Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Thermopyle posted:

There's also vcxsrv which I haven't used but is updated more often.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/

I'm glad I googled for 5 minutes and found this.

Much slicker and quicker than crufty ole' Xming.

# ? Apr 2, 2019 23:41

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# ? May 17, 2024 14:19

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Hey guys hoping this is the right thread but I�m trying to find the best way to do the following task. I don�t think it�s too complicated so I�m willing to learn how to make it a reality but if there�s something existing that can do it , even better. Basically:

I have a template that is basically a order confirmation. It shows the company name, then below that it has empty spots where you can type in the purchasers name, address, the date and time of their tickets, what their tickets are for, and then a total cost and below that, payments made. What I�m trying to find out (and FileMaker Pro used to be able to do this), is if there�s a way to take this template and have it be able to automatically read from a spreadsheet or a database these preexisting info fields and then automatically plug them into these blank fields instead of having to type them out each time.

I hope this makes sense and thank you for any assistance!

# ? Apr 3, 2019 00:24

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Empress Brosephine posted:

Hey guys hoping this is the right thread but I�m trying to find the best way to do the following task. I don�t think it�s too complicated so I�m willing to learn how to make it a reality but if there�s something existing that can do it , even better. Basically:

I have a template that is basically a order confirmation. It shows the company name, then below that it has empty spots where you can type in the purchasers name, address, the date and time of their tickets, what their tickets are for, and then a total cost and below that, payments made. What I�m trying to find out (and FileMaker Pro used to be able to do this), is if there�s a way to take this template and have it be able to automatically read from a spreadsheet or a database these preexisting info fields and then automatically plug them into these blank fields instead of having to type them out each time.

I hope this makes sense and thank you for any assistance!

What kind of template? MS Word? Excel? Some other thing?

# ? Apr 3, 2019 01:28

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

It�s in PDF right now but it could be turned into anything. It�s nothing fancy.

# ? Apr 3, 2019 01:33

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Empress Brosephine posted:

It�s in PDF right now but it could be turned into anything. It�s nothing fancy.

Oh, so you would be fine to have an application that can read the data from your database/spreadsheets and spit out a file (PDF or whatever) with the pre-populated fields. While I personally am not aware of any application that does that already, im sure there are (there have to be). But, if not, you can ask in the Request a tiny app thread.

# ? Apr 3, 2019 01:39

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Awesome thank you I�ll ask in there also. I figure it�s something simple I just can�t think of the correct way to word it to search for it on google.

# ? Apr 3, 2019 02:01

Krakhan: Oct 13, 2005; I see you.

I think maybe what you're looking for is something like mail merge, right?

# ? Apr 3, 2019 03:47

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Yeah that makes sense, i didn�t think of it that way but that should work if you can use a spreadsheet to input info?

# ? Apr 3, 2019 03:48

Krakhan: Oct 13, 2005; I see you.

Yup, you should be able to do that with Word or any word processor like that if you want.

# ? Apr 3, 2019 03:51

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Oh cool I�ll try it out then. That should be the answer hopefully thanks

# ? Apr 3, 2019 03:52

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

Munkeymon posted:

IIRC CygWin can install an X client on Windows and, if not CygWin, I know there are X clients out there because I've used them. Not recently, but they probably still work because Windows.

X server. The client is whatever program you're running that wants to display a GUI. :science:

# ? Apr 3, 2019 12:39

General_Failure: Apr 17, 2005

Idea for a drinking game. Take a drink every time a Java program fails to work properly. I call it "poison".

I'm trying to bootstrap Bazel. It seems to be making GBS threads itself by filling /tmp. It's Armbian mainline aarch64 running on an orange Pi 3. I'm using a 64GB MicroSD card for / and a ~500GB notebook HDD via USB3.0 for home, where I'm building from.

I guess what I want to do is to stop it from making /tmp it's bitch. I have no other reason to fiddle /tmp so I'd prefer a solution to be application specific.

What's also a huge PITA is it seems to create a symlink to a file in /tmp. So if I attempt to build after a failed build it shits itself saying the link already exists. Trouble is it's only telling me the destination, not the source so all I can really do is delete the bazel directory, re-extract it and try again.

Any ideas?

I also have to say that the OPi3 is a little beast. I had an attempted bazel bootstrap build running, and opened an rdp session to it (it's running headless) and ran the openai gym cartpole example which ran fine over rdp at the same time.
I think I've found an ARM board that can take my cruelty.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 08:39

Dominoes: Sep 20, 2007

What's up with Docker? It asked me to reg an account before downloading, popped up with an innocent-looking "Log out" button on complete, which actually logs you out of your computer (!). Once you do and log back in, it then reboots after a few mins with no warning (!!), then when you're back up, immediately runs (without you authorizing it to load on reboot), and tells you to change a BIOS setting.

This strikes me as bad behavior. If it weren't so popular, I'd have virus warning flags going off.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 11:34

General_Failure: Apr 17, 2005

Dominoes posted:

What's up with Docker? It asked me to reg an account before downloading, popped up with an innocent-looking "Log out" button on complete, which actually logs you out of your computer (!). Once you do and log back in, it then reboots after a few mins with no warning (!!), then when you're back up, immediately runs (without you authorizing it to load on reboot), and tells you to change a BIOS setting.

This strikes me as bad behavior. If it weren't so popular, I'd have virus warning flags going off.

That's kind of weird. I know that Docker seems to sink roots in like VirtualBox, but that seems a little ...much.
It offered itself up for me to sign up for some enterprise version or something. I think that was via armbian-config in my case, so I guess they are pushing value adding. What was the source of your Docker install?

On my issue just above. After doing a lot of digging, it came down to "poo poo sucks". So I've temporarily bount /tmp to a directory on the 500GB HDD. Hopefully the Bazel bootstrap will get there eventually.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 12:24

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

General_Failure posted:

That's kind of weird. I know that Docker seems to sink roots in like VirtualBox, but that seems a little ...much.
It offered itself up for me to sign up for some enterprise version or something. I think that was via armbian-config in my case, so I guess they are pushing value adding. What was the source of your Docker install?

On my issue just above. After doing a lot of digging, it came down to "poo poo sucks". So I've temporarily bount /tmp to a directory on the 500GB HDD. Hopefully the Bazel bootstrap will get there eventually.

I have only used Bazel when I had to manually build tensorflow and therefore I know pretty much nothing about it except that it's slow as molasses and quite wirdly behaving. Unlike you though, my build went well and I haven't touched it since (i am not gonna upgrade tensorflow for the time being).

# ? Apr 5, 2019 12:27

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Dominoes posted:

What's up with Docker? It asked me to reg an account before downloading, popped up with an innocent-looking "Log out" button on complete, which actually logs you out of your computer (!). Once you do and log back in, it then reboots after a few mins with no warning (!!), then when you're back up, immediately runs (without you authorizing it to load on reboot), and tells you to change a BIOS setting.

This strikes me as bad behavior. If it weren't so popular, I'd have virus warning flags going off.

Presumably the Intel/AMD VT BIOS settings which are disabled for inane "security" reasons on various lovely devices.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 16:52

Wrenever: Jul 22, 2007

Hi, i've got a question for you guys.

i've been tasked with fixing an intercom system that no longer has any installer support. In tracking down the issue, i've figured out that it's (probably) a configuration problem. I learned just enough about mySQL to open the workbench and dig through the database. Using the SQL editor I found an incorrect id# in the database table for the panel that is faulted, with reference to an old backup of the database from when the panel was working, as well as contextual clues. I can't use the backend configuration software used for the system to make the change, as that software only states the id# and doesn't allow for editing this bit of data.

I'm a new electronics tech with just some C programming under my belt, so committing changes on an actively used database is conjuring up some pretty unpleasant scenarios in my head. My plan is to back up the database and then edit the ID# to what I hope is the correct number.

On scale of 1-Don't you loving press that button, how reasonable is my plan to fix this thing?
I'll be shutting down the software that uses the database before applying any edits, but is it risky to do this "live"? Or would the software just update as it pulled data from the database?

e- going to play around with the workbench models and backups first to understand this better

Wrenever fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Apr 5, 2019

# ? Apr 5, 2019 17:22

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Dominoes posted:

What's up with Docker? It asked me to reg an account before downloading, popped up with an innocent-looking "Log out" button on complete, which actually logs you out of your computer (!). Once you do and log back in, it then reboots after a few mins with no warning (!!), then when you're back up, immediately runs (without you authorizing it to load on reboot), and tells you to change a BIOS setting.

This strikes me as bad behavior. If it weren't so popular, I'd have virus warning flags going off.

Presuming you're on Windows, it has to do with the fact that Hyper-V is pretty low-level poo poo and requires specific features from your CPU and BIOS.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 18:57

The Fool: Oct 16, 2003

Thermopyle posted:

Presuming you're on Windows, it has to do with the fact that Hyper-V is pretty low-level poo poo and requires specific features from your CPU and BIOS.

This, and the extra dialog prompts were from docker installing the hyper-v feature in the background.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 19:01

lifg: Dec 4, 2000; <this tag left blank>; Muldoon

Wrenever posted:

Hi, i've got a question for you guys.

i've been tasked with fixing an intercom system that no longer has any installer support. In tracking down the issue, i've figured out that it's (probably) a configuration problem. I learned just enough about mySQL to open the workbench and dig through the database. Using the SQL editor I found an incorrect id# in the database table for the panel that is faulted, with reference to an old backup of the database from when the panel was working, as well as contextual clues. I can't use the backend configuration software used for the system to make the change, as that software only states the id# and doesn't allow for editing this bit of data.

I'm a new electronics tech with just some C programming under my belt, so committing changes on an actively used database is conjuring up some pretty unpleasant scenarios in my head. My plan is to back up the database and then edit the ID# to what I hope is the correct number.

On scale of 1-Don't you loving press that button, how reasonable is my plan to fix this thing?
I'll be shutting down the software that uses the database before applying any edits, but is it risky to do this "live"? Or would the software just update as it pulled data from the database?

e- going to play around with the workbench models and backups first to understand this better

If you can possibly get a test environment set up with a copy of the database, do that and test your change.

Whether or not you can do that, plan to make the change on production when the possible downtime will affect the fewest and least important users, but when you'll still be around enough other employees to help you. It's a balancing act. Coordinate with your boss.

# ? Apr 5, 2019 20:23

General_Failure: Apr 17, 2005

Volguus posted:

I have only used Bazel when I had to manually build tensorflow and therefore I know pretty much nothing about it except that it's slow as molasses and quite wirdly behaving. Unlike you though, my build went well and I haven't touched it since (i am not gonna upgrade tensorflow for the time being).

For reasons far beyond my understanding, I need to manually build tensorflow. On the way for shits and giggles, whilst divining the correct combination of apt and pip installs to keep everything functional, I successfully installed opennn, openai with gym, and keras (without tf).

When I kicked off my final attempt with building Bazel, I let it run overnight. Just checked it. Successful build apparently. The only reason I can see for Bazel existing, and it being required to build Tensorflow is academia. I don't see any result driven individual or group coming up with something so awkward and snowflake-y.

If I get a chance I'll see if it actually functions today. Then to fail at building TF probably.

For anyone else struggling with Bazel;
in bazel/scripts/bootstrap/compile.sh there's a comment somewhere with an example on how to set the correct environment variable to increase Java's memory and sack size to get rid of the out of memory error.
Net up, /tmp may be too small. I had to bind it temporarily to a hard drive directory. That causes a performance hit and isn't super good for hardware so change it back after maybe.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 00:21

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

General_Failure posted:

For reasons far beyond my understanding, I need to manually build tensorflow.

I knew why i needed to build tensorflow. The C api. At least I got that going for me.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 00:29

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

Bazel exists because Google's in-house build system was so good, ex-googlers were feeling the need to re-invent it at their new jobs. (e.g. facebook's Buck). So they decided to just make the real thing publicly available, after making the necessary adjustments so that it could work in an open-source environment instead of just in the Google monorepo.

It's very literally an industry thing that has nothing to do with academia.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 04:02

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Does Windows offer some sort of event based API that can tell me when new windows are created? As it is now, I'm enumerating all windows every X ms, but that actually gets pretty CPU intensive if I'm wanting to know somewhat quickly about new windows.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 19:50

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Thermopyle posted:

Does Windows offer some sort of event based API that can tell me when new windows are created? As it is now, I'm enumerating all windows every X ms, but that actually gets pretty CPU intensive if I'm wanting to know somewhat quickly about new windows.

Possibly a hook: SetWindowsHookEx with WH_CALLWNDPROCRET, look for WM_CREATE and WM_DESTROY messages.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 20:19

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

nielsm posted:

Possibly a hook: SetWindowsHookEx with WH_CALLWNDPROCRET, look for WM_CREATE and WM_DESTROY messages.

Oh yes, that looks like what I need. Thanks.

# ? Apr 6, 2019 21:22

Bonfire Lit: Jul 9, 2008; If you're one of the sinners who caused this please unfriend me now.

SetWindowsHookEx has some requirements that make it unwieldy (like having the hook code in a DLL so it can be injected). If you only want to track windows getting created/destroyed, you can use the accessibility functions (SetWinEventHook).

# ? Apr 6, 2019 22:10

rjmccall: Sep 7, 2007; no worries friend; Fun Shoe

Jabor posted:

Bazel exists because Google's in-house build system was so good, ex-googlers were feeling the need to re-invent it at their new jobs. (e.g. facebook's Buck). So they decided to just make the real thing publicly available, after making the necessary adjustments so that it could work in an open-source environment instead of just in the Google monorepo.

That might be the marketing line, but the business reason was the Alphabet reorg: Google's in-house build system is wedded to their in-house infrastructure, but the sister companies are meant to be able to run independently (in case they need to be spun off for whatever reason), so Google extracted something they could use and made it open-source. Same thing with Abseil and probably half a dozen other "open source" projects that have basically zero community or support outside of the Alphabet companies.

It's also a step towards creating a platform for third parties, as well as just being a useful tool for inter-company accounting/accountability.

# ? Apr 7, 2019 02:19

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Bonfire Lit posted:

SetWindowsHookEx has some requirements that make it unwieldy (like having the hook code in a DLL so it can be injected). If you only want to track windows getting created/destroyed, you can use the accessibility functions (SetWinEventHook).

Dang, this is easier. Thanks.

# ? Apr 7, 2019 03:05

Wrenever: Jul 22, 2007

lifg posted:

If you can possibly get a test environment set up with a copy of the database, do that and test your change.

Whether or not you can do that, plan to make the change on production when the possible downtime will affect the fewest and least important users, but when you'll still be around enough other employees to help you. It's a balancing act. Coordinate with your boss.

The test environment change looked good so I successfully implemented the change on the working server! There's some other messy network issue that's also way over my head to figure out, but I have the panel sorted out at least, thanks.

# ? Apr 9, 2019 22:15

stoops: Jun 11, 2001

I'm not too familiar with github, but I've used it for pieces of code here and there.

Okay, so I found a plugin that's pretty useful and I installed it using Composer.

There are some things I don't need, cosmetic changes, so I was hoping to fork the plugin to my github account, and make changes. It's a plugin i'll be using again and again so I wanted my install to be with my new changes right off the bat.

I figured I can just use Composer again with my account name instead of the original user, but it's giving me an error. (could not find package myAccountName/myapp with stability stable)

Is this not allowed, or if it is, is there a site that could give me details on how to go about doing what I want to do?

I appreciate any help.

# ? Apr 11, 2019 21:54

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

stoops posted:

I'm not too familiar with github, but I've used it for pieces of code here and there.

Okay, so I found a plugin that's pretty useful and I installed it using Composer.

There are some things I don't need, cosmetic changes, so I was hoping to fork the plugin to my github account, and make changes. It's a plugin i'll be using again and again so I wanted my install to be with my new changes right off the bat.

I figured I can just use Composer again with my account name instead of the original user, but it's giving me an error. (could not find package myAccountName/myapp with stability stable)

Is this not allowed, or if it is, is there a site that could give me details on how to go about doing what I want to do?

I appreciate any help.

I don�t know Composer but based on using similar tools in other domains, I suspect what�s going on is the main package is published to a list somewhere and that�s the list consulted when you specify the package that way. Usually there�s another way to specify packages by pointing at any old git repository, and I think this is that for Composer: https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md#loading-a-package-from-a-vcs-repository

# ? Apr 12, 2019 00:32

sunaurus: Feb 13, 2012; Oh great, another bookah.

I'm not a native English speaker, so this might sound like a really dumb question, but: Does a verb similar to "inline" exist for describing a situation where instead of doing multiple different actions in their own loops/recursion over the same data, you do all the actions in a single pass over the data?

# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:12

pangstrom: Jan 25, 2003; Wedge Regret

Not that I know of... serial vs. parallel is similar but different. Kind of reminds me of long data versus wide data but yeah that's just the data structure. Maybe somebody else knows.

# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:24

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

sunaurus posted:

I'm not a native English speaker, so this might sound like a really dumb question, but: Does a verb similar to "inline" exist for describing a situation where instead of doing multiple different actions in their own loops/recursion over the same data, you do all the actions in a single pass over the data?

I've seen the verb "unroll" used in English for this.

# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:27

fourwood: Sep 9, 2001; Damn I'll bring them to their knees.

Yeah, I was going to say unroll or flatten a loop.

e: actually no maybe that�s not what you meant

# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:40

Nippashish: Nov 2, 2005; Let me see you dance!

You mean turning AAAABBBBCCCC into ABCABCABCABC? I'd call that "interleave".

# ? Apr 12, 2019 14:46

sunaurus: Feb 13, 2012; Oh great, another bookah.

Just to clarify what I meant, with code like:

code:

for thing in things:
    thing.something()
...
for thing in things:
    thing.something_else()

or with recursion:

code:

def do_something_with_a_tree(node):
    node.something()
    for child in node.children:
        do_something_with_a_tree(child)
...
def do_something_else_with_a_tree(node):
    node.something_else()
    for child in node.children:
        do_something_else_with_a_tree(child)

What wording would you use to tell someone to refactor those into something like this:

code:

# single loop
for thing in things:
    thing.something()
    thing.something_else()

# single traversal
def do_something_with_a_tree(node):
    node.something()
    node.something_else()
    for child in node.children:
        do_something_with_a_tree(child)

# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:15

sunaurus: Feb 13, 2012; Oh great, another bookah.

I guess I'm just overthinking it and the easiest way of saying it is just "do all the things in a single loop"

# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:16

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# ? May 17, 2024 14:19

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

That's too specific a case to have its own terminology,. "Single pass" might be closest.

# ? Apr 12, 2019 15:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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