whining about gurls! urrg - oh wait, it's a console game of an immature game for immature idiots in the first place, what on earth was I expecting?

Carry on, nothing to see here...

Having finally received my new parts and built my new machine, it's now purring away on the table in front of me while I type this. My experiences so far can be summed up fairly simply.

1) mITX wasn't as fiddly a form factor to work with as I thought
2) Intel's stock HSF is a pain in the ass to fit
3) Linux is just... godlike!

Lemme expand on that last one. My motherboard has the latest and greatest Intel AC wireless/bluetooth and a pair of gigabit NICs onboard. They all worked off the live CD. (Side note: this wireless card is magick, I'm connected to the wireless access point 10 metres away through a wall and I don't even have the antennae attached!) I was expected my AMD 7850 to be a royal pain in the ass thanks to AMD's crappy Linux drivers. Okay, took me three attempts to download and install the lastest Catalyst beta, but apart from some really retarded default settings (vsync off? Whatever. 10% underscan? Wtf!) that took a tweak or two to sort out, it's been pretty flawless so far. I've had a slight issue with the canvas size under KSP, but it's smooth as butter otherwise. I realise I'm not getting full performance out of the GFX card yet, the drivers still need work, but Trine, KSP and Torchlight 2 have all been perfect.

Oh yeah, one other thing:

4) Firefox under Linux supports 60fps YouTube videos without installing Flash.

We have a winner! I will be testing out SteamOS at some point, just to see what it's like, but I'll probably be heading almost directly back to Mint Cinnamon. Got lots more testing to do, but right now it's late and the GF is in bed waiting for me ;)