glippiglop

The timing isn't great for me to show anything, but I'm working on a UI framework that is exclusively vector graphics based. A few of the interesting things that I've come up with so far are: screenshots can be exported as SVG files rather than bitmaps; a lightweight remote graphics protocol is possible thanks to the desktop being described as a scene graph; apps can easily scale to any DPI/resolution; new and interesting widgets and app designs are possible - pie menus and the like.

Unfortunately the GitHub build is currently broken and I'm probably 2 months away from sharing anything here. I'll post something when it's more presentable.

I met a programmer many years back who had previously been a physicist at CERN. I'd never have guessed but I think he picked up the programming bug there. If you think coding is your thing then go for it and all the best to you!

Magnesium supplements did it for me. I needed to take them for an unrelated reason - eye tremors - and the first time I took them I was suddenly overcome with tiredness that night. I've been taking them ever since to keep my sleep regulated, and they've really helped with my alertness during the day.

  Location: United Kingdom
  Remote: Required
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: AWS, Spark, Java, Python, Scala, C/C++, SQL, REST APIs
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-fury
  Email: [email protected]

I have 22 years of experience as a Software Engineer and I've been working primarily as a Big Data Engineer in AWS environments for the last 4 years. Available on a short-term contract/consultancy basis only to new clients that are in need of remote help.

The findings seem a little off to me. My father was 26 when I was born and he was a leather cutter, so our family wasn't advantaged in any way. He was also a hopeless parent and played very little part in my personal development, despite being physically present throughout my childhood.

The really key environmental factors that led me to being a geek can firmly be put down to: My Mother taking me to the library every week; having plenty of books at home and school; and good quality teaching at school. I can't imagine that having an older/wealthier father would have that much additional impact on top of these factors.

A more practical use might be found in psychotherapy - recalling traumatic memories to identify the relevant neurons and then switching them off. That could be extremely useful for treating PTSD if it's feasible to do so.

Totally agree with this. I'm reminded of when I interviewed with Amazon a few years back and it was clear that the questions were best suited to filtering down to the best graduates. In my mid 30's I was too rusty to satisfy the interviewer and my real world experience counted for nothing as the entire process was structured like a series of exam questions.

I think there's a point - I would guess at about 8+ years of experience - where a technical interview will stop being a reliable indicator of an engineer's ability. It then becomes more important to evaluate what the candidate has been doing in their career and how that experience can be taken advantage of within the team that they'd be joining. Technical ability can still be judged by asking to see some existing code if it's that essential.

I'm in the UK and got the foam from simplyaeron.co.uk

Have a search for "Aeron seat foam insert" if you're outside the UK and need an alternative option.

Agreed, I bought a used one 10 years ago and I'm sitting on it right now. Before that I was replacing foam office chairs every few years due to wear or degassing, but not so with the Aeron. The only maintenance I've had to do is replace the foam at the seat's edge and clean it occasionally.

The build quality of these chairs is amazing when I consider the tens of thousands of hours I've been sitting in this thing.

Here's a best guess based on my knowledge of actually having written a SVG rendering pipeline:

The R and B colour switch in conjunction with the fact that this problem only occurs at non-right angles would indicate that there's a bug in the rendering pipeline that is triggered under specific conditions. Specifically if the transform is at a right angle, then an optimal transform algorithm will be used that processes colours in RGBA format. For all other angles a slower (but prettier) transform pipeline will be used that results in the colour being incorrectly processed in BGRA format. An easy way to test this theory is to set the problem colour to bright green, in which case the bug shouldn't be apparent.

SVG rendering pipelines are really complicated. The quest for optimisation leads to rendering code that has many paths for all the different scenarios. The consequence is that odd bugs for certain conditions are more likely to creep into the code base if you're not careful.

It's an interesting stat, but the chart doesn't speak as to the levels of experience of the traders. All beginners lose money, but it's entirely possible for an amateur to become a profitable day trader with time.

Speaking from experience, the real issue for me was that once I started to get good at it (after 2 years) I realised just how awfully boring it was. It's not intellectually demanding and for the investment of your time, stress and the risk involved, the rewards even if you reach profitability aren't worth it.

Now that I can reflect on it, I couldn't be happier that I stuck with software development instead.

I work on a project that uses Free type for text and an improved version of AntiGrain for SVG rendering. The thought of using AGG for the font rendering has already crossed my mind, but mainly for reducing the size of the codebase. Speed isn't really a concern to me because the glyphs are already being cached to internal bitmaps, after which the bottleneck is the drawing algorithm (which is straightforward anyway). Overall, it's not worth my time to change the font engine.

The really nice thing about using an SVG engine to draw text is the potential for applying runtime effects, transformations and so forth. However that's an entirely different use case and can be done through SVG as it stands. Most of the time you want your text to be on the horizontal and easy to read, and vanilla FT is fine for that.

I'd drink to that, XPath is incredibly useful and easily mastered.

I'm also fond of XSD and XSLT myself. They can be obtuse at times, but have been indispensable in the use cases that I've needed them for.

2000 was 16 years ago, so it's important to understand that NZ is no longer the same country that you knew. I left in 2005 for the UK and can't imagine returning to NZ to live (last time I visited was 2010). Here's just a few reasons:

* I've been spoiled by UK broadband speeds and NZ just doesn't compare.

* Food is more expensive, and not of the quality that I'm now used to (fresh seafood would be the exception).

* Higher tax relative to what I pay in the UK as a contractor.

* Real estate prices are now worse than in the UK

* It's an isolated country, you can't just hop on a cheap plane and find yourself in a completely different country & culture an hour or two later.

* Purchasing power is greatly limited. In the UK I can buy virtually any obscure item that I want online and get a good price, including P+P. Not so in NZ.

* There's very little variety in the job market for software developers, few 'cool' or cutting edge companies and no startup scene worth speaking of.

* Finally, cultural experiences are extremely limited. I know I'd miss all the museums, art exhibitions, theatre, concerts, comedians, ballet, opera and so forth. One of the biggest reasons that I left was because of boredom and the UK/EU certainly alleviated that.

Source: 27 years of living in NZ.