Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else

kingerp · 2012-02-07T08:15:25.359450+00:00

For future search problems:

Go to bing's Calvin and Hobbes search engine
Enter a (sadly exact!) phrase you know from the strip
Find the strip inclusive a link to gocomics

In this case, "utterly useless" did it for me.

znk · 2012-02-06T20:45:09.552783+00:00

I found the tension, King was able to build up, while Richards is with that woman in the car absolutely incredible.

steven_h · 2012-02-06T19:36:05.165861+00:00

I sincerely hope those downvotes are just because you're off-topic, because that book is amazing (even though the cover came off after one reading...). It's always good to point people to it.

kingerp · 2012-02-06T19:33:55.308591+00:00

lo' buddy? lo'? Oh.

onyxrev · 2012-02-06T16:18:52.629834+00:00

Stuff prepended to files at saving sounds like unicode byte order mark, but what you wrote (B1;2c) isn't one. Very strange.

Since the behavior is dependent on GUI or not GUI, I would check the environment variables of both. Perhaps the shell variant has a different LANG, LC* or something.

It's just a wild guess, but perhaps it helps. Compare the content of process-environment when started from GUI to that when started from shell. (C-h v process-environment).

znk · 2012-02-06T12:11:20.486985+00:00

This movie would be so much better if it stayed more closely to the book.

IndigoCZ · 2012-02-06T11:49:18.790146+00:00

Oooh, good point. I just scribbled it down very fast and obviously didn't pay enough attention.

About the "then": That's a leftover from it starting out as a one-liner, where the "then" is necessary.

I think "Unless some_object is nil? do this, else that" sounds more like English than "If some_object do this, else that", but that's just personal preference.

IndigoCZ · 2012-02-06T10:12:07.562699+00:00

Because it's an example. What I wrote, everyone with at least some programming background will understand right away. Double bang saves a few keystrokes but will confuse at least a few readers.

IndigoCZ · 1 day

It's not false_on_failure, it's an_object_I_wan't_to_use_normally_but_nil_on_failure.

IndigoCZ · 1 day

It's generally considered bad practice in languages that are liberal in what is true. For ruby, a lot of stuff is true that could be meant as false.

Example:

true &&   0 => true
true &&  [] => true
true &&  {} => true

When the function call is "inlined" in the conditional, you're distracted from it. When you're distracted, you make mistakes.

It's just a line more and it also gives you more options:

a = method_returning_nil_on_failure
if a.nil? then
    deal_with_failure
else
    do_something_with a
end

This make clear that method_returning_nil_on_failure is called and its result is needed later. It doesn't "hide" the assignment and you can use a.empty? or a.zero? without changing the general layout.

EDIT: corrected the script. See comment from jawdirk.

nukebutt · 1 day

Class should shift away from forward facing, and transform into peer learning.

I'm with you, but it doesn't happen. I spend every year some time to write up interesting questions on the topic of the lecture. Some easy, some difficult and some directly from current research (aka without answer, yet). I provide the students with this questions, time (2 lecture slots) and a place (lecture hall) to think about them and work on them, preferably as groups. Afterwards, I have a whole lecture dedicated to discuss these questions and it happens every time, that way more than half of the students think about the questions for the very first time at this event. Only a few have actually done some thinking beforehand and with them, I have a great time discussing and learning. The rest sits just there and hopefully learns at least a little.

It's an experiment, that without fail provides a few students with a great learning experience, and most of them with free time and one frustrating lecture.

Think what more you could accomplish in class of every student was required to watch a 20 minute video before each class.

If they really watched that video and payed attention: a lot.

nukebutt · 1 day

Thanks for the pointers, that was really interesting.

That's a concept that is wonderful for small size classes. I could try that with some smaller Labs, but even my smallest lectures (~80 students) are too big. Not speaking of the bigger ones with 700 to 800 students.

nukebutt · 1 day

If class is for participating, then I think lectures should go on youtube.

That doesn't make sense. You can't participate on a youtube video. I need you, sitting in front of me, discussing the topic with me, to make the best out of your and my time.

My university does video recordings of certain lectures and hosts them (with discussion forums) on our servers. It's ok-ish. Professors who do published recordings tend to make very ... staged lectures. They don't want to look bad on a video that is saved for eternity, so they follow their script exactly and don't engage in discussions that much.

34Mbit · 1 day

Yes, that summarizes it quite well. It's not only the 8B10B encoding that enables gigabit speed (there are more differences on the physical layer), but that's only a minor point.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this with me.

nukebutt · 1 day

They always distract. They distract themselves, they distract people around them (you wouldn't believe how much students passive-surf in classes) and the worst of all, they make the class unnecessary big.

If it where only for a little distraction among students that weren't interested anyway, I'd say "Screw it. I don't care and it's too much hassle."

But when a class reaches a certain size, students tend to be more passive. I don't know if it's the fear of looking dumb (or intelligent?) in front of a lot of classmates or what else causes this.

I like my classes interactive. I love it when students ask questions. Especially the "silly ones" are always a great way to explore something together from another angle and as it always turns out, that question wasn't silly at all since a good bunch of other students didn't get it on the first try either. An interactive lecture is more fun for me, more fun for the students and everybody will learn more and easier.

With a lot of people just sitting around and not participating, that just doesn't happen.

nukebutt · 1 day

Well, thats idiotic. I'm perfectly fine with my students never showing up at the lecture. As long as they can answer my questions, I don't care where they got that knowledge.

Teaching is much more fun, when there are only students that really want to take part. A room full of people who are forced to show up is no fun at all to teach.

nukebutt · 1 day

And that needs presence in the lectures?

nukebutt · 1 day

I'm fine with my students doing what the fuck they want, but when they're in my lecture, they pay attention and take part ... or leave.

I'd also rather surf reddit, but I put hard work into good teaching and actually care and respect my students. Is it too much to ask for the same in return?

P.S.: Where I teach, education is free.

nukebutt · 1 day

If you aren't paying attention anyway, why not browse reddit at home?

34Mbit · 2 days

Thank you for that long answer, but there is a fundamental error in it.

The article from Stallings you linked describes what is necessary to enable GBit Ethernet to work in a traditional Ethernet Hub setting. That's pure Gb Ethernet, not mixed. There is no way there could be a mixed shared-medium operation since 100Mb Ethernet uses 4B5B coding and Gb Ethernet uses 8B10B coding.

For a pure Gb Ethernet hub setting, you need to extend the minimum frame length to still be able to do CSMA/CD. With only 512bit, the sender would be finished sending before the signal even reached the most distant node. That's why carrier extension is needed.

But, as Stallings and you write, all Gb products on the market use switching technology and therefore provide exclusive access to the medium.

I just wanted to clarify, that Gb Ethernet provides a mode that is comparable to the hub-operation of 100Mb Ethernet. It's just almost impossible to get the equipment for it.

You're not the only one in this thread who stated something similar to "IEEE standard for gigabit requires that all devices be switches" and that's just wrong. I wanted to clarify that and you kindly provided material (from Stallings) that proves me right. Perhaps you want to correct that sentence just to prevent the spreading of wrong information among fellow networkers.

34Mbit · 3 days

IEEE 802.3-2008 Section 3, 42.1: [..] Network topologies can be developed within a single 1000 Mb/s collision domain [..]

The specification doesn't call them hubs, but people usually call a device that connects NICs to a collision domain a hub. One objective of repeaters is to "Provide physical means for coupling two or more LAN segments at the Physical Layer." (41.1.2.1a)

Gigabit Ethernet supports collision domains and certainly doesn't require that all devices are switches. Why else would they include CSMA/CD support?

34Mbit · 3 days

Half duplex Gigabit Ethernet is specified for exactly that reason, to make hubs possible. The standard is quite old and people didn't foresee completely switched networks back then.

34Mbit · 3 days

Half-duplex gigabit links connected through hubs are allowed by the specification ...

I didn't even have to get out the standard or an old textbook. Wikipedia has it in the second paragraph about Gigabit Ethernet.

34Mbit · 3 days

Gigabit Ethernet, as defined by IEEE, supports shared medium and CSMA/CD. It's just seldom used.

whatthefuckguys · 3 days

Wow, for a beginner, that's really a lot of work you put into that. Good job and keep learning. For starters, how about some regular expressions?

The Daily reading filtering could be done with:

curl ... | egrep -io '(Old Testament|Psalm|New Testament): \w+ [0-9]+' | sed -e 's/^.*: //' | head -n 3

egrep with '-o' filters out only the part that is matched by the regular expression. Very handy. sed is still necessary to get exactly the same format. With perl, this could be even shorter.

tashbarg

TROPHY CASE

tashbarg

TROPHY CASE

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